Blackwell Reference Online

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With titles like A Brief and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage (by Edmund Tilney, 1568), A Godly Form of Household Government (by John Dod and Robert Cleaver, 1598), and Of Domestical Duties (by William Gouge, 1622 ), the early modern printing industry produced a sizable canon of guidebooks to the conduct of private life. These popular treatises advised Elizabethans and Jacobeans about ideal gender roles, courtship practices, marital relations, child rearing, servant supervision, and domestic organization. It would be tempting to think that the manuals might tell us everything we would want to know about these important contexts for English Renaissance literature. In fact, however, personal histories were far more complex and diverse than any prescriptive text acknowledged. The history of private life developed in a wide variety of genres, including the diaries and memoirs that made their first English appearances in this period. These are not often thought of as highly fictionalized, but, like more canonical poems and plays, they, too, show the influence of cultural myths about private practices. This chapter seeks to develop alternative perspectives on the literatures of private life, concentrating on works for which history and biography provide evidence of how partial their truths were. In important ways, books like A Godly Form of Household Government were products ... log in or subscribe to read full text