Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell

Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (b. 1540–d. 1609) was the seventh child and fourth daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke and his wife, Anne Fitzwilliam. With the ascension of Edward VI in 1547, Cooke became tutor to the nine-year-old king, a position he held until Edward’s death in 1553. Cooke also dedicated himself to the education of his children, both male and female. The Cooke sisters, as they became known to contemporaries, benefited with their brothers from a humanist education grounded in Greek and Latin languages and texts. By the age of twelve, Elizabeth Cooke was fluent in Latin, Greek, and French. Mildred, her eldest sister, was a noted Greek scholar and the wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I throughout most of her reign. Anne Cooke married Sir Nicholas Bacon, the queen’s keeper of the Great Seal. She translated fourteen Italian sermons by Bernardino Ochino, as well as Bishop John Jewel’s Latin Apology for the Church of England. Katherine married Sir Henry Killigrew and was the author of Latin poems that circulated in manuscript, and of her own Latin epitaph, inscribed on her tomb, where Greek and Latin verses by her sister Elizabeth were also engraved. Russell was sister-in-law to William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, aunt to Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon, and wife first to Sir Thomas Hoby and second to Lord John Russell, son and heir of the Earl of Bedford. Her family connections put her in close proximity to the center of power in her day, while her intelligence and tenacity enabled her to negotiate the political, social, and religious complexities of Elizabethan culture. Russell’s literary reputation emerges from three related forms of early modern publication. First, her fame spread through the circulation of her manuscript works, including poems in Greek and Latin and most likely a manuscript copy of her English translation of John Ponet’s treatise on the Eucharist, A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man (Russell 2001, cited under Printed Texts). Second, Russell was renowned in her lifetime as the author of funerary epitaphs in three languages, engraved upon tombs that she designed and commissioned for members of her family. Finally, Russell’s reputation was established through the joint endeavors of the Cooke sisters and the works that praised them. The Cooke sisters’ shared erudition underwrites Russell’s self-representation and self-defense as a woman of learning, culture, and literary achievement. By foregrounding her role as co-heir with her sisters of their father’s intellectual legacy, Russell’s writings challenge her period’s frequent dismissal of educated women as anomalous and endorse a pedagogy that would educate girls as well as boys.