What does reading, learning and contemplating have to do with living a good life? We talk about fortune telling, manifesting, humanism, philosophy, devotion, debate and different kinds of knowledge in early modern Europe. Was it better to be a scholar or lead a more active, practical life? This episode's examples are an English treatise in defence of women's education that encourages women to equip themselves with suitable knowledge to be useful to their husbands and children and a letter by an Italian philosopher about the joy of convivial academic discussion.

Sources mentioned

Bathsua Makin, An Essay To Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues. With An Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education (London: 1673).

Elizabeth Jocelin, The Mothers Legacie, To her unborne Childe (London: 1624).

Gervase Markham, The English house-vvife Containing the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleate woman (London: 1631).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: 1986).

Marsilio Ficino, 'Letter to Bernardo Bembo on the Convivium'.

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