Republic of women: rethinking the republic of letters in the seventeenth century by CAROL PAL

Author:CAROL PAL
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Europe --Intellectual life --17th century, Women scholars --Europe --Biography, POLITICAL SCIENCE-- History & Theory., Learning and scholarship --History --17th century, Women --Europe --Intellectual life --17th century
ISBN: 9781107018211
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-08-30T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

Republic of Women

Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century

Carol Pal

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087490

Online ISBN: 9781139087490

Hardback ISBN: 9781107018211

Chapter

Chapter 6 - Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the reformation of lear

ning pp. 177-205

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087490.009

Cambridge University Press

chapter 6

Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the

reformation of learning

the greatest scholler, I thinke, of a woman in England.

Sir Simonds D’Ewes on Bathsua Makin1

The seventeenth-century advancement of learning was a project that could

not go forward into the next generation without the simultaneous

advancement of teaching. Thus the scholars in this network of intellectual

women were all engaged with the practical issue of educational reform;

however, their reasons for doing so varied widely, as did the manner of

their participation. For instance, Lady Ranelagh and Dorothy Moore

wanted to use education to change the entire world; Marie de Gournay

wanted to instill virtue while curbing linguistic excess; Marie du Moulin

saw education as a way to strengthen Protestant values and virtues;

Princess Elisabeth wanted to help disseminate Cartesian philosophy;

and Anna Maria van Schurman wanted to ensure that women had full

access to the heights of humanist scholarship. Each of these female

scholars – in her own way, and in concert with male scholars in their

various networks – was engaged in doing the pedagogical work of the

republic of letters.

Foremost among the educators in this network was Bathsua Makin.

Like the others, she saw educational reform as an essential component of

larger projects, and argued for the recognition of female scholars; but

unlike her more aristocratic colleagues, she also needed quite desperately

to earn a living. This chapter, focused primarily on the 1650s, examines

the method, purpose, and content of Makin’s pedagogical work, con-

sidering her career as an illustration of how the female scholars in this

network represented the entire range of educational activity in the seventeenth-

century republic of letters.

1 The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1622 – 1624 : Journal d’un e´tudiant londonien sous le règne de Jacques 1 er, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Bourcier (Paris, 1974), 68–9.

177

Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 14.139.43.12 on Tue Oct 09 09:37:44 BST 2012.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087490.009

Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2012

178

Bathsua Makin: female scholars and the reformation of learning

a l i f e t i m e i n e d u c a t i o n : b a t h s u a m a k i n ( c . 1 6 0 0 – c . 1 6 8 1 ) In 1673, an anonymous tract on women’s education appeared in London.

Entitled An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, it was

the first treatise in English to argue that women could and should be

educated in the full “encyclopedia” of humanist learning: rhetoric, gram-

mar, logic, mathematics, Latin, and Greek. This made sense, the author

argued, because Nature had clearly endowed the female sex with minds

and souls that were “nothing inferior to those of men.”2 The Essay was

loosely modelled on the scholastic disputation, and the author positioned

himself as a “Champion” of the female sex. The author also claimed that

this educational program for women would be of benefit to the male sex,

since men would naturally wish to improve themselves in order to retain

their pre-eminence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.