ABSTRACT
The education of English women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the scholarship on that topic, has a complex history. The Dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century closed off one avenue for English women’s learning and the kind of sisterhood of religious and educational practice that had gone hand in hand for some medieval nuns. This decline came at the very moment that humanists like Roger Ascham, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Vives, as well as Catherine of Aragon, Vives’s patron, were advancing the expanded education of elite women and, in the case of More and Catherine, putting such pedagogy into practice within their households. But it has been argued that the early sixteenth-century florescence in women’s learning was followed by a reimposition of conservatoire gender norms, that the promise represented by learned women like Margaret More Roper or Elizabeth I was not realized in the generations that followed: few women ‘had a Renaissance,’ in the now famous words of Joan Kelly Gadol. 1 At the same time, the received wisdom holds that the Protestant Reformation, which had provided the theological justification for the Dissolution, expanded educational opportunities for women, particularly those of the newly literate middle class.
