Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [13]
In this she drew on her own education and experience. She consulted leading scholars and commissioned educational treatises to advise on Mary’s program of instruction. Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, had produced the Institutio Principis Christiani (Institution of a Christian Prince) in 1516, but there was no similar guide for the education of a future queen regnant. Katherine requested the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives to write such a manual for the education of girls. As Vives wrote in his dedicatory letter of April 5, 1523, to his De Institutione Feminae Christianae (The Institution of a Christian Woman):
Moved by the holiness of your life and your ardent zeal for sacred studies, I have endeavoured to write something for your Majesty on the education of the Christian Woman … your daughter Mary will read these recommendations and will reproduce them as she models herself on the example of your goodness and wisdom to be found within your home. She will do this assuredly, and unless she alone belies all human expectations, must of necessity be virtuous and holy as the offspring of you and Henry VIII, such a noble and honoured pair.2
While asserting that women should be properly educated, De Institutione was traditional in expecting women to be man’s subjugated companions; their primary goals were virtue, domesticity, and chastity. Female education, Vives maintained, was preparation not for a public role but for the conventional occupations of wife and mother. As Vives explained, men would benefit from having educated spouses, as “there is nothing so troublesome as sharing one’s life with a person of no principles.” Since a woman “that thinketh alone, thinketh evil,” it was recommended that Mary be kept away from the company of men and be surrounded at all times with “sad, pale and untrimmed” servants.
Two lists, one of “good” books—predominantly Spanish and French—the other of libri pestiferi—noxious books—were recommended for Mary’s reading. Chivalric romances were to be avoided, as they were thought to incite women’s imaginations and corrupt their minds, given their moral frailty. Instead, Mary should read the Bible, particularly the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and Epistles, every morning and evening, together with the works of the Church Fathers and writers such as Plato, Cicero, and Seneca.3 Besides reading, Vives approved of the classical female recreations of spinning, needlework, and cooking, as all such activities put off the moral danger of idleness. He concluded that Mary should follow her mother in virtue, rather than her father to the throne.
But Vives’s treatise lacked detail, and in October 1524, Katherine commissioned Vives to write a more specific curriculum of study for her seven-year-old daughter. The resulting De Ratione Studii Puerilis (On a Plan of Study for Children) was dedicated to the young princess herself. It set out rules for the proper pronunciation of Greek and Latin, emphasized the desirability of learning things by heart, and refined the earlier list of selected reading. Here the recommended books were much more oriented toward governance, perhaps reflecting Vives’s tacit acknowledgment that Mary was destined to rule. She was to read Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and the dialogues of Plato, “particularly those which demonstrate the government of the commonwealth,” together with Thomas More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s Institutio Principis