ABSTRACT
The great learning that some early modern women displayed did not transform them in the way a similar education in the classics, rhetoric, and theology could make men out of boys. Jane Stevenson is clear about the murky divisions between public and private at work in manuscript writings of the time: It is natural for author's now to identify anything handwritten as private, anything printed as public. Jane Seager's motives are different. Her book is covered in velvet with hand-decorated glass panels on front and back, as if to make transparency the most crucial feature of both these prophecies and Seager's "art and facultie". Although she employs Timothy Bright's code, she also manages to leave the male cryptographer out of the private "transactive space" she has fashioned for herself and the Queen. Seager's 1589 text provides Elizabeth with both a coded text and a decoded transcription, but perhaps Seager's services were ultimately judged unnecessary.
