“In Specie”: Educational Advocacy, the Material Book, and Female Intellectual Communities in Seventeenth-Century British Women’s Writing

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, a number of female writers began to exercise a strong degree of agency in the materials they published and the discourse in which they participated. Discussions of expanded female education abounded in their writing, and by the end of the century, female writers had become bold enough to write tracts proposing entirely new educational institutions for women. These proposed all-female schools would have provided teachers and students alike with both an intellectual space free from patriarchal strictures and the opportunity to expand their minds unimpeded. Through analysis of works by Rachel Speght, Elizabeth Isham, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell, this thesis traces the broad preoccupation of female writers with female intellectual communities across the seventeenth century. This project adds to current and past scholarly discussions of female reading in the early modern period, notes rhetorical continuities between the works of these various writers, and hopes to contribute to our understanding of early feminist thought.