During the insecurity of the Middle Ages, the seclusion of women for their own protection had been severely necessary.  In the East the ‘purdah-system’ reached the length of excluding women of the better classes from the society of all men but those of their own family.  Of such rigidity in Europe I cannot find any traces except under Oriental influence;[28] but there is no doubt that women’s life at the beginning of the Renaissance in the North was circumscribed.  Such higher education as they received was given at home, by father or brothers or husband, or by private tutors.  But there are not a few examples of educated women.  In the well-known Frisian family, the Canters of Groningen, parents and children and even the maidservant are said to have spoken regularly in Latin.  Antony Vrye of Soest, one of the Adwert circle, wrote to his wife in Latin; and his daughter helped him with the teaching of Latin in the various schools over which he presided, at Campen and Amsterdam and Alcmar.  Pirckheimer’s sisters and daughters, Peutinger’s wife, are famous for their learning.  In England throughout the Renaissance period the position of women and their education steadily improved.  Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, the foundress of Ewelme, had an interest in literature; and the great Lady Margaret, besides the endowments which are her memorial at the universities, constantly fostered the efforts of Wynkyn de Worde, and herself translated part of the Imitatio from the French.  The Princess Mary, as the result of the liberal training of Vives and other masters, could translate from Aquinas, take part in acting a play of Terence, and read the letters of Jerome; and before she was 30, made a translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel, which formed part of the English version of those Paraphrases ordered by Injunctions of Edward VI to be placed beside the Bible in every parish church throughout the realm.

     [28] In 1729 the Abbe Fourmont found the seclusion of women
          extensively practised in Athens for fear of the Turks; see
          R.C.  Christie, Essays and Papers, p. 69.

More, for his dear ‘school’, engaged the best teachers he could find.  John Clement, afterwards Wolsey’s first Reader in Humanity at Oxford, and William Gonell, Erasmus’ friend at Cambridge, read Sallust and Livy with them.  Nicholas Kratzer, the Bavarian mathematician, also one of Wolsey’s Readers at Oxford, taught them astronomy:  to know the pole-star and the dog, and to contemplate the ’high wonders of that mighty and eternal workman’, whom More could feel revealed himself also to some ’good old idolater watching and worshipping the man in the moon every frosty night’.[29] Richard Hyrde, the friend of Gardiner and translator of Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman, continued the work after the ‘school’ had been moved to Chelsea;[30] and when Margaret, eldest and best-beloved scholar, was married.  Not that this interfered.  The love of learning once implanted brought her with her husband to keep her place among her sisters in that bright Academy.  Her fame is well known, how the Bishop of Exeter sent her a gold coin of Portugal in reward for an elegant epistle; how familiarly she corresponded with Erasmus; how she emended the text of Cyprian, imitated the Declamations of Quintilian, and translated the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.