Description:The Usurer's Daughter examines masculinity in the 16th century, the fictional representation of women and the uses of rhetoric. Traditional and poststructural approaches to literature from this period have failed to appreciate the cultural impact of humanism, which essentially served to textualize masculine friendship. Drawing upon both new historicism and feminist theory, Lorna Hutson argues that this may account for the pervasive articulation and re-presentation of women in Shakespeare and 16th century fiction.