In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. Drawing on a range of materials, from prose to theatre, theological controversy to legal trials, and court ceremonies - including royal birthing rituals - Lander Johnson unearths previously unrecognised opinions about chastity. She reveals that early Stuart theatrical and court ceremonies were part of the same political debate as prose pamphlets and religious sermons. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

This book explores early modern ideas of chastity and their cultural, political, medical, moral and theological applications, demonstrating how early Stuart thinking on chastity governed even the construction of different literary genres. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.

Chastity as a topic is an ideal interdisciplinary consideration since it accesses iconographical representation, the philosophical issues of purity, morality, and of innocence; the legal issues of loss and punishment, the historical issues of celibacy, and the legislation that topic evoked; as well as the role of chastity as a literary topos in Late Antiquity as well as the Middle Ages, for example, in medieval commentary traditions and within medieval vernacular literatures. The topic of Chastity, as well as its opposing characteristics, thus provides an arena for a discussion of the transmission of Ovid and the commentaries this author provoked in the Middle Ages, the interpretation of images illustrating legal texts, cross-cultural enquiries, such as the reciprocity between Christian, Muslim, and Judaic interpretations of temperance, continence, and abstinence, and the theological-legal issue of “God’s rights” (in excising Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden). Contributors: Nancy van Deusen; Frank T. Coulson; Marcia L. Colish; Uta-Renate Blumenthal; Thérèse-Anne Druart; Claudia Bornholdt; Susan L’Engle; Cristian Gaspar; and Rafael Chodos.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.

The chastity belt is one of those objects people have commonly identified with the 'dark' Middle Ages. This book analyzes the origin of this myth and demonstrates how a convenient misconception, or contorted imagination, of an allegedly historical practice has led to profoundly flawed interpretations of control mechanisms used by jealous husbands.