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Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a Reply to More by Robert Whitehall: Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates, ed. Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 44. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Vol. 491. Toronto: Iter Academic, 2016. Pp. xvi + 201. $34.95.
The three early modern documents in this collection present some available options for the education of early modern women-going to school, learning at home from one's mother, teaching the self through reading and writing. The collection also demonstrates a few ways early modern English women and men thought about and responded to women's education and its consequences. The collection's tight focus, together with its neatly edited, accessible primary texts, makes this a worthwhile collection, one best suited for novice readers of early modern texts, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students in the disciplines of history, literature, education, and/or women's studies.
Two of the texts in this collection-Bathsua Makin's published treatise, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), and Mary More's manuscript pamphlet, The Woman's Right (c. 1674)-have appeared in previous anthologies, usually in excerpts. Educating English Daughters is especially valuable because it presents both women's texts in their entirety; both texts are also newly revised by Mss. Teague and Ezell (who have previously edited these texts). The collection also introduces readers to Robert Whitehall's manuscript response to More, The Woman's Right Proved False (c. 1674). In the engaging, informative general introduction to the collection, readers will profit from ways that the editors contextualize early modern women's reading and writing with details about the traditional humanist education designed for boys and men. At times they challenge current critical discussions about women's education. For instance, they question historical notions of "literacy" that have been used to discount women's...