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The Matter of Virtue Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Holly A. Crocker
u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a
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Introduction. Virtues That Matter
PART I. PRESCRIPTIVE FAILURES Chapter 1. The Fragility of Virtue, from Chaucer to Lydgate Chapter 2. The Matter of Virtue, from Henryson to Shakespeare
41 78
PART II. GRACE, ENACTED: ROMANCE AND MATERIAL VIRTUE Chapter 3. Virtue’s Grace: Custance and Other Daughters Chapter 4. Virtue’s Knowledge in Lodge and Spenser
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PART III. HOMELY VIRTUES Chapter 5. Shrewish Virtue, from Chaucer to Shakespeare
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Conclusion. Legends of Good Women
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271 307 339 000
Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
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Virtues That Matter
For use almost can change the stamp of nature. —Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.iv.151.8 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour —Chaucer, General Prologue, I.1–4
This book investigates premodern “vertue,” or the embodied excellence that enables women’s ethical action in vernacular English poetry between 1343 and 1623.1 To study this kind of virtue, the following chapters address skepticism regarding women’s capacities for ethical action, by which I mean the concrete ability to enact principles that organize an everyday way of life in premodern England. When Hamlet advises his mother to abstain from sex with Claudius, “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” he treats virtue as a power that Gertrude might exercise (III.iv.151).2 Yet, when he concludes his counsel with the remark, “For use almost can change the stamp of nature” (my emphasis), he suggests that Gertrude cannot fully enact this or any other virtue (III.iv.151.8). Instead, he imagines Gertrude’s virtue as a decorative covering, as “a frock or livery / That aptly is put on” (III.iv.151.4–5). Hamlet renders Gertrude’s virtue as superficial, and, by so doing, he forecloses her potential for ethical action. This devaluation of “virtues that matter”—as well as the association of these embodied powers with women—focuses the ensuing argument.
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Material Virtue Like Hamlet, we often refer to virtues as qualities that humans might perform, and for good reason. As this study shall acknowledge, the virtues are fundamentally engaged with what it means to be human. Yet, during the period studied in this book, virtues are also the defining properties of material things. In medieval and early modern England, a rich vernacular vocabulary reveals that premodern virtues are physical qualities. Like better-known areas of virtue ethics, this tradition can also be traced to Aristotle, who claims in The Physics, “the virtues are perfections of nature.”3 Prominent contemporary philosophers, including Philippa Foot, Julia Annas, and Rosalind Hursthouse, have argued for virtue’s “naturalism,” and the argument that follows in this book arises from their contention that our very species is morally situated—that the flourishing of the human qua human relies on its virtues.4 Unlike modern moral philosophers, who by and large focus their discussions on human excellences, I emphasize one aspect of premodern virtues that makes this naturalism possible: in premodern English, “vertues” were not exclusively human. Rather, the Middle English Dictionary defines “vertu” as “an inherent quality of a substance which gives it power.”5 Similarly, early modern English continued to refer to “vertues” as forces that imbued physical bodies with vitality and power.6 From heads to hands, and from rocks to plants, virtues suffused all material bodies in premodern England.7 “Vertues” were not simple or inert characteristics of a physical body. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorizes “vertu” as “life force: reproduction and vitality, affect and intellect and health, that which moves the flesh.”8 The Peterborough Lapidary characterizes “vertu” as proof of divine power: “no man schall be in / dowte 4at god ha3e set & put gret vertu in worde, stone, & erbe, by the wyche, if it so be 3at men be not of mysbeleue & Also owte of dedly synne, & many [wonder]full mervailes my9t be wrow9t 3orow her vertues.”9 As Mary Carruthers explains, virtue was a “principle of biological energy.”10 Elsewhere, she notes, “vertu” signified “that innate ‘power,’ ‘energy,’ or ‘desire’ of the soul animating the body, which (as with babies, puppies and plants) requires channeling, habituation and training.”11 The fourteenthcentury Dives and Pauper credits such energies to divine power: “God 9af gres, trees and herbis diuerse vertuys.”12 We might best understand each of these virtues as an affordance, or the capacity for a specific body to flourish in a particular environment. In the most fundamental sense, “vertues” improved the bodies they inhabited.
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To distinguish these embodied affordances from other, more traditional characterizations of premodern virtues, throughout this study I shall refer to “material virtues” as the inherent powers of physical bodies commonly referenced in English writings between 1343 and 1623. From the start, I should acknowledge that this practice is somewhat misleading, since, as I have briefly noted above, many contemporary moral theorists think of all virtues as similarly embodied. So what I am describing as “material virtue” would just be “true virtue” as it has more recently come to be understood by key thinkers.13 I maintain this distinction in order to investigate a discursive habit, which, on account of its everyday, pragmatic emergence in the particular historical milieu of premodern England, might remain unimportant to modern moral philosophers. Material virtue was not the domain of scholastic debate or pastoral teaching (though they did intersect, as I shall subsequently demonstrate). Instead, these inherent bodily powers were central to everyday practices that focused on the natural potencies of physical bodies. Premodern medicine relied on material virtues, for, as John Trevisa’s fourteenth-century English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum explains, “A good physician . . . nedi3 to knowe complexions, vertues, and worchinges of medicynable 3inges.”14 A command of material virtue also requires intimate local knowledge, including the season for the optimal cultivation of healing plants: “4ese herbys . . . mustyn ben gaderyd abowtyn mydsomyr, for 3anne 3ei ben of moste vertu.”15 This sense of virtue’s materiality continued in the early modern period. Herbals as well as medicinal tracts attend to the “vertues” of different plants and potions. The brief broadsheet, The admirable vertue, property and operation of the quintessence of rosemary flowers and the meanes to vse it for the sickesses and diseases herein mentioned (1615), equates “vertue” to a physical potency: “Moreouer, the force and vertue thereof extendeth it selfe euen to the sinewes shrunke and weakned.”16 In the more comprehensive A boke of the propreties of herbes called an herball (1552), the “vertues” of different plants are associated with distillation, which means that this type of power is thought of as the defining essence of each example included therein.17 Similarly, A right profitable booke for all diseases. Called The path-way to health (1587) describes its contents by referencing virtue as a type of potency, “wherein are to be found most excellent and approoued medicines, of great vertue.”18 The oft-printed An hospitall for the diseased (1610), by Thomas Cartwright, also proclaims the powers of its practical wisdom by advertising the “most excellent approoued medicines, as well emplaisters of speciall
