She wrought all Needle-works that Women exercise,
With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificial,
Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancy could devise,
Beasts, Birds, or Flowers, even as things natural.
She wrote "three manner hands," was especially cunning in accounts and "Algorism" (Arithmetic), and she could speak, write, and read Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and she "won the garland" in English.[43] Our knowledge of Elizabeth Withypoll's rare attainments comes by chance from the information on her monument. Probably there were other highly educated women in the wealthy middle classes but their learned tastes were not counted worthy of any definite record.
In addition to the many instances of girls trained in the best learning of their times during the first half of the sixteenth century, we have striking contemporary testimony as to the prevalence of the custom, and the high esteem in which such learning was held. Richard Mulcaster (1530-1611), first head-master of a school founded by the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1561, in discussing principles of education, expressed advanced ideas concerning the ability and training of girls.[44] He declared himself "for them toothe and naile." He says that their "natural towardnesse" is such that they should be well brought up, and he summarizes the elements of this training. A young gentlewoman is thoroughly educated, he says, if she can "reade plainly, and distinctly, write faire and swiftly, sing cleare and sweetly, play wel and finely, understand and speak the learned languages, and the tongues also which the time most embraseth with some logicall helpe to chop, and some rhetoricke to brave." And he asks whether it is likely that the children of a woman so trained will be "eare a whit the worse brought up" for this learning. The places wherein girls may study may be at home with tutors or they may go forth to the elementary school. And the teacher may be either a man or a woman. Mulcaster was himself in favor of sending girls to the public grammar schools, and even to the universities, but he said it was "a thing not used" in his country, there was no "president" therefor. But he is enthusiastic about the attainments of women. In languages, he says, "they compare favourably with our kinde in the best degree." Some of them are so excellently trained and so rarely qualified that they could be preferred to "the best Romaine or Greekish paragones be they never so much praised: to the Germaine or French gentlewymen by late writers so wel liked: to the Italian ladies who dare write themselves and deserve fame for so doing."
Nicholas Udall, in 1548, in a Preface to Princess Mary's translation of the Paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John by Erasmus, comments on the great number of noble women at that time in England given not only to human sciences and strange tongues, but
also so throughly expert in the Holy Scriptures that they were able to compare with the best writers as well in enditeing and penning of Godly and fruitful treatises to the instruction and edifying of realmes in the knowledge of God, as also in translating good books out of Latin or Greek into English.... It was now no news in England to see young damsels in noble houses and in the courts of princes, instead of cards and other instruments of idle trifling, to have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations ... and as familiarly both to read or reason thereof in Greek, Latin, French or Italian, as in English. It was now a common thing to see young virgins so trained in the study of good letters, that they willingly set all other vain pastimes at naught for learning sake. It was now no news at all, to see Queens and ladies of most high estate and progeny, instead of courtly dalliance, to embrace virtuous exercises of reading and writing, and with most earnest study both early and late, to apply themselves to the acquiring of knowledge.[45]
Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), indicates the prevalence of women poets in the sixteenth century when he says:
Darke word or doubtfull speach are not so narrowly to be looked vpon in a large poeme, nor specially in the pretie Poesies and deuises of Ladies and Gentlewomen-makers, whom we would not haue too precise Poets least with their shrewd wits, when they were maried they might become a little too fantasticall wiues.[46]