ABSTRACT
Thomas Middleton's city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside dramatizes several pedagogical encounters. In one of the most hilarious scenes of the play, Tim, son of the wealthy London goldsmith Master Yellowhammer and his wife Maudline, comes back from Cambridge, where he is studying Latin, together with his tutor. Tim's appearance provides further insight into the merchant middle class's understanding of education. Tim's social incompetence means that he is eventually tricked into marrying a former prostitute, the Welsh Gentlewoman. As his mother's allusions suggest, his education has a second economic purpose: it serves as stock-in-trade in the society's sexual economy. A very obvious example of this dual impulse is gentry woman Elizabeth Joscelin's The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child. She composed her advice book when she was expecting her first child and gripped with a sense of foreboding about her possible death in childbirth, which did occur shortly afterwards.
