The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare.
- Author / Editor
- Crocker, Holly A.
The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare.
- Published
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
- Physical Description
- 352 pp.
- Description
- Investigates "premodern 'vertue,' or the embodied excellence that enables women's ethical action in vernacular English poetry between 1343 and 1623." Focuses on "material virtue"--the "natural potencies of physical bodies"--rather than on habit-, volition-, or rule-based ideas of virtue, exploring how this material perspective "changes what it means to be human," particularly as evident in representations of "female excellence" in literary characterizations, medieval to early modern. Includes discussion of women in conduct literature, saints' lives, and romances, with particular attention to select works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Henryson, Lydgate, and Chaucer (TC, LGW, MLT, and ClT).
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
Troilus and Criseyde
Legend of Good Women
Man of Law and His Tale
Clerk and His Tale