The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England.

This important new study of the centrality of fictions of women to the rhetoric of humanism is impressive in its breadth of scholarship and stimulating in its challenging of received ideas. As its title implies, this book seeks to enhance our awareness of the depiction of women as a key to the implicit goals of the literary culture of humanism. Central to its argument is the idea that representations of the sexual transgressions of women were expressive not only of an eternal truth but also of a 'historically specific transition in socio-economic relations'. In the period, it is argued, women became potent signs of credit between men in the traditional areas of alliance formation …