Bathsua Makin

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Standard Name: Makin, Bathsua
Birth Name: Bathsua Reginald
Married Name: Bathsua Makin
The seventeenth-century BM , long famous as a writer on pedagogy and defender of learning for women, is now known to have been one of the earliest middle-class Englishwomen to publish poems. She relied heavily on royal and noble patronage.
Photograph of an etching of Bathsua Makin by William Marshall after an unidentified artist, 1640s. She is shown from the waist up, seated, and holding a small book, with draped curtains and a window behind her. She is wearing a simple dark dress with large white collar, white cuffs, and pleats down the front. Her hair is curly and shoulder length, with a small cap or hair-band. A Latin inscription round the oval frame mentions her position as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth and her skill in Latin, Greek, an

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Sarah Scott
SS 's mother, Elizabeth Robinson , was heiress of the estate of Mount Morris in Kent (also known as Monk's Horton).
Rizzo, Betty. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. University of Georgia Press, 1994.
298
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, 1996, p. ix - xlv.
x
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
27
This estate became the Robinson family home by 1730.
Rizzo, Betty. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. University of Georgia Press, 1994.
298
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Montagu
EM 's mother (born Elizabeth Drake) had attended Bathsua Makin 's school at Tottenham. She died in late April or early May 1746, some considerable time after an operation for breast cancer. Montagu had...
Friends, Associates Anna Maria van Schurman
Visiting AMS became a custom among cultivated people travelling in or to Utrecht. She met Elizabeth, Princess Palatine (daughter of the Queen of Bohemia ), and became a friend and correspondent of a network of...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Maria van Schurman
This work became fairly well-known among Englishwomen interested in the issue of education for their sex. Her correspondence with Bathsua Makin ensured that the influence of AMS in England was practical as well as theoretical....
Literary responses Anne Askew
Knowledge of AA 's writing spread rapidly. The reactionary Stephen Gardiner , Bishop of Winchester, complained on 6 June 1547 of the number of copies in circulation.
Beilin, Elaine V., and Anne Askew. “Introduction”. The Examinations of Anne Askew, Oxford University Press, 1996.
xxviii-xxix
John Foxe gave it a still wider...
Literary responses Anne Bradstreet
Bathsua Makin offered AB as an example of an excellent poet in her Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen, 1673, thereby bringing her to the attention of a large female readership in...
Reception Anne Bacon
AB 's reputation was known to women from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century who were alert to the historical achievements of their own sex: Bathsua Makin , Elizabeth Elstob , Mary Deverell
Textual Features Anna Maria van Schurman
Having laid out her case, AMS proceeds to summarise and refute that of her Adversaries. These she classifies as the utilitarian (who value learning purely for its cash or career value) and the envious...
Textual Features Mary Astell
From Astell's own viewpoint this would have been her most important work; it represents the distillation of her religious and philosophical opinions. It follows in the tradition of Bathsua Makin 's Essay to Revive the...
Textual Production Frances Boothby
FB expressed her own view about the fate of her play in a poem which circulated among the highly literate Roman Catholic families of Aston and Gage: it turns up in commonplace-books of the letter-writer...
Textual Production Mary More
The Womans Right reached print in 2016, edited by Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell with Jessica Walker in Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a Reply to More by Robert Whitehall.

Timeline

About 1606
Anna Walker beautifully transcribed a copy of her devotional work A Sweete Savor for Woman, designed for presentation to its dedicatee, James I's queen, Anne of Denmark .
1628-1632
John Comenius wrote his Didactica Magna, which argues for the education of girls.
January 1697
Daniel Defoe proposed in his early publication An Essay upon Projects (advertised for sale this month) the founding of an academy for women.
1697
John Evelyn included in his Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Ancient and Modern a list of women famed for writing: Margaret Cavendish , Katherine Philips , Aphra Behn , Bathsua Makin , and Mary Astell .