CHAPTER II.
THE SCHOLARS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
Revival of learning in the sixteenth century—Attitude of the nobility towards Letters and Arts—No age so productive of learned ladies—The Tudor princesses and Lady Jane Grey—Sir Anthony Coke’s daughters—Mary Sidney—Learned women held in esteem—Learning confined to the upper classes—A sixteenth-century schoolmaster on women’s education.
The sixteenth century was England’s great literary renaissance. Fresh streams of intellectual life were poured into the nation. There was activity in all departments of thought. The study of poetry, of theology, of the classics, went on apace. The printing press was letting loose floods of knowledge. The tide swept the women of the nobility along in its course. They stand out prominently among the ranks of scholars. In place of the domestic arts, they are found immersed in classics, divinity, and philosophy. Education was not conducted on the easy, pleasant lines of our own day. Knowledge was hard to obtain. It was locked up out of reach of the indolent in languages to which there were none of the modern keys. Literature was the great study, and familiarity with Greek and Latin essential. The tree of science had only just begun to grow, and was sorely beset by the brambles of superstition and mysticism. The arts in England could scarcely be said to exist. Foreign painters came from time to time, and rich noblemen went abroad and brought back treasures from Italy. All decorative work other than tapestries, which were sometimes of English make, was imported. Music, like dancing, was cultivated as a polite accomplishment, for private uses; but there was not the stimulus of excellent public performances by first-rate artists.
History was in the form of chronicles and romances. Stow was the great contemporary writer engaged in recording for future generations the events passing around him. Books in living languages were scarce, though not so few as when the Dowager-Duchess of Buckingham left what was deemed a notable legacy of four volumes to her daughter-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. French and Italian, especially the latter, were studied by the nobility with continental masters, or acquired by means of travel. Great courtesy was shown to visitors from the continent by the English aristocracy, who delighted in having intercourse with men of other nationalities, and often surrounded themselves with foreign servants. In this way a taste was fostered for the Spanish, French, and Italian languages. Nobles who did not want to study themselves, liked to be surrounded by men of learning, and willingly gave poor authors a seat at their table. It became customary to dedicate every new book to some rich patron, and though it was a practice that opened the door to abuses, it secured, on the other hand, a subsistence to deserving authors who would otherwise have been unable to pursue their studies.
Although the nobility extended their patronage to learned men, they were not greatly given to study themselves. In the time of Henry VIII. there was such a lack of learning among laymen, that ecclesiastics had the governance of the country largely in their hands. The generality of men among the upper classes deemed the labour involved in acquiring knowledge unfit for gentlemen, who were better employed learning to hunt, shoot, sing, and dance. Roger Ascham reproaches the young gentlemen of England for their sloth in learning, and holds up for imitation the Virgin Queen—
“whose example if the rest of our nobilitie would follow, then might England bee for learning and wisdome in nobilitie a spectacle to all the world beside.”
It was otherwise with women. They toiled over Latin and Greek, frequently in manuscript, for there were not many printed books in those languages; no classics had issued from Caxton’s press. Hebrew was also studied, for divinity and theology occupied a good deal of attention. A Florentine, Petruccio Ubaldini, who visited England in 1551, writes in his comments on social life—
“The rich cause their sons and daughters to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, for since this storm of heresy has invaded the land, they hold it useful to read the Scriptures in the original tongue.”
Dr. Wotton, in his “Reflections on Antient and Modern Learning,” says—
“that no age was so productive of learned women as the sixteenth century.” “Learning,” he says, “was so very modish that the fair sex seemed to believe that Greek and Latin added to their charms, and that Plato and Aristotle untranslated were frequent ornaments of their closets. One would think by the effects that it was a proper way of educating them, since there are no accounts in history of so many great women in any one age as are to be found between the years fifteen and sixteen hundred.”