Dr Gemma Allen’s new book, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press), has just been published. Part of the select group of Tudor women allowed access to a formal education, the Cooke sisters were also well-connected through their marriages to influential Elizabethan politicians.
Drawing particularly on their own writings, this book reconstructs for the first time the sisters’ humanist education and reveals the extent of their religious and political agency.