This book examines the close ties between European queens and Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione foeminae Christianae and its translations. This volume was the most popular instructional manual for women in sixteenth-century Europe. Vives dedicated the book to Catherine of Aragon, queen of England as the wife of Henry VIII. Richard Hyrde did the same with his English translation, while Juan Justiniano dedicated his Spanish translation to Germaine de Foix, dowager queen of Aragon as the wife of Ferdinand II. This volume restores women to the history of De institutione through an analysis of its printed English and Spanish translations and their contexts through 1599. In doing so, it highlights royal women’s intellectual, cultural, and political associations with Vives’s book, especially regarding humanism, women’s education, and public authority.

Darcy Kern is an independent scholar of Western European intellectual history.