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vertue . . . for the restitution and preseruation of bodily health.”19 Thinking of “vertue” as potency is central to medicine’s public standing, or so the English translation of the Latin Prepositas (1588) claims: “When men or women shall, hauing read this booke, see and vnderstand how that there are in hearbes, plants, gummes &c. such seuerall vertues . . . they will be the better perswaded to like and esteeme of phisicke then heretofore they haue done.”20 Virtues are not intangible, theoretical principles; rather, bodies have the potentialities their virtues enable. Treating virtue as the animating power of a physical body was not confined to the specialized vocabularies of science, husbandry, or medicine. Rather, as I shall argue in greater detail, it is also important to literary representations, which seek to bring bodies to life—on the page, on the stage, or both. The well-known opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from which I take my second epigraph, affirms the animating power of material virtues: “Of which vertu engendred is the flour” (I.4).21 As it does in other instances, virtue enlivens a physical body. Those animate bodies, in turn, have the power to affect those around them. Elsewhere in Hamlet, when Laertes observes Ophelia’s madness, he curses his eye’s natural powers: Tears seven times salt Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye! (IV.v.154) Ophelia’s madness affects Laertes in an intimate, immediate fashion. The suffering chronicled on the stage, in turn, is designed to move audiences in a tangible, demonstrable fashion. This influence is moral, insofar as it prompts Laertes—and insofar as it might provoke the play’s spectators—to live in a different way. The ability for bodies to make a moral difference to one another is both ethical and physical, for this kind of virtue materializes a world organized by specific values. Material virtue’s power is centrally connected to representational art, and its ethical standing. Indeed, although a physical body’s power to affect those around it is well known, this capacity has long founded critiques of the theater, as well as the literary arts more generally. Augustine, notably, dismisses the theater’s ability to evoke pity as a sham form of ethics, since, as he queries, “But how can the unreal sufferings of the stage possibly move pity.”22 He claims such spectacles do not evoke true emotions, but, rather, they are “merely fictitious,” providing a superficial enjoyment that makes no moral difference to the spectators who watch stage plays.23 While he allows that
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poetry provides greater “food for thought,” and recalls how Medea’s plight caused him to reflect on moral situations that he might not have otherwise contemplated, earlier in the Confessions, when Augustine recounts how he wept for Dido as a youthful reader of Virgil, he condemns his investment in her suicide as a distraction that prevented him from realizing the corrupt condition of his fallen soul.24 Despite his disapproval, Augustine confirms that poetic stories bring bodies to life, and shows how those bodies exert moral power over their immediate audiences. Yet, since the ethical demands such bodies issue are not concerned with Christian salvation, Augustine insists this power is wholly negative. The poets and playwrights I study in this book would also meet with Augustine’s censure, for they are primarily concerned with imagining how people might lead better lives in the everyday circumstances of premodern England. Even narratives that prioritize Christian salvation are firmly grounded in a material world that is riven with contingency and violence, but has the potential for improvement and reform. This quotidian materialism is due, I suggest, to the sense that human excellence must be set in relation to physical powers that worked, for good or ill, as part of a broader ethical ecology in the premodern world. In a darker affirmation of these physical powers, when Laertes conspires to poison Hamlet he tells Claudius the potion is beyond the powers of any medicine: And for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword. I bought an unction of a mountebank So mortal that, but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death That is but scratched withal . . . (IV.vii.112–18) Such references are not just figurative, but mine a vocabulary of practical, material virtue that was believed to suffuse all physical bodies. As the herbals’ and medicinals’ practical appeals to readers indicate, thinking of virtue as the animate force of a material body was commonplace in early modern England. One of the central contentions of this book is that material virtue makes an ethical difference in premodern England. If material bodies have inherent, animating powers, then those bodies typically and insistently associated with matter—namely, women—are not passive, inert, and therefore incapable of
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ethical action. Rather, bodies exert moral influence by means of their proximity and connection to us. Virtue might very well be transformed on account of its association with feminine matter. For that reason, I will ultimately argue that a rival idea of what it means to be human emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. This conception of humanity includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others. Before detailing the difference matter makes to virtue, in the following section I shall give an overview of virtue’s ethical history, or at least the Western tradition of virtue ethics that extends from antiquity to the early modern period. I do so principally to highlight the fact that women’s exclusion from virtue ethics is widely acknowledged by modern philosophers. I do so also to demonstrate how a shift in the foundation of virtue changes what it means to be human. This shift does not simply produce a new set of virtues; rather, many of the qualities that I highlight across this study intersect, and frequently overlap, with familiar schema. The difference, I contend, derives from thinking of the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent, whose cultural supremacy is guaranteed by prevailing social structures. Rather, if we consider physical bodies as women more frequently experienced them, as fragile and open, as well as connected and subjected to others, then our virtues will be, like the worlds we share, transformed.
Heroic Virtue Ethics and the Virtues in Medieval England As Alasdair MacIntyre acknowledges in After Virtue, the heroic society in which Aristotle devised his ethical framework was masculinist in its assumptions about who qualified for areté, or virtue.25 Because “Aristotle believed that women could not exercise the requisite control over their emotions,” they could not be citizens, and therefore they could not cultivate the virtues that accompanied public life in the polis.26 Stephen G. Salkever details how virtue in ancient Greek thought was inseparable from the ideal of virility, and the inveterate misogyny that structured republican politics.27 Even if, as Salkever contends, Plato and Aristotle contest the exclusively male orientation of ancient virtue, he explains that ancient writers who come after them do not vest “women and womanly activities [with] a greater dignity.”28 The classical formulation of virtus, with its emphasis on empowered, public action, rendered women’s excellences largely invisible.
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This heroic tradition dovetailed with medieval misogyny in a powerful fashion. Indeed, in the long history of virtue ethics, women’s association with matter denied them an equal ability to develop virtues derived from ancient thinkers.29 With his influential Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville establishes women’s explicit association with matter from the seventh century: “A mother is so named because something is made from her, for the term ‘mother’ (mater) is as if the word were ‘matter’ (materia).”30 Women’s materiality, which for medieval thinkers was associated with the flesh’s fallen-ness, meant they could never take up the active, autonomous practices of selfcultivation required for virtues derived from the heroic tradition.31 For centuries, misogynist writers insisted that women acted according to bodily desires. Physical appetites, not rational dictates, drive women’s actions. The thirteenthcentury writer Guido Delle Colonne references women’s materiality when he insists upon their insatiable desire: “But just as it is known that matter proceeds from form to form, so the dissolute desire of women proceeds from man to man.”32 This does not mean that medieval Christian thinkers adopted earlier understandings of heroic virtue wholesale. Augustine is famously uncomfortable with ancient virtues, because, “the pagan virtues are vices, if glittering ones,” as Jennifer A. Herdt explains.33 Even so, from the twelfth century onward, Christian thinkers including Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard adopted what came to be known, following Ambrose, as the “cardinal virtues”—Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude—which were derived from Plato and Aristotle, then Cicero and Seneca.34 These were joined with the “theological virtues”—Faith, Hope, and Charity—which were derived from 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”35 Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (I–II, q. 49–67) made the elaboration of such qualities central to medieval ethics. In his most fundamental statement, Aquinas says, “Virtue is not in a power of the soul, but in its essence.”36 Yet Aquinas’s insistence on the infused nature of virtue affirms that embodiment remained a crux of medieval virtue ethics. He articulated the widely accepted idea that theological virtues were infused into the human soul by divine power, but, in a move that was generally not followed by other philosophers, he also developed a parallel set of cardinal virtues, which he argued were equally infused (this means there were two sets of cardinal virtues in Aquinas’s formulation).37 In the same way that herbs, metals, and other physical bodies were imbued with powers attributed to the divine, the human soul was invested with qualities—the infused virtues—that humans did not cultivate.
