Elizabeth Grymeston is easily the most polished and possibly the most learned of the seventeenth-century writers of the "mother's advice book," a tract of advice ostensibly directed by a mother to her child, providing (invariably pious) guidance for that child's instruction. The mother's advice book, a genre which seems to be a novelty of the early-modern period, was often composed by a dying mother, apparently impelled to write as an extension of her motherhood, the most authoritative function open to her in early-modern English society. Indisputably the Grymeston tract, probably written without any intention of publication, succeeds in combining pious thoughts, questions, and paraphrases, most of them of a decidedly Roman Catholic cast, into a wonderful whole compounded of direct, simple language and arresting, concrete images. The Miscelanea (1604) so persuasively conveys Grymeston's intentions and thoughts that Charlotte Kohler, in her study of women writers of the Elizabethan era...