Women in the English Renaissance and Reformation. by Retha M. WarnickeReview by: Charmarie J. BlaisdellThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 531-532Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540397 .

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Book Reviews 531

Women in the English Renaissance and Reformation, by Retha M. War- nicke. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1983. viii + 229 pp. $29.95.

It has almost become a tenet of women's studies that historically significant periods-times of revolution or progress-were not necessarily significant experiences for women. In an important article written almost ten years ago, Joan Kelly surveyed the roles of women in the Renaissance, asked whether there was a Renaissance for women, and concluded there wasn't. A few historians have taken up the challenge inherent in her brief essay and ex- amined the issue from the variety of perspectives necessary to substantiate her conclusions. This book is an attempt to do just that from the perspective of women's education and in- tellecutal achievement in Renaissance and Reformation in England.

This book is about women and humanism in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The author traces the degree to which English society adopted the classical education which Thomas More advocated for women. The author examines English theories on female educa- tion. The education of Protestant women is compared with that of Counter-Reformation Catholics. The education of some individual women such as Mary Sidney is compared with that of her brother. The position of English women in their society is compared with that of women in other European societies. Finally, Warnicke traces the impact of educational theory and practice on leading members of English female society over a period of four generations: Prereformation, Reformation, Mid-Elizabethan, and Jacobean. By using a generational ap- proach and analyzingifemale achievement within the two contexts of humanistic education and religious reform, the author claims to provide the "first truly historical study of the scholarly accomplishments of women in sixteenth and sevententh century England."

The beauty of this book is that Warnicke, instead of looking at women as if they were frozen in time, examines the lives of different groups of women and compares their achievements over a period of time-four generations to be exact. As the evidence from her material emerges, a number of assumptions about the impact of the Renaissance and Reforma- tion on women are challenged. The picture we get of women in Elizabethan and Jacobean England is bleak indeed.

In the Prereformation generation there were almost no female classicists outside of More's household. Although Grammar Schools grew in popularity, they proved to be an unfortunate development for women. Unless the education of young men continued at home with humanistic tutors, aristocratic parents were not inclined to provide instruction for their daughters. Henry VIII made humanistic education fashionable among the aristocracy who were ambitious to make royal alliances for their children. But by the time Elizabeth came to the throne, they had lost interest in their daughters' learning the classics lest they resemble the Queen who was viewed as somewhat eccentric. Warnicke challenges the notion that the Age of Elizabeth was a period of improved conditions for women. The Reformers, viewing classical education as a hindrance to marital harmony, did little to encourage the education of women beyond their ability to read scripture. With the disappearance of the convents, the situation became even worse. Thus an educational chasm between the sexes existed except for a few women who were fortunate to be educated at home with their brothers. Moreover, a com- parison of Protestant women with their Recusant sisters indicates that the former may even have been less well educated since the adherents of the Counter-Reformation in England main- tained a sympathy for Thomas More and his educational philosophy. In summarizing the im- pact of humanism in women's education, Warnicke says, "It is indicative of the failure of Thomas More to popularize his ideas that in the fourth generation, the Protestants came to view education as a marital handicap and a majority of women classicists of the Catholic faith remained unmarried."

Warnicke argues that women gained very little with the Reformation in England and she takes issue with the point of view that women enjoyed more liberty in Calvinist countries than in Catholic cultures. In her view, the Protestant focus on marriage and the family would have

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532 The Sixteenth Century Journal

demoted women had it been successfully implemented. There were many factors which hindered the development of real respect for marriage and women's role within the household particularly the widespread antipathy among lay people to clerical marriages.

If the roles of English and Catholic Protestant women changed in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, Warnicke says it had little to do with education or Reform. If the status of Protestant women improved, it was because Reformed theology was not successfully im- plemented by a monopoly state church. And if Catholic women gained, it was because, under persecution, the household had to function as a parish and that gave women many oppor- tunities to assume pastoral duties, function independently, and perform in unexpected and uusual ways.

Surveying the four generations, Warnicke sees some improvement in the status of women by the first half of the seventeenth century. But it was not educational theories or any par- ticular theology that account for this change. The conflict produced by the Reformation-not humanism or the Reformation itself-created opportunities for both men and women to depart from traditional modes of behavior.

This book is a challenge to some of our ideas about the impact of the Reform and the Elizabethan era on women's roles and status. It questions the assumption that Puritanism was a force for improving women's lives. Following the conclusions of John Bossy in his studies of Recusant women in England and Catholic women on the Continent, Warnicke's evidence sug- gests that in the seventeenth century Catholic women had more opportunities for education and more interest in it than Protestant women. She questions whether women enjoyed more liberty and self-esteem in Protestant cultures than in Catholic cultures. Further this book argues that if English women enjoyed better opportunities for education and higher status in society it was only "inadvertently due to Protestantism."

Warnicke's thesis is an important one and bears further testing for England and Continen- tal Europe. It calls into question the assumption that great periods of reform and change necessarily are a benefit to women. It also suggests that while the ideology of male dominated movements do not necessarily improve women's status, it may be that the dynamics of the struggles for change work to the advantage of women and others.

While Warnicke has broken new ground on the "woman question" in Early Modern Europe, we need to know more about women's roles in the community and in the marketplace and women's status before the law (to name but two areas) both in England and on the Conti- nent in order to understand what happened to women in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies. She is very convincing that the humanists and reformers did little over the long run to improve women's status. She has not convinced me that women's status did not change or im- prove at all. And if, indeed, it is true that the Reformers said and did little to improve women's status, we are left with the question of why religious reform seems to have appealed to so many women.

Charmarie J. Blaisdell Northeastern University

Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton's Politics and Christian Liberty, by Stevie Davies. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. 248 pp. $21.00.

This exercise in literary criticism, explicitly set apart from political theory, seeks "to understand how Milton's poetry absorbs and re-creates the political material on which it draws" (pp. 5-6). The author is interested in the imagery rather than sociological or political concepts as she studies Milton's use of political material in working out the complex allusions in Paradise Lost-"a great, fluid structure of symbolism into which images, allegories, and concepts melt or blend with other areas of allusion" to yield meanings which "transcend any specifically political constituent" (p. 6). She reads the work not as a polemic to be interpreted

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