ABSTRACT
In 1645, Elizabeth Richardson published A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters, a book of prayers intended as both an advice book and a devotional aid for her children. As a book of practical and spiritual guidance, the Legacie has a place within a subgenre of women's life writings in early modern England that has come to be known as mother's legacies. As an Anglican with leanings toward Laudianism, Richardson would have looked directly to the Bible and to the Book of Common Prayer for models of daily piety and routine devotion. Text of the Legacie thus borrows most evidently and most profoundly from the generic and spiritual templates offered by these two cornerstones of Protestant spiritual ideology. As such, the Protestant Prayer Book stood in direct contrast to Puritan critiques of ceremonialism and set prayer, exemplified by the Puritan Prayer Book of the 1580s, which presumed that the most able ministers would pray as inspired in their own words.
