The Chastity Plot

In The Chastity Plot , Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom. "There is a compelling story to be told about the rise, fall, and transfiguration of the ideal of chastity, and Lisabeth During is the perfect person to tell it. In The Chastity Plot, During reveals how the obsession with chastity has played a powerful role in the history of our moral imagination. The metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. The demand for chastity has shaped social institutions and figured in the construction of political power; sexual renunciation has been an ornament to sainthood and a technique of ascetics both sacred and profane"-- Provided by publisher Contents 10 Introduction 12 1. Is There a Chastity Plot? 32 2. Virginity and Terror: Reading Hippolytus 68 3. Marriage and Mayhem 98 4. The Dangerous Mystique of Continence 142 5. The Pure and the Impure: Pastoral and the Reversal of Nature 192 6. A Virgin Enthroned: Power, Performance, and Poetry in the English Renaissance 232 7. The Virgin’s Fall 270 8. Losing the Plot: The Politics and Poetry of Modern Virginity 312 Notes 334 Acknowledgments 386 Index 388