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Visual art made the cardinal and theological virtues familiar, but medieval depictions also vested them with a gendered embodiment that this book investigates. Indeed, the theological and cardinal virtues were so frequently depicted as women that Barbara Newman argues they formed part of what she characterizes as a “goddess culture” in the High Middle Ages.38 Nevertheless, because grammatical gender renders ideals including justitia and prudentia feminine in Latin, and because allegory is often taken to use abstraction to personify such qualities, women’s connection to these virtues has frequently been dismissed.39 My project challenges the dominance of this account by working to uncover the ethical influence of the material body on representations of the theological and cardinal virtues. Yet I should also like to acknowledge that the cardinal and theological virtues were not the only virtues medievals recognized. Despite the prominence of the “seven virtues” tradition, Siegfried Wentzel rightly observes: “Were one to ask Bishop Bradwardine or Geoffrey Chaucer or a real-life Haukyn the Active Man . . . to name the chief virtues[, it] would probably have occasioned a puzzled ‘Which ones?’ For throughout the Middle Ages, systematic theology as well as popular catechetical instruction recognized two different series of chief virtues, depending on whether ‘virtue’ was considered as a principle of morally right action, or as a counterpart to or replacement for a specific vice.”40 In the latter formulation, derived from practices of pastoral care, virtues were remedial and arose in direct response to enumerated sins. The remedial virtues were responsive to actions that occurred in the world, so they were almost invariably imagined as powers that enabled and protected a Christian subject, body and soul. The remedial virtues, it is worth emphasizing, were multifaceted. Perhaps because the seven deadly sins could manifest themselves in myriad ways, Wentzel explains, “[the remedial virtues] never became as definitely fixed as did the corresponding list of deadly sins.”41 Two other sets of qualities derived from the Bible were also integrated into considerations of the remedial virtues: the beatitudes of Matthew 5:3–9 (or 11), along with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, from Isaiah 11:2–3. As the invaluable work of Morton Bloomfield, Richard Newhauser, and their respective collaborators demonstrates, there were over 6,500 virtues and vices treatises circulating in Europe between 1100 and 1500.42 In establishing the genre of the tractatus de vitiis et virtutibus, Newhauser underscores its hierarchical organization, but also emphasizes its existence “as an intrinsically open system. . . . It was either subsumed into larger, more expansive forms . . . or was extracted from more inclusive works.” For instance, although the Dominican
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William Peraldus elaborated two analytically organized summae, a tradition of vices and virtues proliferated outside the boundaries of this popular genre.43 Medieval virtue was multiple, and it was informed by scholastic and pastoral discourses at once. Important for my purposes, virtues were not rendered as abstract, idealized principles, but, as the thirteenth-century Summa Virtutum de remediis anime makes clear, they were described as remediis for morbis ipsius anime, or “remedies” for “the soul’s diseases.”44 Again, since medieval medical discourse classifies virtues as physical powers, we should not regard the use of medicinal vocabulary in a moral treatise as purely figurative. Virtues did things in the world, uniting body and soul through a system of everyday ethics in premodern England. This is because, as medievalists are keenly aware, 1215 saw the greatest pedagogical program ever instituted with the Church’s Fourth Lateran Council. Lateran IV’s canon, Omnis utriusque sexus, which required yearly confession for all Christians, meant that a basic set of spiritual information had to be taught. Answering this need, in 1281 Pecham’s syllabus mandated certain rudiments of religious literacy, including instruction in the virtues, for every layperson.45 Men as well as women were taught the virtues as part of a quotidian ecology of ethical information. These virtues overlapped and intersected: often the remedial, cardinal, and theological virtues are included in a single treatise, and the physical power that “vertu” carried in Middle English is fully utilized by writers seeking to explain the transformational capacities of these qualities. On account of virtue’s multiplicity, if one wanted to trace the ways in which the virtues informed characterizations of literary women in Middle English literature, then one would still have to decide which qualities to include in such a project. I have not followed this path, but instead, I investigate how literary authors, in seeking to represent women’s ethical action, end up inventing new virtues through their female characters. This is in part because the ethical standing of these so-called canonical virtues changes over the period featured in this study. Indeed, the transition between the medieval and early modern periods in literary history is an era in the history of philosophy when virtue ethics is said to have declined.46 Virtue becomes troubled, and is eventually eclipsed by other theorizations, following attacks upon and challenges to virtue by later writers including Luther, Machiavelli, and eventually Hume.47 Writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare were certainly aware of the traditions of virtue ethics that derived from heroic and stoic writings, as well as scholastic philosophy and pastoral care. They did not bind themselves
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to these traditions, I maintain, because the creative processes of character formation demand more ethical complexity than any schematized set of qualities can provide. For most if not all the literary authors featured here, the motivating concern is formal, not ethical. Writing more complex characters, to be clear, produces more complicated virtues. Nevertheless, I shall briefly elaborate the reasons why traditional virtue ethics cannot fully account for the material virtues this study uncovers. I do so to emphasize the feminist stakes of the ethical changes I trace across this book. In telling the story of the demise of virtue ethics, scholars usually point to a series of factors, which were established during the period studied here. These include the break between habit and virtue; the rise of rule-based ethics; virtue’s superficial, even deceptive status; and an emphasis on the individual as the principal moral agent.48 These factors, I suggest, arise from treating all virtues like women’s virtues. Indeed, “the misfortunes of virtue,” to adopt J. B. Schneewind’s important formulation, always restricted women’s ethical action.49 This is because these features—which are said to cause virtue’s demise in the history of philosophy—structured women’s moral lives throughout the history of Western virtue ethics.
Habit, Virtue, and Women’s Ethical Action Intellectual historians confirm that the period treated in this study witnessed one of the most significant revisions to ethics in the history of Western thought, what Katharine Breen terms a “crisis of habit.”50 As Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics maintained, “Moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit. . . . We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”51 Until the High Middle Ages, virtues were the products of habits. Yet, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, philosophers as different as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and John Buridan destabilized the connection between habit and virtue.52 Although good acts remained laudable, they said nothing about a person’s virtue. A person could perform good or bad acts, in other words, but doing so would not make that person good or bad. Instead, a person’s will determined a person’s virtue, but volition was completely, and troublingly, severed from action. As a consequence of this ethical revision, even when a person performed good deeds, those deeds might be dismissed as indices of moral character. Or such deeds might be counted as instances of duplicity in a larger performance of deception.
