ABSTRACT
In the middle decades of the sixteenth century prospects for women were not good. Education was available only to a small percentage of women, mainly in the upper classes, while theoretical discourse was generally negative in its attitude towards female literary activity. Though official opinion was divided over the amount and kind of learning that should be allowed to women of various classes, all agreed that women should not take up writing poems, plays, and romances, or, worse yet, publish them. Women of authorial ambition had to confine themselves to religious and domestic subjects. It is no mere coincidence that until the late 1560s no Englishwoman had published any significant volume of secular literature, at least according to existing records.
