The Background of Spenser's Attitude toward Women Rulers

Abstract

A UNDERSTANDING of Spenser's position with reference to the LE sixteenth-century controversy over government by women requires a more adequate account of that controversy than has heretofore been available. The sketches by Strype' and by the biographers of Knox,2 which carry the story little beyond Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, fail to indicate the continued publication of gynecocratic literature which kept the issues alive until Spenser's day and into the next century. The resources of the Huntington Library make possible a fairly detailed and complete account of the controversy. The present paper is designed to tell the story itself, which is of curious importance to the student of Renaissance ideas as well as to the student of Spenser. A subsequent paper will consider, against this background, the nature and significance of Spenser's attitude. Long before the accession of Mary Tudor made the political issue a point of particular interest in the discussion of women, humanists had drawn the attention of the Renaissance to the status and education of the sex in general.! In 1523 Juan Luis Vives acknowledged that women possess certain intellectual capacities, and, in his De institutione foeminae Christianae, he outlined a humanistic course for their education. Cornelius Agrippa wrote at length, in his De nobilitate & praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529), to prove that in every respect women are equal, or even superior, to men. Richard Hyrde's translation of Vives in 1540, and David Clapham's translation of Agrippa in 1542, brought support to a similar enlightenment, in England, regarding women. Edward Gosynhyl, who had written

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