ABSTRACT
During the Early Modern period, religious education was essential to elite intellectual and spiritual development and often led to charitable acts and religious commissions. Both men and women needed to understand basic theological issues and church teachings, but moralists placed particular emphasis on women’s engagement in religious issues. Mothers were responsible for their children’s education, and spiritual matters were of prime importance. The Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro advised mothers to instill in their offspring a strong foundation in religious and moral lessons in his early fifteenth-century treatise On Wifely Duties, “First they should instruct them in their duty toward Immortal God, their country, and their parents, so that they will be instilled from their earliest years with those qualities that are the foundation of all other virtues.”2
