ABSTRACT
As Ian Green, the scholarly authority on early modern English catechisms, notes they were a crucial religious and cultural phenomenon used across the religious to teach the outline of a Christian life. In the seventeenth century, clergy, schoolmasters, and parents of both sexes instructed children, typically using The ABC with the catechism, The primer and catechism, and the official catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. The regularity of catechism as an instructional method ensures that children attend official catechism sessions, becomes quite clear here. Robert Abbot's Milk for Babes, or a Mother's Catechism for Her Children, a text roughly contemporary with Herbert's, likewise misses what seems like a golden opportunity to teach children the extent of Eve's culpability in human sin. Whatever the source, the absence of Eve in these catechisms for girls and women remains a startling omission to scholars accustomed to reading so many genres of early modern texts for women still harping on Eve.
