ABSTRACT
It is undoubtedly true, as one twentieth-century authority has asserted, that during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, ‘girls could read to an extent incomparably greater than any previous century’.1 It is equally true that the general level of culture was rising and that this rise was caused in large measure by the increasing availability of books. As the years went by women writers with something of interest to say on the subject of education became more numerous, although most of them thought more in terms of accomplishments than book-learning. In some of the fashionable schools, if book-learning languished, girls became really proficient in music and singing; and there was some attempt to popularize the less frivolous accomplishments, needlework, for instance, and accounts.