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Niccolò Machiavelli rather infamously embraced the impressive, theatrical, and spectacular manifestations of virtue that worried thinkers from Augustine to Luther. For Machiavelli, virtues are simply qualities that are praised by others. They do nothing to reveal the ruler’s inner moral state. And, though his virtù created new forms of political life for ambitious men, only an elite few were empowered by these theatrical capacities.53 For the most part, early moderns remained wary of virtue’s freighted history. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thinkers including Gabriel Biel and Martin Luther attempted to reconcile the rift between volition and action that the break between habit and virtue introduced.54 The focus shifted not to human action, but to God’s grace, a pactum made with humans that stressed God’s preeminence, as well as his mercy.55 Human action only counts as moral virtue because God agrees to see it as such; and as we see in the writings of anti-Pelagian writers from Augustine onward, there was a persistent insistence that no human deed could ever earn divine favor—human virtue is not based on merit, but on God’s free gift of grace. The crisis in habit, because it divides a person’s moral character from ethical action, puts virtue under suspicion. This crisis in habit is significant because, I want to emphasize, it merely extends to everyone a long-standing assumption about women’s moral lives. Aristotelian virtue ethics always reserved consuetudo (custom) for lesser persons, including women.56 Used to enforce social and gender divisions, this form of repeated action occupied “lower mental faculties and the habitus . . . higher ones.”57 Because women had no access to the rational capacities that made ethical habits transformative, their good deeds said nothing about their virtue. With his Enchiridion militis Christiani (1501; trans. William Tyndale, 1533) Desiderius Erasmus attempts to allay broader worries about virtue by codifying a form of imitatio Christi.58 While Erasmus does not claim that following Christ’s perfect model will habituate the soul, such imitation does formulate a code of conduct that affirms humans’ struggle to maintain faith in the face of their own frailties. The rise of rule-based ethics, therefore, was a direct response to the late medieval crisis in habit. Here too, though, ethics only expanded to men an assumption that had always been applied to women. Indeed, early thinkers had always insisted that women should practice codified moralized actions. From Christian antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, male advisers trained their female charges in virtuous rules of conduct. From Tertullian to Jerome, from Jacques de Vitry to Jean Gerson, and from Richard Rolle to Walter Hilton, medieval male writers affirm their relation to an ethical habitus by dispensing moral training to women.59 The
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rule-based morality that is often cited as a factor in the broader demise of virtue, then, was always applied to women in the early history of virtue ethics.
Rule-Based Ethics and Conduct Books for Women While women’s virtues had long been directed and supervised by men, the vernacular hybrid situated somewhere between spiritual guide, courtesy manual, and exemplary catalog, which modern scholars now roughly refer to as the “conduct book,” arose during the period studied in this project.60 Emerging in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and gaining cultural importance in the era following, the genre provides guidelines for those wishing to pattern their lives after elite modes of outward presentation.61 These books aim not just to provide ethical rules, but more importantly, I suggest, to dematerialize virtue, to make it into a set of principles that can never be fully embodied. Indeed, despite their announced practicality, conduct treatises for women present intangible virtues (not particular acts) of worthy figures for ethical imitation. As William Caxton explains in the preface to his 1484 translation of Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, “Emong al other this book is a special doctrine & techyng by which al yong gentyl wymen specially may lerne to bihaue them self virtuously.”62 His Book of the Knight of the Tower abstracts the narratives it contains, distilling particular virtues by separating them from the specific conditions of their emergence. Women are told to act like the Virgin Mary in their humility, even if they are not chosen to be “the moder of the sone of God / of whome the regne shold haue none ende.” The abstract ideal is then converted into the good behavior recommended for late medieval women: “Euery good woman oughte to humble her self toward god / toward her lord and toward the world.”63 Other narratives extol the virtues of strong, active women, yet the complex particulars that invest model heroines with moral power are downplayed as a means to shape everyday feminine conduct. And, while the totalized exemplarity of famous women allowed Christine de Pizan to recuperate a number of sullied heroines in her Cité des dames (ca. 1405, printed in English translation by Henry Pepwell in 1521), the exceptionalism of female worthies remained a distinctive feature of conduct books incorporating such idealized narratives. Christine features the deeds of strong pagan and Christian women, but as Justice explains in her introduction of holy saints’ lives, these narratives offer good women lessons for contemplation, not emulation. Though she is installed as the “heede of the kynde of
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women” to confirm a continuing history of feminine excellence, Mary, as Queen of Heaven, equally demonstrates “her hyghnesse towarde [regular women’s] lytelnesse.”64 Similarly, in what became the most popular conduct book in Tudor England, De institutione feminae Christianae (1523; trans. Richard Hyrde, ca. 1529, as A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instruction of a Christen woman), the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives instructs unmarried women to model their lives after the Virgin Mary: “Therfore by my counsaile the mayde shall folowe her [the Virgin Mary’s] example / nat with a faynyng & a dissembling mynde / but true and stedfaste / leste there be a worse vice lying vnder a colour of virtue / as hit were a poison vnder an holsome thynge / or a sore vnder a holle skynne.”65 In recommending the Virgin Mary as a model, Vives’s guide confirms that the virtues prescribed to women have little to do with their everyday lives. To this point, after Gaspar objects that the women described in book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtyer are “so farr from vs, that many lyes may be toulde,” Julian turns to contemporary examples. In a great irony, however, these women are treated with far more abstraction and generalization than narratives featuring famous women from the legendary or biblical past.66 Giovanni Boccaccio captures the anxiety that accompanies presentist exemplarity in his De claris mulieribus, for as he tells his eventual addressee, the Countess of Altavilla, he settled on her after he realized the renown of his initial choice, Joanna, queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, would outshine “the flickering flame of my little book so small and weak.”67 To say more, Boccaccio tacitly admits, would risk comparing this dazzling queen to other women, thereby reducing her unmatched virtues to everyday conduct. By and large, writers including Boccaccio and Castiglione do not treat contemporary notables as living, breathing actors. They are icons, whose agency is suspended by their prized exemplarity. Through Castiglione’s praise of Queen Isabella, the airy virtue of the court lady gains a living model: “There hath not bine in our time in the world a more cleere example of true goodnesse, stoutnes of courage, wisdome, religion, honestie, courteisie, liberalitie, to be breef, of all vertue, then Queene Isabel.”68 The disembodied, rule-based ethics formulated by premodern conduct books rendered virtue as a performance in ways that were problematic for women in particular. What had been a spontaneous, improvised reaction became a rote rehearsal of moralized norms that exercised no ethical hold over individual subjectivity. Worse, if a woman had no ethical investment in the goods she performed, her virtues might be feigned, or even used to
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deceive her immediate audiences. In a rather infamous example, Phillip Stubbes links his critique of the theater to virtue’s superficial status in The anatomie of abuses (1583). His condemnation does not just affirm that stage plays teach their audiences “to playe the vice”; rather, he argues that women’s cosmetics, like their ornate clothing, encourage women to feign virtue, to hide their corruption under the guise of excellence.69 If virtue becomes scripted, played according to moral rules that say nothing about ethical subjectivity, then the power of this form of ethics, this logic reveals, is wholly negative. Stubbes equally condemns men for ethical emptiness, but he does so by decrying their “effeminat condition, as we may seeme rather nice dames and yonge gyrles, than puissante ag[e]nts, or manlie men, as our Forefathers haue bene.”70 Once again, an ethical practice associated with women degrades virtue more generally. Even if we dismiss Stubbes’s attack as inflammatory, his treatise nevertheless shows how the rise of rulebased ethics leads directly to an association between virtue’s duplicity and women’s corruption.
