Snook looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors considered are Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Dorothy Leigh, : Elizabeth Grymeston, Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Wroth. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes. .Snook explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices.