Thomas Salter's "The Mirrhor of Modestie": an Edition.

Abstract

In both the old and the revised Short Title Catalogue 1475-1640, Item 21634, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie {1579}, is attributed to Thomas Salter. The attribution is based on information provided by the treatise itself--by Salter's epistle to his female readers, which invokes mot of the conventions of authorial humility; by the head-title of the main text, which includes Salter's name; and by the explicit, which reads "Finis . . Thomas Salter.". In fact, Thomas Salter is not the author of this work. What he presents is for the most part a close translation of Gian Michele Bruto's La Institutione di una Fanciulla Nata Nobilmente (Anvers, 1555), an epistolary address to Lord Sylvester Cattaneo on the subject of his daughter's education. The Mirrhor of Modestie is a plagiarism of one of the most conservative of Renaissance humanist treatises on female learning. This edition of Salter's translation introduces a perspective that has been largely neglected by those who have examined attitudes toward women's education in sixteenth-century Engl and . Bruto's judgment, in Salter's words, is that "it is not mete nor conuenient for a Maiden to be taught or trayned vp in learnyng of humaine artes, in whome a vertuous demeanor and honest behauiour, would be a more sightlier ornament" (Cl('r)-Cl('v)). Taking his place among those who mistrust the conjunction of woman and knowledge, Bruto (Salter) warns that the maiden must be kept from philosophy, eloquence, and poetry--from whatever would encourage excessive thinking and speaking or amorous fantasy. Because inquiry leads to an underst and ing of evil, she should be restricted to simple Christian truths and household lore. The edition presented here supersedes that which was published by John Payne Collier in his Illustrations of Old English Literature (1866) and corrects Collier's assertion that Salter wrote within a discrete Puritan tradition. That The Mirrhor is primarily the work of a Catholic humanist suggests need for a revision of the categories by which we traditionally have described Renaissance thought.