Female Education in
16th & 17th Century England

Influences, Attitudes, and Trends

For about a thousand years in England, from the start of Christianity there in the late 6th century through the 15th century, at least some members of all classes of society were taught to read. While in those years literacy was the prime tool for religious and learned scholarship, literacy was also a very pragmatic instrument for personal communication and for the other written necessities of economic and social functioning, including household and estate record-keeping (Clanchy, p. 198). In the many years that women were empowered with household and ecclesiastical responsibilities - which included much of the Middle Ages - reading and writing, on some level, was needed by them as well as by men.

In fact, it appears that in England, prior to the 16th century, the family and community structures of the localized preindustrial society of those many years allowed for a wide range of activities in which women could quite easily participate, though to a lesser extent than men. For poorer women, that participation included both learning and teaching to read at the early levels when males of similar station did. For high-born and for convent-situated women, a certain amount of advanced religious and advanced secular learning was also available.

The picture was changed by events of the 16th century, a century that, in England, started with the era of humanism - roughly, the forty years between 1500 and 1540 - was followed in mid-century by the twenty years of the Protestant Revolt or Reformation, and ended with forty years of the reign of Elizabeth I. All three periods affected the subsequent course of female education.