ABSTRACT

Legacy writers look to the genre as a way to preserve religious instruction for their children. The genre shows that sixteenth-century trends continued into the seventeenth century. Humanism's treatises on women and learning impact both individual legacy writers and the advice they dispense, and Protestantism's emphasis on motherhood and the family sanctions maternal authority. Yet legacy writers were also aware of the effects of gender, attending quite closely to the needs of their female descendants. Legacy writers may uphold their culture's gender hierarchy, but they are less willing to support existing religious or political structures. Exploring the formal and functional features of the genre sheds light on the world of early modern women, for genre and gender go hand-in-hand. In the early modern period, too, gender was a multivalent, flexible concept that extended beyond sexual identity, and multiple institutions used gender as a way to articulate and reinforce social hierarchies.