The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare - Hardcover

Crocker, Holly A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251415 ISBN 13: 9780812251418

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Synopsis

If material bodies have inherent, animating powers—or virtues, in the premodern sense—then those bodies typically and most insistently associated in the premodern period with matter—namely, women—cannot be inert and therefore incapable of ethical action, Holly Crocker contends. In The Matter of Virtue, Crocker argues that one idea of what it means to be human—a conception of humanity that includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others—emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. While a misogynistic tradition of virtue ethics, from antiquity to the early modern period, largely cast a skeptical or dismissive eye on women, Crocker seeks to explore what happened when poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent whose cultural supremacy was guaranteed by prevailing social structures but rather as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others.

After an introduction that analyzes Hamlet to establish a premodern tradition of material virtue, Part I investigates how retellings of the demise of the title female character in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida among other texts structure a poetic debate over the potential for women's ethical action in a world dominated by masculine violence. Part II turns to narratives of female sanctity and feminine perfection, including ones by Chaucer, Bokenham, and Capgrave, to investigate grace, beauty, and intelligence as sources of women's ethical action. In Part III, Crocker examines a tension between women's virtues and household structures, paying particular attention to English Griselda- and shrew-literatures, including Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She concludes by looking at Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to consider alternative forms of virtuous behavior for women as well as men.

About this title

About the Author

Holly A. Crocker is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina and author of Chaucer's Visions of Manhood.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Virtues That Matter

For use almost can change the stamp of nature.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.iv.151.8

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
—Chaucer, General Prologue, I.1-4

This book investigates premodern "vertue," or the embodied excellence that enables women's ethical action in vernacular English poetry between 1343 and 1623. To study this kind of virtue, the following chapters address skepticism regarding women's capacities for ethical action, by which I mean the concrete ability to enact principles that organize an everyday way of life in premodern England. When Hamlet advises his mother to abstain from sex with Claudius, "Assume a virtue if you have it not," he treats virtue as a power that Gertrude might exercise (III.iv.151). Yet, when he concludes his counsel with the remark, "For use almost can change the stamp of nature" (my emphasis), he suggests that Gertrude cannot fully enact this or any other virtue (III.iv.151.8). Instead, he imagines Gertrude's virtue as a decorative covering, as "a frock or livery / That aptly is put on" (III.iv.151.4-5). Hamlet renders Gertrude's virtue as superficial, and, by so doing, he forecloses her potential for ethical action. This devaluation of "virtues that matter"—as well as the association of these embodied powers with women—focuses the ensuing argument.

Material Virtue

Like Hamlet, we often refer to virtues as qualities that humans might perform, and for good reason. As this study shall acknowledge, the virtues are fundamentally engaged with what it means to be human. Yet, during the period studied in this book, virtues are also the defining properties of material things. In medieval and early modern England, a rich vernacular vocabulary reveals that premodern virtues are physical qualities. Like better-known areas of virtue ethics, this tradition can also be traced to Aristotle, who claims in The Physics, "the virtues are perfections of nature." Prominent contemporary philosophers, including Philippa Foot, Julia Annas, and Rosalind Hursthouse, have argued for virtue's "naturalism," and the argument that follows in this book arises from their contention that our very species is morally situated—that the flourishing of the human qua human relies on its virtues. Unlike modern moral philosophers, who by and large focus their discussions on human excellences, I emphasize one aspect of premodern virtues that makes this naturalism possible: in premodern English, "vertues" were not exclusively human. Rather, the Middle English Dictionary defines "vertu" as "an inherent quality of a substance which gives it power." Similarly, early modern English continued to refer to "vertues" as forces that imbued physical bodies with vitality and power. From heads to hands, and from rocks to plants, virtues suffused all material bodies in premodern England.

"Vertues" were not simple or inert characteristics of a physical body. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorizes "vertu" as "life force: reproduction and vitality, affect and intellect and health, that which moves the flesh." The Peterborough Lapidary characterizes "vertu" as proof of divine power: "no man schall be in / dowte Þat god haþe set & put gret vertu in worde, stone, & erbe, by the wyche, if it so be þat men be not of mysbeleue & Also owte of dedly synne, & many [wonder]full mervailes my3t be wrow3t þorow her vertues." As Mary Carruthers explains, virtue was a "principle of biological energy." Elsewhere, she notes, "vertu" signified "that innate 'power,' 'energy,' or 'desire' of the soul animating the body, which (as with babies, puppies and plants) requires channeling, habituation and training." The fourteenth-century Dives and Pauper credits such energies to divine power: "God 3af gres, trees and herbis diuerse vertuys." We might best understand each of these virtues as an affordance, or the capacity for a specific body to flourish in a particular environment. In the most fundamental sense, "vertues" improved the bodies they inhabited.

