ABSTRACT
Early modern humanists and their reforming counterparts generated a rich conversation about teaching England's girls. They recommend an education firmly grounded in religious and moral subjects, which would form a foundation from which women would run their households, serve their husbands, and raise their children. Because legacy writers are products of this ideology, their educations fell generally in line with the programs outlined for girls of the higher social ranks. If legacy writers are ambivalent about their own educations, they are equally equivocal on the subject of educating their daughters. Legacy writers focus almost exclusively on daughters as future teachers of the Word, a role that calls for them to be versed in the Bible, religious texts, and, occasionally, classicism. The fact that the text comes so clearly from the Catholic tradition matters too, for the concept of the Bible-reading, pious mother was more closely associated with Protestant thought than with Catholic ideology.
