How Lady Jane Grey May Have Used her Education

Abstract

Abstract That early modern education was segregated is a widely accepted truism. While boys attended school, girls remained at home to receive domestic and religious training. This paradigm overlooks exceptions: girls in whom the ambitions of their aristocratic families were invested. This chapter focuses on one such girl, Lady Jane Grey (1537–1554). It explores what we know of her education, contrasting the hesitant speaking voice created for her by Michael Drayton, with the one we hear in her prison writings. It compares Drayton’s Ovidian model for her speaking voice with the catechist role that she adopts in her prison writings. It also turns attention from the question of authorship to the act of attribution, arguing that even if the words we read were not spoken or written entirely by Grey herself, their attribution to her is meaningful—creating a different script for readers that is unusually direct, confrontational, and female.

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