The chastity plot / Lisabeth During.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

During, Lisabeth, author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chastity.

Virgins.

Chastity--History.

Sexual abstinence--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Sexual abstinence.

Chastity in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (402 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Summary:

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. Idealised 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. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into modernity, Lisabeth During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Is There a Chastity Plot?

2. Virginity and Terror: Reading Hippolytus

3. Marriage and Mayhem

4. The Dangerous Mystique of Continence

5. The Pure and the Impure: Pastoral and the Reversal of Nature

6. A Virgin Enthroned: Power, Performance, and Poetry in the English Renaissance

7. The Virgin’s Fall

8. Losing the Plot: The Politics and Poetry of Modern Virginity

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2021.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 8, 2021).

ISBN:

0-226-74163-X

OCLC:

1245420595