Lynne Magnusson

Widowhood and linguistic capital: the rhetoric and reception of Anne Bacon's epistolary advice.

H E most usual note struck in the existing letters of sixteenthcentury English gentlewomen is of deference, often signalled by apology and self-deprecation, as where Lady Mary Gray opens her suitor’s letter to Sir William Cecil, “Good master Secrytary I must crave pardonn at your handes for trublynge you so ofienn withe my rude letters.”’ Nonetheless, some surprisingly bold accents emerge in the correspondence of a few learned women, particularly in letters by Anne Cooke Bacon and (to a lesser extent) her sisters Elizabeth Russell and Mildred Cecil. The educated daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke and Lady Anne Fitzwilliam are better known for religious translations in which the use of their learning was, as Mary Ellen Lamb has argued, kept within acceptable and unthreatening boundaries.2 In translating Bernadino Ochino’s Sermons on election and predestination from the Itahan and Bishop John Jewel’s Apologie . . . of the Church ojEngland from Latin,3