ABSTRACT

The all-embracing ethics and asceticism required of Christians and imposed between the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution affected every aspect of behaviour and reduced the scope for morally indifferent acts. The situation was analogous for women, where efforts to impose monastic discipline influenced the behavioural model for young women educated in convents, colleges and schools for the poor. Models of behaviour were taught to women indirectly through lives of the saints and directly through spiritual rules for the different 'states in life': virginity, marriage and widowhood. The Decor puellarum is an exemplary text for the way in which it demonstrates the role of the Church and its ideology in promoting the spread of good behaviour and good manners. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, good manners, which went with the art of disguising feelings and passions, did not constitute the peak of Christian perfection, but were becoming its essential accompaniment.