Abstract

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.