ABSTRACT
It is impossible to overstate the importance of modesty as a virtue for early modern women, particularly those entering public discourse. While most writers and speakers, regardless of gender, had to strike a humble posture, both as a rhetorical courtesy and in order to lessen the possibility of raising the ire of patrons, royalty, and religious authorities, women were also burdened with the need to veil themselves either literally or figuratively as a sign of both their purity and their inherited shame. Pudor, not modestus, is the modesty of women. Commenting on François Fénelon’s assertion that women should have a “pudeur towards knowledge, almost as delicate as that which inspires the horror of vice,” Elizabeth Rapley observes, “[p]udeur went far beyond physical modesty. It represented the feminine identity as it was perceived in the seventeenth century, in all its weakness and limitation” (158). Modesty was a virtue for men as well, but for them modestus or “keeping due measure” was the appropriate Latin cognate-in men, modesty connoted probity, self-government, and reason. In the hierarchical secular world, modesty helped men negotiate the dual roles of governing and being governed. From a religious perspective, modest activity meant acting with faith, humility, and charity, well aware of one’s own fallen nature. For men, modesty was largely a matter of moderation. Immoderate men were characterized as effeminate; they were governed by the body when they should be governing it.1
