Women's Education in Early Modern Europe

Elite Women's Education

Barbara Whitehead's Women's Education in Early Modern Europe would be better named Elite Women's Education in Early Modern Europe as the book focuses squarely on the elite. This book is a compilation of essays by various early modern specialists. The most important contribution of the work is the argument that while "early modern elite women were educated to the standards established by their societies," the "formal aspects of education provided by convents, boarding schools, and tutors were not the only ways in which information was disseminated to women." Whitehead is one of the few scholars who has noted much of an elite woman's education took place later in her life as an adult through informal institutions often organized by women themselves, such as the seventeenth and eighteenth century salons.

This book adds much to the historiography of early modern women's education and reminds readers not to judge early modern education standards according to our modern... read more