Women’s Corruption and Virtue’s Duplicity In establishing the suspicion of virtue in early modern thought, Michael Moriarty traces a much longer tradition from classical antiquity through the Christian Middle Ages. He does so because early modern writers use a longer tradition to “put forward . . . redescriptions of apparently virtuous behavior as fundamentally vicious.”71 My project begins with the late Middle Ages because by the second half of the fourteenth century, it was clear that virtue’s duplicity was connected to women’s corruption. This link was present even when it was not immediately apparent. For instance, the fifteenth-century N-Town Passion Play I blames virtue’s flimsiness on Satan’s abuse of language, since he renames the seven deadly sins so that each takes on the guise of virtue: Ye shal kalle Pride ‘[H]oneste,’ and ‘Naterall Kend’ Lechory, And Covetise ‘Wisdam there tresure is present’; Wreth ‘Manhod,’ & Envye callyd ‘Chastement’ (Seyse nere session, lete perjery be chef ); Glotynye, ‘Rest’ (let abstinawnce beyn absent); And he that wole exorte the[e] to vertu, put hem to repreff.72
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The practice of paradiastole, that is, redescribing the virtues of one’s opponent as vices, was a mainstay of classical rhetoric, but the medieval convention of masking vices as virtues derives from the sermon tradition.73 And, as John F. Plummer points out, Satan’s deliberate confusion of vice with virtue has an explicitly gendered history in medieval sermons: “The image of Satan renaming sins to make them more palatable for mankind is a commonplace in the fifteenth-century English sermon, and seems to have had its origin in the popular stories of the devil’s marrying of his seven daughters, the deadly sins, to humanity; in order to make these ugly daughters marriageable, Satan gave them new names.”74 The fifteenth-century sermon from the Gloucester Cathedral Library describes the reoutfitting process for the devil’s eldest daughter, Pride: “And for by cawse that the fende wolde marry hyr to the pepull of the worlde, he hathe sett on hyr a gay name and now sche is callyd Honestye.”75 Satan’s redescription of vices as virtues in the N-Town Passion Play I, just mentioned, comes after a passage that details women’s capacities for deception: A beggerys dowtere to make gret purviauns To cownterfete a jentylwoman, disgeysyd as she can.76 Here as elsewhere, virtue’s corruption follows from a woman’s duplicity—her ability to feign worthiness. And, while political theorists have attended to the ways that Machiavelli adopted paradiastole from the ancients, an association between women’s corruption and virtue’s duplicity persisted in early modern England.77 Barnabe Rich is most engaging in decrying those: “Idle fol兩lies of this madding age, that Time hath now hatched vp, and are long sithens become so flush and fligge, that they are flowne into the world, and they haue there nestled them兩selues amongst the Chickins of vertue, so disguising them兩selues vnder the habit of vertue, that they are reputed to be of vertues Broode, and are not easily to be discerned by their plumes, or outward shew.”78 Vice can look like virtue, Rich warns in My Ladies Looking Glasse (1616), which purports to distinguish “A Good Woman from a Bad, and the true resemblance of vice, masked vnder the vizard of vertue” (t.p.). Similarly, Nicholas Breton’s Will of Wit (1597) accepts virtue’s potential for duplicity: For vertue many waies, Is made a vice, yet Vertue hath her praise.79
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This is despite Breton’s insistence in The Soules Immortall Crowne (1605) that “Vertue is Wisedome’s light,” a font of glorious truth: No, where she loues, it tends but with her life, And whe⬃ she speakes, her Iudgements shewes her wit: And, when she writes, her Concords know no strife, What choise conceite shall chiefe in honour sit: But speake, and write, and looke, and like, and loue, All haue their blessings in the heauens aboue.80 Virtue’s potential for perversion, despite her truth, can be traced to skepticism regarding appearances in early modern culture. Things that are false can appear to be true; that which is corrupt can take on the guise of the unsullied. Even writers who personify virtue, who depict virtue as a woman whose truth is disregarded, even denigrated, by a superficial culture infatuated with debased vices, articulate the fears that many men had about women’s capacity for virtue during this period. In A dyall for dainty darlings (1584), William Averell insists that virtue remains true by retaining its inward character. For Averell, “vertue [is] a habite of the hidden minde, [which] appeared not in her externall déedes.”81 Phillip Stubbes seeks to memorialize his young wife’s death after childbirth in A Christal Glas for christian women (1592), but the virtue he ascribes to Katherine Stubbes in his popular pamphlet hides her from the world: “& so solitary was she giuen, that she would verie seldome or neuer, & that not with兩out great constraint (& than not neither, except her husband were in companie) goe abroad with any, either to banquet or feast, to gossip or make merry (as they tearme it) in so much that she hath beene noted to do it in contempt and disdaine of others.”82 Thomas Salter’s Mirrhor of Modestie (1579) goes further, suggesting that the mirror his treatise presents is “of an other maner of matter, and is of muche more worthe then any Christall Mirrhor; for as the one tea兩cheth how to attire the outward bodie, so the other guideth to garnishe the inward mynde, and maketh it meete for vertue.”83 To conclude his treatise, Salter appends “A pretie pithie Dialogue betwene Mercurie, & Ver兩tue,” which presents virtue as neglected and disrespected by a corrupt, superficial society.84 For women in the world, then, virtue is hidden by a protective interiority, and makes no outward appearance in deed, or even gesture. When virtue does appear in public, society treats
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virtue as degraded, unwanted, and suspicious. As these texts collectively demonstrate, early modern English culture confined women’s virtue to an inward domain where it had no shaping impact on the world. Outward acts, furthermore, were treated as disguised and misleading vices. Vives points to his own mother-in-law as a perfect model of forbearance, but the patience Clara Cervent displays while nursing her grotesquely ill husband makes her deeds suspect. Readers are clearly meant to marvel at her willing abasement, “And euery day [she] dyd salue and bynde his sore and stynkyng legges and rounnyng of matter.” But what of the claim, offered without irony, that she preserved him “with that dolefull body, more like unto a graue, than a body . . . in the whiche space she had two chyldren by hym”?85 Cervent’s miraculous conception reveals a rift between feminine excellence and female embodiment in premodern virtue ethics.
