Acting Virtuous

Suzanne Hull and many others have amply established that early modern women were relentlessly instructed to be chaste, silent, and obedient. ¹ The first of these terms, however, poses significant problems. Whereas “silence” and “obedience” would appear to be relatively straightforward—dependent upon and displayed through acts of outward compliance—“chastity” is considerably more complicated. Even in its premarital formations, when it might be narrowly construed as “virginity” and connected to a condition of corporeal intactness, chastity is neither easy to understand nor establish. Recent work in literature, religion, history, and medicine has emphasized how efforts to define and assess virginity from patristic times to the present have been beset by uncertainty. ² These myriad problems only multiply when chastity is expanded to include those who are married. Although the chastity of maids can be connected (at least theoretically or fantastically) to an inviolate anatomy, this condition does not survive the sexual consummation of marriage, requiring the chastity of wives to be envisioned alternatively. Conjugality, by further separating the condition of sexual purity from the state of sexual innocence or inexperience, complicates what is already an epistemological conundrum. Especially where wives are concerned, chastity must be interiorized, increasingly associated with internal conditions (such as affective fidelity or an unspotted will) rather than external ones (such as an intact hymen).