ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that even as Elizabeth Grymeston’s work conforms with a conventional view of what is acceptable for a woman author, the conjunction of affective meditation with maternal instruction also challenges customary distinctions establishing gender difference in discourses of religion and education. Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives is a fascinating collection of meditations, penitential psalms, and proverbs written and compiled by Elizabeth Grymeston for the guidance of her son Bernye after her death. Mothers were considered to be a formative source of moral instruction, especially within the “spiritualized household”–the ideology of the domestic sphere, prominent in seventeenth-century English culture and influenced by earlier humanist writings, that made the family the primary unit of religious education. Symbolized by the ceremony of breeching, the rejection of qualities and influences deemed feminine and the commencement of a scholarly education indicate the beginnings of a boy’s difference from his mother.
