Abstract
Over the last 20 years or so, the recovery of an impressive and expanding corpus of women’s writing and the emergence, piecemeal, of evidence relating to individual female experience of childhood and youth, has to a modest degree revised upwards estimates of girls’ access to academic learning in the early modern period.1 Nonetheless, even among the social elite, the nature and extent of the early education of many women remains unknown, and, given the frustrating lacunae of the available sources, may seem often destined to remain so.2 Anne (Fitton) Newdigate’s formation is at first sight a case in point. There is no direct evidence, as there is for the next generation of Fitton girls, that a governess or tutor was employed; it is not known whether she learned any foreign languages, or even if she spent any extended period in a household other than her own.3 What is clear, however, is that she was educated.
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Notes
See for example: Sara Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’ and Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 181–210 and 211–82; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (Virago, 1988); Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), intro., pp. 1–27, and bibliography, pp. 225–35; T. Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992); Women, Writing and History 1640–1740, eds Isobel Grundy and S. Wiseman (Batsford, 1992). On education itself, see: N. McMullen, ‘The Education of English Gentlewomen 1540–1640’, History of Education, 6, 2 (1977), 87–101; Linda Pollock, ‘“Teach Her to Live Under Obedience”: the Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 4, 2 (1989), 231–58; Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modem England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 11–13, 56–60, 133. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), remains cautious about the degree of scholarly education even for the elite: ‘a very small group of women mainly from noble families did experience the classical curriculum’ (p. 366); they were ‘very much exceptions’ (p. 367).
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp. 90–1.
What follows is an extension of research undertaken for my thesis, ‘The Lifestyle and Attitudes of the Seventeenth-Century Gentleman, with Special Reference to the Newdigates of Arbury Hall, Warwickshire’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1980), and for Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: the Seventeenth-Century Newdigates ofArbury and their World (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer for the Royal Historical Society, 1995).
F.B. Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatoty Verses in English Books before 1641 (1962). For Mary Fitton, and for an earlier analysis of Anne Newdigate and her correspondents, see Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, Gossip from a Muniment Room (Nutt, 1897).
HC 1558–1603, 2, 124; Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, pp. 127–8; WCRO, CR 136, B2 (Arbella Stuart), B434–6 (Lucy Percy), B513 (Elizabeth Vere).
Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, ch. 2, esp. pp. 25–30, and ch. 9, esp. pp. 126–30.
Ibid., esp. pp. 10–17.
V.M. Larminie, ‘The Godly Magistrate: the Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate, 1571–1610’ (Dugdale Society occasional paper 28, 1982). For evidence of Anne’s authorship of letters, see below.
For a discussion of Anne as a wife, see Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, pp. 80–1, 90.
Pam Wright, ‘A Change in Direction: the Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603’, in The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey (Harlow: Longman, 1987), pp. 147–72 (pp. 153–4).
HC 1558–1603, 2, 464–5; G.P. Mander, ‘Sir Richard Leveson and Mary Fitton, The Wolverhampton Antiquary (1933), 368–76. I am indebted to Mr Richard Wisker for this last reference.
Vivienne Larminie, ed., ‘The Undergraduate Account Book of John and Richard Newdigate, 1618–1621’ (Camden Society Miscellany, 30, 1990), pp. 154, 207–8, 246–7; Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, p. 38.
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Larminie, V. (2001). Fighting for Family in a Patronage Society: the Epistolary Armoury of Anne Newdigate (1574–1618). In: Daybell, J. (eds) Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598669_7
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