Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea, Meditations, Memoratives and the commonplace-book culture of sixteenth-century English women writers

Abstract

Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanea, Meditations, Memoratives (1604) has generally been considered one of the earliest and most polished examples of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mother’s legacy genre. Written between 1601 and 1603 and published posthumously in four reprints (1604, 1606?, 1608?, 1618?), Grymeston’s work is routinely compared to that of seventeenth-century mother’s legacy writers Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth Joceline. However, despite being dedicated to Grymeston’s only son, Bernye Grymeston, Miscelanea is not only a tract of motherly advice but also a survey of Grymeston’s life events, biblical knowledge, religious loyalties, and reading materials. In fact, as I will argue, Grymeston’s compilation displays the reading, extracting, and gathering characteristic of early modern commonplace books and can be compared more effectively to devotional collections such as Lady Frances Abergavenny’s prayers, published in Thomas Bentley’s anthology The Monument of Matrones (1582). In this thesis, I reconsider, therefore, Grymeston’s compilation within the context of the humanist educational practice of commonplacing and compare her work to the female-authored commonplace books of Katherine Parr and Elizabeth I. By recontextualizing Grymeston’s Miscelanea and applying a more flexible definition of the mother’s legacy genre especially in regards to its sixteenth-century representatives, I intend to redefine Grymeston’s place within the commonplace-book culture of early modern English women writers.