ABSTRACT
Many of Philip Sidney's teachers, patronized by similarly learned ladies, had their own misgivings about female literacy, and school-mistress Stella appears part of a much-longer line of talented, manipulative women unable to see or to know or to love, despite their talents at reading or writing-and therefore unable to remember or reward the men who, author hear, have taught them. The woman who wrote in early modern England took her place, Margaret W. Ferguson tells author's, in a world already crowded with cheap texts, pervaded by print. The spread of literacy in the early modern period gave rise to innovations in poetry as well as in the novel, newspapers, chapbooks, and even crime reporting. James Phillips has persuasively mapped Buchanan's links to members of the Sidney circle which also included poets and rhetoricians like George Puttenham, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel to 1572, around the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
