Schleiner 1994

Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Women's Household Circles as a Gendered Reading Formation: Whitney, Tyler and Lanyer (Chapter 1)

"In a circle where most of the hands were busy with embroidery, other needlework, or sewing, the waiting women (and sometimes serving men) would read on command to their aristocratic ladies and, in effect, to each other from the various kinds of material sureyed above." (3) -- quotes passage from the Urania

"Renaissance women's reading, of romance and other txts, was largely companionate reading aloud of several kinds of vernacular materials,m in some of which (especially the romances) the rigid gender concepts of their societies were at times suspended, even wildly so." (4)

Whitney's Nosgay enacts the loss of just such a circle

Schleiner draws on Bennett's concept of "reading formations"