ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, Liminality of Life Stage: Education, Adolescence, and Corporal Punishment, concerns transformations of gender and sexuality effected in the formative liminal stage of adolescence. It examines Spenser and Shakespeare’s responses to humanist education, including corporal punishment. For boys and young men, the violent rituals and physical chastisement of education were intended to ensure progression through mistrusted, fluid, unpredictable adolescence into socially approved, normative adulthood, but for women that transition to adulthood was suspended. The chapter argues that the lifelong instruction of women, regulated by men, policed by violence, and inextricably linked to the provision or denial of formal education, was a cultural expectation that rendered women perpetually liminal.
