Model of female friendship in early modern and modern age

My paper is divided into three parts. The first part revolves around an article by Penelope Anderson and wonders about the absence of female friends in friendship studies on early modern and modern age. The second part sheds light on what I call the female side of Montaigne’s De l’amitié through an in-depth examination of the section on friendship in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women. The third and final part takes cue from John Najemy’s and Amyrose McCue Gill’s studies on conjugal friendship in Leon Battista Alberti’s de amicitia and thus suggests that one should go in search of good wives to find female friends, not only in the fifteenth century.