Q. What substantial section of early modern English society receives even less scholarly attention than women? A. Children. Q. What literary genre was most clearly the province both of women and of children in the early modern period? A. The catechism. That, in brief, is the justification for Paula McQuade's delightful book, a work of literary scholarship which is not only for literary scholars. Like many of her authors – women whose humanity she never forgets – her professed aims are modest: to add half-a-dozen more minor entries to the emerging canon of early modern women's writing in English, and in the process to persuade us that catechesis deserves to be taken seriously as a literary genre. As it happens, the significance of her work extends a little further than that.
Ian Green's path- and backbreaking work on the catechism industry (The Christian's ABC, Oxford 1996) revealed its centrality to church life and to the printing industry. McQuade, who has already edited a collection of catechisms (Catechisms written for mothers, schoolmistresses and children, 1575–1750, Aldershot 2008), has now produced a slight, elegant monograph on the same subject. (The slightness, unfortunately, extends to a too-brief index.) McQuade's approach takes us into the home. Catechisms were intimate documents woven into everyday life, and they belonged to mothers in particular. Women doing their best to raise godly children used catechisms written for the purpose, but used them actively: sometimes annotating and extending them in the margins, sometimes transcribing them and reshaping them subtly or dramatically in the process. And – which forms the meat of her book – many of them composed their own catechisms, whether derived from other texts or apparently entirely original.
All of the texts that she considers share a question-and-answer format, but they are not interrogations. A recurring theme is the warmth, care and intimacy of these works. Some are playful, more Bible quizzes than oral examinations, often going out of their way to present their material so as to engage a childish audience. One of her catechisms anticipated that modern children's favourite, the book of world records: asking children to name the proudest ever king (Nebuchadnezzar), the fairest ever man (Absalom) and the strongest ever man (Samson). These are books that one can imagine having to be prised out of the hands of newly literate children. In other cases, the exchange between the interlocutors is more like a play script, which an adult and child could prepare for performance before the household together. In still others, the catechetical framework is a disguise, allowing some of McQuade's authors to write frankly exegetical or controversial works under the cover of this innocuously maternal form.
After a substantial introductory chapter on these general matters, the bulk of the book consists of five chapters delving into five specific texts: some published, some unpublished, some faintly familiar to scholars, some almost entirely unknown. Each of these miniature studies stands by itself and deserves to be read carefully. Here I can do no more than mention a few choice details. The early seventeenth-century gentlewoman Katherine Fitzwilliam left us a series of four increasingly original and complex manuscript catechisms: the third of these, which focuses entirely on the problem of suffering, deserves to be recognised as one of the age's more humane theological engagements with that theme. It was conventional enough to describe God as a physician who gives us ‘bitter potions of afflictions’; less so to add that he sometimes ‘tempers’ such afflictions with comforts of various kinds, wishing to alleviate our suffering in the present rather than simply to sanctify our souls at any cost (p. 80).
A better-known case is that of Mary Cary, the Fifth Monarchist fellow-traveller whose The resurrection of the witnesses (1653) adopted a catechetical style. As McQuade points out, what is remarkable about this exegesis of the book of Revelation is that Cary did not claim prophetic status, by far the simplest rhetorical strategy available to women hoping to justify speaking out on such matters. Instead she took her stand on her own intense study of the text, and used the catechetical format to draw the reader in, presenting her findings as the product of a communal discernment of which the reader is made a participant. The genre could be disarmingly subversive.
For me, however, the most memorable of her characters is Katherine Thomas, who in the 1680s produced a catechetical reworking of a Catholic devotional work from earlier in the century. It is now well known that early modern English Protestants were devotional omnivores, although not all read their Catholic sources as generously as Thomas did. As well as being remarkably open to and tolerant of Catholicism, however, Thomas's text consistently reworks her sources to bring women's agency to the fore: at times she feels like a successor to Aemilia Lanyer, now famous for her radically women-centred retelling of the life of Christ in 1611. ‘I am not claiming’, McQuade has to point out for the avoidance of doubt, ‘that Thomas asserts women's ability to serve as priests within the Church of England’ (p. 106). Nor, perhaps, would Thomas have recoiled from the idea in horror.
