Approaches to Early Modern Chastity

In The Turtle and his Paramour (Emblem 47)112, Pulter advises her women readers that “Nothing gains love like virgin Modestie” (18). But if the “love” you get looks uncomfortably like rape, then the poem seems to be critiquing whether laboring to preserve virgin modesty is worth the trouble. Chastity, in contrast, is mentioned three times in the poem, and is upheld as a constant model for her women readers. Chastity was not equivalent to virginity. As Bonnie Lander Johnson notes in her study Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, “Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.”1

Notably, “chaste” and “chased” also function as an aural pun in The Turtle and his Paramour (Emblem 47)112, connecting the poem’s two major themes.

Consider the way chastity was discussed as a guiding virtue for early modern women:

Jean Luis Vives’ advice manual The Education of a Christian Woman (1529) assigns the utmost importance to a woman’s chastity:

In a woman, chastity is the equivalent of all virtues … if that is safe, everything else will be in safety; if that is lost, all things perish together with it.

Vives, Jean Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Ed. and Trans. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000, p. 85.

Jane Anger’s biting advice in Her Protection for Women (1589) highlights the double standard to which women and their chastity were held:

Our virginitie makes us vertuous, our conditions curteous, & our chastitie maketh our truenesse of love manifest. They confesse we are necessarie, but they would have us likewise evil.

Anger, Jane. Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women. To defend them against the scandalous reportes of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed with womens kindnesse. London: Printed by R. Jones and T. Orwin, 1589.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) calls chastity “That fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest” and praises chastity as a crowning glory akin to a heavenly halo:

With this faire flowre your goodly girlonds dight,
Of chastity and vertue virginall,
That shall embellish more your beautie bright,
And crowne your heades with heauenly coronall,
Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall.

Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser. Ed. Grosart. London, 1882. Prepared by R.S. Bear, Book 3, Canto V, LIII.

Shakespeare upholds the value of chastity as a form of loyalty in his “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (1601), but also mourns the dearth of issue that results from its enforced practice:

Death is now the Phoenix’ nest,
And the Turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:
’Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.

Shakespeare, William. “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, ll. 56–61.

Like Pulter, Aemelia Lanyer notes that chastity often serves as an enticement to wayward men. In her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” (1611), she lists a number of historical, mythological, and biblical women—including Helen and Cleopatra—whose chastity (and by proxy, beauty) proved to be their undoing:

For greatest perils do attend the fair,
When men do seek, attempt, plot, and devise,
How they may overthrow the chastest dame,
Whose beauty is the white whereat they aim.

Lanyer, Aemelia. “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology 1560–1700. Ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000, ll. 205–8.

Now explore the treatment of chastity and virginity in some of Pulter’s other emblem poetry. Where do the concepts of chastity and virginity overlap? Where do they diverge?

Pulter’s The Stately Unicorn (Emblem 14)80 uses the legend of the unicorn and the virgin’s protective power to warn of the dangers of alluring women. What kind of power is given to virginity, and how does this differ from the power afforded to chastity?

Pulter’s The Elephant (Emblem 19)84 praises the elephant’s constancy as a form of chastity: “Then yet be chaste, and those you choose in youth, Love constantly, for Truth deserveth truth.” Are chastity and constancy synonymous?

Likewise, Pulter’s Mark but those Hogs (Emblem 34)99 praises the “chaste and constant turtledove” as a model for romantic relationships, contrasting the worldly hogs with the spiritual doves. In what way is chastity figured as spiritual rather than physical?

Footnotes

1. Johnson, Bonnie Lander. Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2015, p. 2