ABSTRACT
Legacy writers working in the first decades of the seventeenth century express a profound concern with England's religious trends and a passionate interest in their children's futures. An analysis of Nicholas Breton's The Mothers blessing throws the religious and political opinions expressed in the mothers' legacies discussed in this chapter into sharp relief. Like Elizabeth Russell and Rose Throckmorton, Puritan legacy writers Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joscelin use their writing to advance religious reform through their children. Throckmorton opens by attesting to her natal family's investment in reformed religion under Henry VIII. Both Leigh and Joscelin value public worship, although they believe that it serves principally to prepare the parishioner to pray privately. The genre of the mother's legacy provides them with an ideal means to address both issues. Elizabeth Russell translated Bishop John Ponet's Diallacticon sometime in the late 1550s or early 1560s.
