Yep - Oxford History of English Literature. He wrote the volume on "the sixteenth century, excluding drama". I read it because Lewis wrote it, it was interesting (he has a way with words - who else could make religious pamphlets from the 1540s interesting? or at least his comments about them are interesting). Do not recall a whole lot of literary ladies (nothing compared to the 17th c. even . . . ) but they were represented. And reading More and Ascham and others of that era, you can see that they are talking about educating the daughters of the gentry and the rising middle class, not perhaps as a matter of course but as something that was done frequently.
The feminists have not done us any favors. They have ignored the educated women of 16th and 17th c. England, probably in the interest of promoting their theory that the Industrial Revolution brought forth "heroic" anti-patriarchal wymyn. They seem to think that no females were writing before Austen and Bronte.