The Lives of Tudor Women Quotes

“We see young maidens be taught to read and write and can do both with praise; we hear them sing and play and both passing well; we know that they learn the best and finest of our learned languages to the admiration of all men.’ Thomas Becon had noticed that girls actually seemed to learn faster than boys, although he was quick to assure his readers that ‘for all that seeming yet it is not so.”
― Elizabeth Norton, The Lives of Tudor Women

“The fifteenth century poet John Lydgate portrayed the death of a ‘little infant that were but late born’ in his own version of the Danse Macabre. For him, Death was the child’s music tutor, teaching how to dance the dance of death. In September 1495, it was Princess Elizabeth's turn to take a new dancing master.”
― Elizabeth Norton, The Lives of Tudor Women

“It was unnatural to send a child to be nursed, the Countess of Lincoln declared, both for the mother’s own child and also that of the nurse, and she warned: ‘be not accessory to that disorder of causing a poorer woman to banish her own infant, for the entertaining of a richer woman’s child, as it were, bidding her unlove her own to love yours.”
― Elizabeth Norton, The Lives of Tudor Women

“Swaddling was considered essential by Tudor parents of all classes. It was an old practice. On tombs and monuments from at least the 14th century, babies were depicted tightly swaddled like little Egyptian mummies. Swaddling not only kept the children warm, but, contemporaries considered, ensure that their limbs grew straight.”
― Elizabeth Norton, The Lives of Tudor Women