Abstract
The biography of the educator, poet, linguist, and renowned polyglot, Bathsua Makin (née Reynolds) (c. 1600–1675), has been marked by misidentification and uncertain provenance. Although known today mainly for her essay promoting a humanist education for women, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues (1673), her writing career is more extensive and began as early as 1619. Skilled in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Spanish, French, and Italian, Makin’s academic reputation gained her the position of tutor, rather than governess, to Princess Elizabeth Stuart, and later to Lucy Davies Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. Her correspondence with family, friends, patrons, and scholars reveals a woman who remained active in teaching and educational reform throughout her long life.
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Bibliography
Makin, Bathsua. 1673. An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues with An Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education. London: Printed by J.D., Cheapside.
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——— 1998. Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
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Further Reading
Brink, Jean R. 1980. “Bathsua Makin: Educator and Linguist.” In Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned Women Before 1800, J.R. Brink, 86–100. Montreal: Eden’s Press.
——— 1991. “Bathsua Reginald Makin: ‘Most Learned Matron’” Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no. 4: 313–326.
Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. 2009. The Birth of Feminism: Women as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Saunders, Anne Leslie. 2002. “Bathsua Reginald Makin.” In Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, 247–70. New York/London: Routledge.
Uckelman, Sara L. 2018. “Bathsua Makin and Anna Maria van Schurman: Education and the Metaphysics of Being a Woman.” In Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Emily Thomas, 95–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Beek, Pieta. 1995. “‘One Tongue is Enough for a Woman’: The Correspondence in Greek between Anna Maria van Schurman and Bathsua Makin.” Dutch Crossing 19 no. 1 (Summer): 24–48.
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Brataas, D.B. (2021). Makin, Bathsua. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_200-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_200-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_200-1