latin

Learning Latin

In regards to speaking and writing in Latin and/or Greek, this skill was a definitive social marker in regards to class and belonged almost exclusively to the aristocratic women. Almost no woman, however, was allowed to or taught to speak either language unless she had very lenient parents or there was some direct need that she learned, which there usually was not. So these aristocratic women were a minority within a minority when it came to some form of formal education in Latin. Most of the major academic works were written in Latin and learning the language helped women to gain a substantial amount of credit and access to different disciplines and discourses. Pearl Hogrefe describes how Latin was to be used in regards to a learned mind:

Such an education meant the ability to read Latin and Greek books easily, almost as
easily as if they were in English, and to know something about the lives and the times, as well as the ideas of classical writers. It meant skill in translating from Greek into Latin or from either of them into English. It meant the ability to compose orations, declamations, or personal letters in fluent and correct Latin by the standards of the Renaissance, to carry on a correspondence with famous theologians on the Continent, or even to write epitaphs in Latin or Greek verse.1

Knowing how to speak and write Latin was a key to the highest levels of knowledge prior to the major distribution of the vernacular English, which would dominate later in the Early Modern period.

This is a potrait of Lady Jane Grey in 1537.

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Greek was also very important to have some grasp of in regards to knowledge and access to further education. Roger Ascham, in a letter in 1550 described Lady Jane Grey�s skill �in both writing and speaking Greek, [as] almost incredible.�2 The important aspect of Lady Jane Grey and her knowledge of Greek is that her parents had the money to hire a private tutor by the name Mr. Aylmer, whom she declared taught her �so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that [she thought] all the time nothing whiles [she was] with him.�3 Without her class status, Greek, let alone most any other language, would not have been afforded to her, nor would her much beloved tutor.
Nigel Wheale brings up an important point in regards to all women�s education of Latin (or lack thereof):

Milton wished that he had published his divorce tracts in Latin rather than English because this would have restricted their readership to more �sober� judgments�perhaps what he meant was that they would then have been beyond the reading power of most women.4

Learning Latin was one of the most important steps in gaining some type of equal footing to that of their brothers, husbands and/or fathers. Without knowledge of at least some Latin and hopefully Greek, women were at best, highly excluded from reaching their full potential in the academic realm, and at worst, unable to recognize some of their basic rights as mentioned above in regards to Milton�s regrets.

1 Pearl Hogrefe. Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975). 104.
2 Hogrefe, 105.
3 Bonnie Anderson, Judith Zinsser. A History of Their Own. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 86.
4 Wheale, 85.

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