Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 1520-1698

Focusing on the unusual learning and schooling of women in early modern England, this study explores how and why women wrote, the myriad forms their alphabets could assume, and the shape which vernacular literacy acquired in their hands. Mazzola argues that early modern women's writings were designed to conceal rather than reveal women's learning and schooling. Such difficult or ’resistant’ literacy, Mazzola proposes, transformed the broader history of literacy in the West.