Virtue’s Misfortunes and Hamlet’s Advice to Gertrude The familiar story of virtue and its misfortunes confines women’s ethical action in premodern England. This does not mean, of course, that the literary authors featured in this study were immune to this powerful tradition. On the contrary, when he advises his mother, Hamlet assumes three of the four factors that led to virtue’s demise in conventional accounts of virtue ethics: Assume a virtue if you have it not That monster custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devilish, is angel yet in this: That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy— For use almost can change the stamp of nature. (III.iv.151.1–9) For Gertrude, there is a break between habit and virtue, her behavior must be rule-governed, and her good deeds remain suspect due to her inveterate bodily corruption, or what Hamlet refers to as “the stamp of nature.”86 To resist the benighted materiality of the female body, Hamlet urges Gertrude to follow custom. This is despite the fact that Hamlet earlier imagines this mindless form of behavioral repetition in wholly negative terms,
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wondering if the rote enactment of cultural expectations has deadened his mother’s ability to distinguish right from wrong: And let me wring your heart; for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff, If damnèd custom have not brassed it so That it is proof and bulwark against sense. (III.iv.34–37) When he implores Gertrude to avoid Claudius’s bed, however, Hamlet emphasizes unthinking custom’s positive potential. In the same way that it can corrupt those disposed to good, mindless actions can improve those who might pursue vice. Gertrude’s vicious deed is sex with Claudius. If she abstains for one night, Hamlet insists, resistance will become increasingly easy for her. This is notwithstanding Gertrude’s desire for Claudius. Importantly, Hamlet does not address Gertrude’s desire except as it might be reupholstered by alternative practice. Deep down she might continue to love or want Claudius; but through virtuous action, Gertrude’s unvirtuous desire will be masked, even if it is never completely remade. When he sidesteps Gertrude’s volitional investment, Hamlet resists any suggestion that Gertrude might cultivate virtue as a “habite of the hidden minde,” in Averill’s words, above. Unlike earlier advisers, moreover, Hamlet is not concerned with Gertrude’s soul. Her outward practice, not her inward disposition, interests the young prince. Indeed, since he treats virtue as an external covering—as a pleasing outfit that might be donned—he puts faith only in its extrinsic, imposed dimension. Like Claudius, Hamlet sees a distinct break between “th’exterior [and] the inward man” (II.ii.6). Modern scholars have found ample room in this formulation for the emergence of modern interiority, or “that within which passeth show” (I.ii.85).87 We might therefore assume an expansive terrain of complex interiority would also be extended to women, since, as Kathryn Schwarz sagely observes, “Good women have to know what they are doing.”88 To be sure, Gertrude must will her own alteration to enact Hamlet’s recommendations. Yet, according to the familiar story of virtue ethics, women’s investment in their own ethical action is rendered moot. Once Gertrude accedes to her son’s directives, her volition can be voided by the repetition custom dictates. In fact, the lingering specter of Gertrude’s bodily corruption necessitates continued masculine supervision, for Gertrude cannot be trusted to direct her own moral behaviors to ends that count as
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ethical excellences by premodern society. She will enact only vice, even if she means to perform virtue. In seeking to forestall what he characterizes as Gertrude’s lust, Hamlet justifies his continued control over his mother’s behavior by suggesting that she is a creature of appetite. He reasons with her, in other words, even though he believes bodily desires govern her moral choices. The Ghost tells Hamlet that Gertrude’s virtue is just a cover for deeper duplicity, since “virtue . . . never will be moved, / Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven” (I.v.53–54). She is for him “my most seeming-virtuous queen” (I.v.46), or an actor who dons virtue to pursue vice. Like his father, Hamlet treats Gertrude’s desire as corporeal, seated in the physical appetites of the lustful (female) body. He refuses to believe her virtue is anything but a superficial ruse, a shallow performance that says nothing about Gertrude’s inner character. When women are tutored in virtue, guided by men through the motions that culturally count as goodness, they lose ethical autonomy. If women enact virtues by themselves, however, they gain startling—sometimes threatening—new powers. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century visual art from German nunneries, Christ is frequently depicted as crucified by feminized virtues.89 Although this image is meant to enact the allegory of the Song of Songs, the nightmare of women’s ethical action is realized through the virtues’ feminization.
A Different Perspective: Virtue’s Organicism This project investigates alternatives to this nightmarish vision of women’s virtues. In part, this is because, as Kathryn Schwarz observes, “a curious pattern” emerges in early modern literatures: “Women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions.”90 Likewise, Glenn Burger analyzes the “performative reading” medieval conduct literature elicits as “a set of practices developed individually by means of an internalized, textually driven process of understanding.”91 As these scholars detail, women often find room to develop ethical subjectivity through even the most prescriptive, rule-based guides, in situations where women’s virtue is subject to skepticism, if not outright dismissal. I maintain that this happens when the grounds of virtue become material. Women overturn the prescriptive ideals that dematerialize their virtues when the physical body is reimagined as a positive resource for ethical action. In recognizing the material body’s positive ethical
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potential, medieval and early modern writers resist virtue’s reduction to a superficial guise that might be deployed to mask vice. This struggle need not be associated with gender at all. In fact, many premodern texts avoid gender in imagining “vertues” that matter. What David Aers identifies as William Langland’s “organicism” in his late fourteenth-century masterpiece, Piers Plowman, is just this sort of attempt to resist virtue’s subversion.92 To be sure, Langland taps the tradition of feminized virtue at the end of Passus V in the B-Text; moreover, the debate between the four daughters of God in the B-Text’s Passus XVIII is yet another variation on this artistic motif. Late in the poem, however, Langland turns away from feminized virtue: mining a naturalistic register, Langland figures the cardinal virtues— temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude—as grains that Grace sows in the soul of mankind. In his effort to prevent virtue from becoming a flimsy covering for corruption, Langland invokes virtue’s materiality, or its ability to suffuse all physical bodies. In this Langland is not alone, nor is his organicism a complete departure from what I have been calling traditional virtue ethics. Indeed, earlier Latin writers also use organic topoi to explain virtue’s relation to divine agency and human autonomy. Hildegard of Bingen’s twelfth-century Ordo Virtutum, which features sixteen feminized virtues singing to Anima, also imagines the virtues as the boughs of a tree rooted by the Patriarchs and Prophets (“Nos sumus radices et vos rami, / fructus viventis oculi”).93 The “tree of virtues” motif is part of a larger mnemonic structure that system-building philosophers employed to communicate the complexity of medieval virtue ethics.94 We often think of medieval virtues as elaborately hierarchized, and it is true that medieval thinkers frequently used the tree of virtues to differentiate moral properties root and branch. Nevertheless, such depictions also unify virtue as a flourishing and dynamic system of connected excellences. These qualities grow from one another, and human excellence stems from divine power. In a thirteenth-century copy of the Speculum Virginum, the interconnection of virtues visually insists that moral goods are generative, material, and living (see fig. 1). This motif does not fade away: in Additional MS 37049—the fifteenthcentury Carthusian miscellany described as a “spiritual encyclopedia”—an English devotional poem “The Desert of Religion” uses the “tree of virtues” to show how goodness implanted by the divine grows within the human soul (see fig. 2).95 As the early seventeenth-century Two guides to a good life (1604) insists, “The tree of vertue muste florish in euerie bra⬃ch, In which sence it
