ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the genre from the perspective of a particular social institution. It reviews how legacy writers try to influence others, beginning with the gender-specific lessons they teach their children. The book analyzes how the political and religious beliefs they offer their readership develop in tune with changing historical circumstances. It assesses the intellectual world of early modern women. From their youngest years, English girls, at least in the middling and elite social ranks, were trained to be wives and mothers. The book explores the genre's engagement with gender, power, and social order. It examines legacy writers' interventions in the religious world of Jacobean England, when legacies proliferated. The book draws on texts across the corpus to analyze one of the genre's defining features, the dying mother.
