Queering the History of Reading: Women Readers, Female Homoeroticism and Trans Possibility in Renaissance Romance

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By exploring representations of homoerotic and genderfluid possibility in texts by Sidney,Spenser, Wroth, and Cavendish, and identifying their early readership as influenced byRenaissance rhetorical practices, I argue for the ability of early modern women to be 'queerreaders' of early modern romance. I combine Renaissance rhetoric, which often includedspeaking through multiple gendered identities, with each text's constructed reader(s) and thematerial traces of female readers to offer a new methodology to early modern queer studiesand the history of reading.