On the Perils of Women Reading Secret and Forbidden Books

“And now I will unclasp a secret book,

And to your quick-conceiving discontents

I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,

As full of peril and adventurous spirit

As to o’re walk a current roaring loud

On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.”

     I Henry IV, I, iii

With 50 years of well-educated queens on the English throne between 1553 and 1603, you might expect that English women’s education prospered under the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor.  Alas, not the case. If government censorship already limited what any literate English subject could read, what women were “permitted” to read was circumscribed even more narrowly.

While Queen Elizabeth I herself was quite literate in several languages, during her reign, only between one and five percent of her female subjects could read even English.

What female “discontents” might arise if women read what men read? What undisclosed “matters deep and dangerous” lay hidden in men’s books? What was so secret that men could know and women could not?

First, a few words on literacy rates.  It is estimated that in 1558, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, only 5 percent of her Majesty’s adult male subjects and 1 percent of her adult female subjects were literate. By her death in 1603, those numbers had risen to 25 percent of men and 5 percent of women.  Certainly, the explosion of English plays, novellas, translations, poems and pamphlets during Elizabeth’s 45-year reign played a role in providing more interesting reading material. But the main cause was the establishment of more grammar schools for boys, with the caveat that the quality of schools like London’s Westminster School and Canterbury’s The King’s School far surpassed the rest. Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson did not make it into Cambridge thanks to grammar schools in rural market towns.

But what about the education of that literate 1% to 5% of the fairer sex?

Females were not admitted to universities. If they were educated, girls learned at home from a literate parent or, in wealthy families, from a tutor. Noble daughters might be sent to another noble family for their education.  In Elizabethan society, a girl learned to read if her father allowed it. Alas again, William Shakespeare of Stratford-up-Avon was not one of those enlightened fathers. It remains a backstair mystery as to why both daughters of the author of the most extraordinary works in the English language appear to have been illiterate.

Forbidden text: Shakespeare’s First Folio definitely did NOT make the summer reading list for women. But no matter. It appears Will of Stratford never taught either of his daughters to read it.

What was available for this small slice of literate women to read?  Juan Luis Vives stepped up to answer the question for the age, by advocating the “policing” of women’s reading in his De institutione feminae christianae (1523).

“Nothing should be read by women except that which encourages the fear of God:  Now what books ought to be read, everybody knoweth, as the Gospels, and the Acts and the Epistles of the Apostles and the Old Testament, St. Jerome, St. Cyprian, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Gregory, Plato, Cicero and Seneca .  . . .  A woman hath very great need of this moral part of philosophy.”

In addition to religious texts, Vives supported women reading Aristotle and Xenophon to learn how men should rule and govern their households, family, the education and bringing up of children. Plutarch, as well as certain precepts of daily life in Latin and simple medical treatments, passed Vives’ muster.  If a woman possessed sufficient opportunity and intelligence to have mastered ancient Greek, she might read Sappho and Callimachus.  Vives cautioned that women need the guidance of men to understanding these texts.

And when might she read?  Only on the holy days, or on working days only after concluding her other duties.

Even history books, like Herodotus’ covering the Greco-Persian Wars, were deemed too dangerous for women according to Juan Luis Vives’ “touch not; taste not; handle not” list.”

Now we get to the what and why, according to Vives, women should be kept from reading everything else.  On Vives’ vast list of “forbidden” works (except to the monarch), were books on “grammar, logic, histories, the rule of governance of the commonwealth, and the art mathematical”. Those, he opined, should be left to men.  Tales of romance were especially forbidden, among them, Tristan and Isolde, Amadis of Gaul, Celestina, and Boccaccio’s Decameron, for they were written by “idle men [who] wrote unlearned, and set all upon filth and viciousness, in whom I wonder what should delight men but that vice pleaseth them so much.”

Vives reserved his particular disapproval for Ovid whose “books of Love . . .a woman should beware, like as of serpents or snakes,” for they would lead a woman to “sin like Eve”. She should be kept away from such books by her father and friends, so that she could “by disuse, forget learning, if it can be done. For it is better to lack a good thing than to use it ill.” 

When you have recovered from reading that, pray, consider both why women’s reading material was so prescribed and the prospect of spending the rest of your life reading only religious texts, moral philosophies, precepts of daily life and a couple of ancient Greeks. My next post will reveal what happened when the Queen’s maids-of-honor were caught reading one of those forbidden books written by one of those “idle men”.

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