Spenser's Faerie queene and the reading of women

Publisher's description: Linking The Faerie Queene with early modern conduct manuals, romances, dedicatory epistles, and devotional literature, McManus examines the poem's depiction of women's interpretive strategies and argues that female readers were expected to exercise considerable autonomy as they endorsed, adapted, or resisted the texts that sought to fashion them as "chaste, silent and obedient."