ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ambivalent response of both men and women to women's immersion in the cultural meanings of literacy. It discusses the women's textual testimonies to the ultimately irresistible pleasure of literacy's 'mixed blessing'. Expanding educational opportunities in early modern England were initially advocated by sixteenth-century humanist scholars, who saw literacy and further learning as preeminently desirable at least for socially privileged men, and as essential to civilization and social development. Some women's texts, especially in the seventeenth century, dismiss classical languages as mere vanity and rewrite in positive terms women's alliance with what becomes in their 'inside' reconstruction the God-given vernacular. They reconstruct the vernacular as a language that is purer, more useful and more nourishing. For Bathsua Makin, the illustrative text for women's enjoyment of learning outside the constructions of male commentators is, interestingly, Erasmus's dialogue between an abbot and a well-read woman, Magdalia.
