Katherine Stubbes

Besides details about her parents, marriage, and conduct as a daughter and wife, the work also records the confessions of faith (supposedly verbatim) that she spoke before her death.

[6] Mr. Stubbs had "recently gained some notoriety by rebuking the world, and England in particular, for its backsliding with his tract The Anatomy of Abuses," but, because of her father’s death, she most likely had to be married off quickly for financial reasons.

"[11] As a deeply religious and extremely pious woman, much of Katherine's short life revolved around religion and Scripture.

After she had seemed to have a full recovery, she fell seriously ill with ague and languished in her bed, not sleeping for more than an hour at a time, though she had "perfect understanding, sense, and memory to the last breath.

[21] The biography praises Katherine quite highly: according to Mr. Stubbs, she was a very good, pious woman, and should be held up as a mirror of womanhood, hence the title of the work.

[24] After that, in “A most wonderfull conflict betwixt Sathan and her soule, and of her valiant conquest in the same, by the power of Christ,” she argues with Satan, who seemed to have appeared before her, and she eventually vanquishes him.

In her dying moments, she sings a psalm and asks her husband not to mourn her—then, “her breath stayed, and so moving neither hand nor foot she slept sweetly in the Lord.”[25] Although A Chrystall Glasse is a biography, numerous scholars and critics agree that it is not one that is completely unbiased and without motives.

[29][30] From an economic perspective, in the age of emergent capitalism, Katherine was also held up by her husband as a contrast and critique of the “bourgeois women consumers who offered her a world of goods—fine food, prideful apparel, and plays.”[31] Primarily, godly and pious women were meant to emulate Katherine’s strong religious faith and piety, which included the practice of “obsessive Bible reading.”[32] As a public speaker, she also places herself as an active member of the religious community.

[34] Stubbes’ speeches have been compared with Rachel Speght’s Mortalities Memorandum, with A Dream Prefixed (1621) and Alice Sutcliffe’s Meditations of Man’s Mortalitie (1634), since all three give rise to discussion about the question of the woman’s voice.

[35] When reading A Chrystall Glasse from a feminist perspective, one way the text can be seen is as evidence of Katherine’s “internalisation of the ideology of womanhood.”[36] As the ‘mirror of womanhood’ from an early modern European perspective, the text suggests that Katherine seemed to live vicariously through her husband: everything he felt, she felt as well.

For example, she is described as an “active and intelligent disputer against Catholics and atheists: ‘she would not yield a jot, nor give place to them at all, but would most mightily justify the truth of God against their blasphemous untruths, and convince them.’”[38] Despite this, Mr. Stubbs goes on to say that Katherine was the very model of the ‘silent woman,’ and would engage in “theological questioning only in private at home…‘she obeyed the commandment of the apostle who biddeth women be silent, and to learn of their husbands at home.’”[39] She also showed assertion in other ways: on her deathbed, she specifically expresses to her husband her wishes for her child’s education.

[40] The apparent disparity between the descriptions and rhetoric of Katherine Stubbs causes A Chrystall Glasse to become a text where “women can find not just a model of the ideal woman, but also ways of, and places for, articulating specific roles and powers which are not explicitly part of the dominant ideology.”[41] Even so, others argue that the text can be seen not simply a struggle against “restrictive masculine discourses…but as an affirmation of more numerous…discursive options for early modern women.”[42] In any case, considering that A Chrystall Glasse had 34 editions from 1591 to 1700,[43] it must have resonated strongly with society throughout the early modern period.

Brayman Hackel, Heidi & Kelly, Catherine E. Reading Women: literacy, authorship, and culture in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800.

Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) (Material Texts).