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will be as a shelter in time of neces兩sitie, and a hauen of peace to the con兩 science.”96 Poetic organicism enables vernacular writers to investigate the ethical implications of community norms in material terms. In Piers Plowman, the corruption Langland imagines in the poem’s grim conclusion is social. Pride preys on the “Cristen peple,” but in casting doubt on virtue’s veracity, “Wi3 swiche colours and queyntise come3 Pride y-armed,” Langland’s poem levies a broader critique against degraded cultural practices.97 The erosion of virtue arises from social habits that make moral excellence less substantial. Through abuse, virtue becomes intangible. Ideally, though, Langland suggests that virtue has a palpable impact on the world. As Will’s search for Dowel affirms, virtues are not ethereal principles, but lived practices that rely on material embodiment. The invocation of virtue’s materialism in everyday contexts was not unique to Langland; indeed, as this book shall detail, many medieval and early modern writers sought to make virtue more substantial. Moreover, Rosemond Tuve’s still-powerful analysis demonstrates the importance of medieval representations of vices and virtues to early modern writers. She not only charts the numerous, overlapping classical and medieval traditions that ground ideas about the virtues for Spenser, Lodge, and their contemporaries. She also emphasizes the dynamic, responsive, and generative fluorescence of the virtues as gifts from the Holy Ghost—invested by divine Grace—as a response to the seven vices. In Tuve’s words, in imagining the virtues, “accommodation rather than rivalry or substitution” marked authors’ representations.98 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, treatises on the virtues and vices continued to be translated and reprinted. And, although there were formal treatises that delineated the virtues in a schematic, hierarchical fashion, virtues nevertheless remain sites for creativity and combination. Thomas Paynell’s English rendering of The ensamples of vertue and vice, gathered oute of holye scripture, originally compiled by the thirteenth-century Dominican and Patriarch of Jerusalem, Nicolas Hanape (1561), uses biblical paraphrase to guide readers through a series of exhortations to virtue and condemnations of vice. With chapters including “Of the wisedome of wemen,” as well as “Of the pietye & compassion of wemen,” Paynell’s translation imagines virtues as actions that actual women perform in their everyday environs.99 Similarly, John Larke’s 1565 translation, The booke of wysdome, otherwyse called, The flower of vertue, uses classical and Christian examples to demonstrate “howe a Man (or a Woman) oughte to be adorned with vertues.”100 Medieval representations shaped sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of virtue and vice, but, and perhaps more importantly, renderings of
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virtue that originate after 1500 frequently share with their earlier counterparts a conception of virtues as material, living, and, in many contexts, feminine.101 This is not to say that writers from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have the same religious outlook on virtue as writers from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On the contrary, Thomas Becon’s daily guide, The gouernaunce of vertue (1566), cautions readers, “against the plucking away of thy trust and confi兩dence from Christ and his merites, to put in the merites of other creatures, or in thine own good workes, or in the intercession of Saintes, or in sacrifice of the popish Masse.”102 The argument of this book acknowledges differences between medieval and early modern periods, but it also examines continuities that have hitherto been ignored. Above all, there is a concerted effort to make virtues matter in people’s everyday lives. As a consequence, pastoral literatures often use organic figures of spiritual cultivation: The Book of Vices and Virtues, a fourteenth-century translation of the popular Somme le Roi, returns man and woman to a prelapsarian garden of spiritual growth where God grafts virtues into the individual soul.103 The virtues God fosters, importantly, are imagined as making a substantial difference in the shared lives of fellow Christians. The arbour of vertue (1576), like The vineyard of virtue (1579), conceptualizes virtues as both natural and intertwined.104
The Positive Case: Feminine Virtue As these examples demonstrate, premodern virtues are often represented as material. Viewing virtues this way, I propose, remakes what counts as ethical excellence, and also transforms what it means to be human. Imagining virtues as collective, generative, material, and open does not correspond with a notion of human subjectivity as individual, governing, intellectual, and closed. In fact, the fourth major criterion said to have caused virtue’s demise—the prominence of the individual moral agent—stands in direct opposition to the conception of ethical excellence I investigate in the following chapters. Rather, and importantly for the argument that unfolds across this book, the model of human subjectivity that corresponds to this alternative formulation of virtue is historically associated with women: rooted in the body, connected to others, and involved in fostering, not governing, intimate relations that cross all boundaries of individual selfhood. Unsurprisingly, therefore, women are often central to figuring material virtues. The Digby Mary Magdalene, a fifteenth-century saint’s drama, cannily
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renders virtues as organic properties, which grow from the seeds Christ implants in the human soul.105 Yet this organicism is overlaid by gendered allegory, which figures human submission through Mary’s obedient response to Christ. Mary is embarrassed when she realizes her error, “I wentt ye had bin Simond the gardener,” but Christ reassures her: So I am, forsothe, Mary; Mannys hartt is my gardin here. Therin I sow sedys of vertu all the yere; The fowle wedes and vicys, I reynd up by the rote. Whan that gardin is watteryd with teris clere, Than spring vertuus, and smelle full sote.106 Mary’s reliance on Christ’s power is a model for women and men alike, but her pliancy draws on the premodern belief in feminine passivity. Accounts of ethics that rely on individual agency cast passivity in a wholly negative light. In yet another way, then, women are shut out of the conventional history of virtue ethics. Women’s passivity was commonly assumed by foundational thinkers in this tradition, as Joan Cadden explains: “From Aristotle came the hierarchical formulation which represented females as consistently inferior and specifically cool, weak, and passive.”107 The Generation of Animals contains key passages linking women’s passivity to their materiality, and thereby to their social inferiority: “By now it is plain that the contribution which the female makes to generation is the matter used therein. . . . The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement’, the female provides the body, in other words, the material.”108 Female materiality made women passive, and this lack of agency distanced them from powers of governance—over self or others. Because women are limited by their materiality, furthermore, they are ideally submissive to the active powers of masculine governance.109 In Book to a Mother, a fourteenth-century epistolary guide from clerical son to widowed mother, the speaker advises, “Also wommen, be 9e soget to men” since women are unable to govern themselves.110 Thomas Aquinas echoes Aristotle when he asserts women’s lower status: “But the father, as the active partner, is a principle in a higher way than the mother, who supplies the passive or material element.”111 Misogyny has long relied on just this kind of sexist appropriation of matter as inert, pliant, and passive. Yet, as Caroline Walker Bynum argues, “matter was not mere dead stuff”: “Because it was understood to be that
