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Roger Ascham has been credited with rehabilitating Elizabeth Tudor's image after a near-disastrous seduction at the hands of her stepmother's husband Thomas Seymour. But in many ways Ascham's tutelage merely continues a process the Lord Admiral had already begun, educating a young girl about what to wear, how to comport herself, and how to regard her male teacher, all necessary steps in the programme Vives details as removing 'the residue of her infancy'. This essay examines Ascham's seductions and Seymour's pedagogy with the larger aim of exploring the Tudor classroom, at once an official site of humanist learning and kind of rival space where women were taught to read and to write and to counteract the designs of male teachers. If images of Lucretia and Griselda resurface in accounts of Elizabeth's prodigious learning, there were other female figures -like Katherine Parr and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's governess Kat Ashley and the Duchess of Suffolk -who shaped a humanism of the household just as crucial as the humanism of the university.He taught me fundamentals; The remainder that I did not learn He was keeping for one who was capable. 1

This essay considers a recent shift in scholarship on early modern women writers, away from studying what these women wrote to investigate how and where women’s writings occurred. A critical focus on letters inscribed on whitewashed walls and funeral monuments, jewels and embroidered cloths, for instance, has supplied us with useful information about women’s schooling and teachers, their gift‐giving and household responsibilities, and scholars have demonstrated how poems and prayers also belong to this women’s circulation of material things. Indeed, early modern women were not always seeking to transform their letters into literature, and this essay also briefly suggests other ways of reading the shapes and designs of women’s letters. What Mercie Collyn describes as her ‘small raggid secretary hand’ is designed to throw off unauthorized readers, so that what looks like illiteracy, in other words, might just be another – and equally valuable – form of writing. Continued discussion of female literacy and female schooling in the early modern period should attend more closely to the many marks on cloths and walls – even the flourishes on Elizabeth Tudor’s signature or alphabets adorning embroidered samplers – as evidence of an alternative use of letters by women in the early modern period.

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