SOURCE: Cunningham, Karen. “‘She Learns as She Lies’: Work and the Exemplary Female in English Early Modern Education.”¹ Exemplaria 7, no. 1 (spring 1995): 209-33.

In the following lecture, originally presented in 1990, Cunningham takes a historicist approach to Ascham's Scholemaster, comparing it to Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie and demonstrating how the authors used the idea of woman to support the idea of intellectual work. Cunningham also addresses how Renaissance pedagogues like Ascham contended with the figure of Queen Elizabeth in imagining an exemplary female.

The impulse toward social engineering in education has been a persistent aspect of humanist pedagogical history. During the sixteenth century, two figures I am going to consider, Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster (1570) and Richard Mulcaster in the Elementarie (1582), worked zealously to produce social organization from the shifting ground of grammatical constructions and literary canons. They were among many educators caught up in a social revolution in which “the...