ABSTRACT
Although Christianity imposes the same moral code upon men and women and offers to each the same promise of grace and salvation the widespread assumption that woman’s weaker nature made her more prone than men to certain (if not all) vices required of her the practice of what were seen as preeminently feminine virtues: most especially, obedience and submissiveness were hers (65, 71), for her unreliable intellect and unruly passions stood in need of the guidance of ‘masculine and wise counsellors’, in Lucy Hutchinson’s phrase (127; cf. 26, and see further chapter 9). It is consequently no surprise that the opposed Biblical stereotypes of the whore and the good woman (47) continued to dominate the century’s discourse as they had done that of the Middle Ages. Classical texts provided precisely similar types (66). Opposed to the vices outlined in chapter 6 above are their contrary virtues: silence, patience, discretion, piety, modesty and chastity (67, 68, 69). Opposed, too, are the virtues proper to men and to women. The dynamic virtues are masculine, the passive feminine. Courage, magnanimity and authority belong to men; bashfulness, reticence and obedience to women. In the figure of the Amazon Radigund, to whom the knight Artegal yields in combat out of misguided pity, Edmund Spenser represented the monstrosity of female assertiveness (70). ‘Virtuous women wisely understand / That they were born to base humility’ and should ‘obey the ’hests of man’s well ruling hand’. For his part, Artegal is ‘justly damned’ to the punishment of role reversal and the shame of ‘woman’s weeds’ for having permitted this perversion of the natural order through his abdication of his masculine authority.