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which changes, matter was threat and opportunity: a threat because it decays, an opportunity because change is manifestation of the new. Matter is the place where what was seems to depart, yet it is also the place where life can be born. Astonishing things erupt in it. It can renew itself . . . generate new matter . . . or return from decay to life in resurrection miracles.”112 Matter is where virtue might be realized, since matter is where powers of the divine take physical shape. Consequently, as this book demonstrates, it is through matter’s virtues that women’s actions might gain moral authority. In this book, I spend a lot of time detailing how women’s actions—particularly those that might be taken to be passive in traditional accounts—assume ethical heft in different literary representations. Across the following chapters, however, I aim to show that material virtue is not confined to women. Most men experience subjectivity in ways similar to those I will trace as feminine: as vulnerable, as subject to others, as shaped by sources outside the self. Furthermore, there is an important tradition of putting women at the center of human experience, both in spiritual and secular writings. When women are taken as examples for spiritual relations with the divine, their pliancy is meant to be a positive attribute that should be instructive to all. A commemoration of the life and death of the right worshipfull and vertuous ladie; Dame Helen Branch (late wife to the right worshipfull Sir Iohn Branch Knight, sometime Lord Maior of the famous Citie of London) by whose godly and virtuous life, virgines are insinuated to virtue, wiues to faithfulnes, and widdowes to Christian contemplation, and charitable deuotion, &c. (1594) praises its subject for her submission to God: “A godly life she alwayes led, vprightly she did deale.”113 In other words, because virtue is frequently thought to be bestowed by a higher power, the receptivity of pious women becomes an ethical model for emulation. In such accounts passivity is not inertia, nor is it weakness; rather, it is a performance of compliance, of selflessness, and of receptivity that reorganizes human subjectivity. The fourteenth-century religious writers Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton certainly understood the significance of feminized receptivity, selflessness, and compliance for all spiritual subjects.114 This is because virtues are endowed with agency and substance even in early renderings. To return briefly to Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum: when Anima turns to follow Diabolus, the sixteen feminized virtues not only sing to her, but they also take up her cause. According to Peter Dronke, the “Virtues [are] conceived not only as qualities within the human being but as creative forces in the cosmos, forces that fight on Anima’s behalf.”115
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The virtues’ martial might recalls their earliest allegorical dramatization, when Prudentius stages a pitched battle between feminized virtues and vices in his late fourth-century Psychomachia.116 This contest is firmly located within the human psyche, but the qualities themselves maintain a nonhuman autonomy. Because such representations derive from allegory, scholars frequently assume these powers have little to do with women, their bodies, or their experiences. Yet, as Helen Cooper demonstrates, in personification allegory “a feminine personification invited development in female terms.”117 She further notes a difference in conceiving a certain quality—including a virtue—as having “an existence independent of the person that feels it; it is a state larger than one’s self but in which one can participate.”118 Imagining feminized virtues as having an independent existence entails picturing women—many of whom look like contemporary elites—embodying different virtues, the powers of which reach beyond the conventionally drawn boundaries of the individual self. Medieval virtues could be understood as material and female, collective and positive; to dismiss the tradition of feminized virtues as purely figurative is to deliberately ignore the tangible influence these ideas exercised over premodern understandings of women’s ethical action. The refusal to credit a connection between figures of feminized virtue and women’s ethical action discounts instances when actual women are praised for virtue. Anthony Gibson’s A Woman’s Worth (1599), like many treatises extolling women’s virtues, is dedicated to a powerful patroness, the Countess of Southampton, along with named and unnamed ladies-in-waiting to Elizabeth I.119 And, even if we are tempted to dismiss the numerous dedications that declare women’s virtues in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as opportunistic flattery on the part of favor-seeking authors, it is difficult to set aside the amazing collection devoted to the memory of Richard Crashaw’s stepmother, Elizabeth Skinner Crashaw, after her untimely death in childbirth. The honour of virtue (1620), or a collation that includes funeral sermon, elegies, and epitaphs, insists that its subject combined “Wisdome with Vertue” and that “Beauty and vertue together dwelt in her faire Brest.”120 The ability for material virtues to affect the inner and outer lives of subjects bespeaks their positive connective powers. Material virtues link subjects to the world and to one another, as Thomas Dekker’s Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus (1600) confirms. In this play, the goddess Virtue seeks a land with a climate hospitable enough to replenish her withered tree. Because virtues are powers that thrive on connection, virtue’s isolation dooms her to rootless wandering.121
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Introduction
About a century earlier, as Liza Blake directs us to notice, Henry Medwall’s Nature (c. 1495) debates whether “virtues are understood . . . as abstract and immaterial moral qualities, . . . [or] as properties of nature.”122 When virtues are part of the natural world, they circulate between bodies, growing and multiplying as a network of material excellences. When virtues are imagined as material, they are not superficial, nor can they be worn like a pleasing, and sometimes deceptive, garment. They grow organically, connecting body and soul, human and divine, subject and community. They remake more than the gender division that structures traditional virtue ethics. Because they render the body as a positive ethical endowment, material virtues transform what it means to be human. They critique traditional virtue ethics for making the individual the ideal moral subject. They also provide a new foundation for ethics, one based on openness and connection, not governance and domination. To put women at the center of human experience is to prioritize another model of the human; it is to develop a counter-ethics that critiques the individual, usually masculine, agent whose actions express ethical qualities.
Individualist Virtue: Ophelia’s Songs In many of the literary representations traced in this book, material virtue issues an important critique of individualist ethics. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it becomes troublingly apparent, women are relegated to supporting roles in masculine shows of individual virtue. Shortly after Hamlet appears impaired, Gertrude tells Ophelia, so shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honours. (III.i.42–44) Ophelia’s recognized excellence is meant to return Hamlet to his former habits, but instead, his public dissolution predicates her death. With her breakdown, Ophelia shows the terrible consequences of the cultural logic that insists women’s virtue depends upon and complements that of men. The Flower of friendshippe (1571) makes women’s supplementary status explicit: “hir husba⬃d[’s] . . . face must be hir dayly looking glasse, wherein she ought to be alwais prying, to sée when he is mery, when sad, when content, and
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