When Suzanne W. Hull published Chaste, Silent and Obedient, English Books for Women 1475-1640 in 1982, what little work there had been done on Renaissance women was directed towards the “conduct” literature that suggested women’s behaviour fitted the first half of that title.

Her work, which identified and detailed the books directed towards the female market, was a vital step towards a more sophisticated view, which today recognises that if books about how women should behave – frequently written in a hectoring tone – kept being published, that women were not behaving in that way.

More, she helped to develop a more sophisticated idea of what literacy might have meant then – including the recognition that many women (and men) were able to read but not write.

Behind these conclusions were a vast amount of library work, on texts previously little noticed. From English Books for Women, page 127:

Only twenty-four books printed between 1475 and 1572 can be classed as women’s books. In the next decade there was a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of books directed to women and nineteen appeared between 1573 and 1582.

But Hull did more than the heavy labour of collecting these texts, which often survive in single copies, in libraries scattered around the world. She analysed and understood the complexities of their writing and consumption.

The books for women gave much direct information (and misinformation) to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century female readers; they give just as much information indirectly today about the lives, rights, and roles of those women readers. The messages about women that come down through the centuries, revealed through the guides, romances, prayers, and polemics written for them by contemporaries are many; a few messages are clear and consistent. (p. 133)

I learnt of her death this month at the age of 84 from an obituary in the LA Times (registration required):

Her writing was a way to “stitch together her feminist views and her love of England,” said her son, Jim Hull. “She was interested in the idea that women were already beginning to struggle against chauvinism at that time.” …

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1943 from Swarthmore College, she married fellow student George Hull.

An amateur architect, Hull designed a home that was built around 1960 in Woodland Hills.

In 1967, she received a master’s in library science from USC and joined the Huntington two years later.

Unfortunately, however, the most sophisticated thing the Times can find to say about the book is: “Scouring texts for clues to what it was like to be a woman then, she found advice on how to make a poultice, keep skin white and bake live birds into a pie.”

Hull changed our view of the women of the Renaissance; for the women of today we’ve still got a lot more work to do.

One ‘virago of quality’, the rich Lady Tresham, went to Newgate in 1630 for saying in open court that a thief had more friends there than an honest body. Another time the justices forced her to take back Helen Haddocke whom she had had as a servant for year and then turned loose without wages or apparel “for no cause shewne”. At the next session she was again sent to prison for abusing the court and telling Justice Long that “Your authoritie set aside, you are a scurvy companion.”

From: Bridenbaugh, C. Vexed and Troubled Englishmen 1590-1642, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968, p. 181

It seems likely she’s related to the Sir Thomas Tresham who was executed for his role in the Gumpowder plot. His family debts were largely cleared by a Lady Tresham, but she died in 1615, so this must be the next generation.

And this piece of parliamentary history – in which an attempt is being made to trample all over the privileges of the Spanish ambassador – suggests that she was Spanish. It seems an odd period for an English aristocrat to marry a Spaniard, but the family was Catholic…

From the inbox, to be newly found at the Women’s Library online catalogue:

* “Records of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (including videos, photographs and correspondence sourced from women based at the camps).”

* “Papers of Louisa Garret Anderson (1879-1943) The documents include letters of Louisa to her mother from Holloway, and photographs and a scrapbook relating to the women’s military hospital that LGA and Flora Murray ran in Convent Garden during WWI.”

* “Papers of Harriet Martineau (1839-1901) The collection includes the literary manuscript of ‘Life in the Sick-room’, manuscript correspondence mainly with Mr Henry Reeve and to Dr Ogle (1839-1901) and photocopied correspondence containing references to Harriet Martineau.”