To distinguish these embodied affordances from other, more traditional characterizations of premodern virtues, throughout this study I shall refer to "material virtues" as the inherent powers of physical bodies commonly referenced in English writings between 1343 and 1623. From the start, I should acknowledge that this practice is somewhat misleading, since, as I have briefly noted above, many contemporary moral theorists think of all virtues as similarly embodied. So what I am describing as "material virtue" would just be "true virtue" as it has more recently come to be understood by key thinkers. I maintain this distinction in order to investigate a discursive habit, which, on account of its everyday, pragmatic emergence in the particular historical milieu of premodern England, might remain unimportant to modern moral philosophers. Material virtue was not the domain of scholastic debate or pastoral teaching (though they did intersect, as I shall subsequently demonstrate). Instead, these inherent bodily powers were central to everyday practices that focused on the natural potencies of physical bodies. Premodern medicine relied on material virtues, for, as John Trevisa's fourteenth-century English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum explains, "A good physician . . . nediþ to knowe complexions, vertues, and worchinges of medicynable þinges." A command of material virtue also requires intimate local knowledge, including the season for the optimal cultivation of healing plants: "Þese herbys . . . mustyn ben gaderyd abowtyn mydsomyr, for þanne þei ben of moste vertu."

This sense of virtue's materiality continued in the early modern period. Herbals as well as medicinal tracts attend to the "vertues" of different plants and potions. The brief broadsheet, The admirable vertue, property and operation of the quintessence of rosemary flowers and the meanes to vse it for the sickesses and diseases herein mentioned (1615), equates "vertue" to a physical potency: "Moreouer, the force and vertue thereof extendeth it selfe euen to the sinewes shrunke and weakned." In the more comprehensive A boke of the propreties of herbes called an herball (1552), the "vertues" of different plants are associated with distillation, which means that this type of power is thought of as the defining essence of each example included therein. Similarly, A right profitable booke for all diseases. Called The path-way to health (1587) describes its contents by referencing virtue as a type of potency, "wherein are to be found most excellent and approoued medicines, of great vertue." The oft-printed An hospitall for the diseased (1610), by Thomas Cartwright, also proclaims the powers of its practical wisdom by advertising the "most excellent approoued medicines, as well emplaisters of speciall vertue . . . for the restitution and preseruation of bodily health." Thinking of "vertue" as potency is central to medicine's public standing, or so the English translation of the Latin Prepositas (1588) claims: "When men or women shall, hauing read this booke, see and vnderstand how that there are in hearbes, plants, gummes &c. such seuerall vertues . . . they will be the better perswaded to like and esteeme of phisicke then heretofore they haue done." Virtues are not intangible, theoretical principles; rather, bodies have the potentialities their virtues enable.

Treating virtue as the animating power of a physical body was not confined to the specialized vocabularies of science, husbandry, or medicine. Rather, as I shall argue in greater detail, it is also important to literary representations, which seek to bring bodies to life—on the page, on the stage, or both. The well-known opening of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, from which I take my second epigraph, affirms the animating power of material virtues: "Of which vertu engendred is the flour" (I.4). As it does in other instances, virtue enlivens a physical body. Those animate bodies, in turn, have the power to affect those around them. Elsewhere in Hamlet, when Laertes observes Ophelia's madness, he curses his eye's natural powers:

Tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye! (IV.v.154)

Ophelia's madness affects Laertes in an intimate, immediate fashion. The suffering chronicled on the stage, in turn, is designed to move audiences in a tangible, demonstrable fashion. This influence is moral, insofar as it prompts Laertes—and insofar as it might provoke the play's spectators—to live in a different way. The ability for bodies to make a moral difference to one another is both ethical and physical, for this kind of virtue materializes a world organized by specific values.

Material virtue's power is centrally connected to representational art, and its ethical standing. Indeed, although a physical body's power to affect those around it is well known, this capacity has long founded critiques of the theater, as well as the literary arts more generally. Augustine, notably, dismisses the theater's ability to evoke pity as a sham form of ethics, since, as he queries, "But how can the unreal sufferings of the stage possibly move pity." He claims such spectacles do not evoke true emotions, but, rather, they are "merely fictitious," providing a superficial enjoyment that makes no moral difference to the spectators who watch stage plays. While he allows that poetry provides greater "food for thought," and recalls how Medea's plight caused him to reflect on moral situations that he might not have otherwise contemplated, earlier in the Confessions, when Augustine recounts how he wept for Dido as a youthful reader of Virgil, he condemns his investment in her suicide as a distraction that prevented him from realizing the corrupt condition of his fallen soul.

Despite his disapproval, Augustine confirms that poetic stories bring bodies to life, and shows how those bodies exert moral power over their immediate audiences. Yet, since the ethical demands such bodies issue are not concerned with Christian salvation, Augustine insists this power is wholly negative. The poets and playwrights I study in this book would also meet with Augustine's censure, for they are primarily concerned with imagining how people might lead better lives in the everyday circumstances of premodern England. Even narratives that prioritize Christian salvation are firmly grounded in a material world that is riven with contingency and violence, but has the potential for improvement and reform. This quotidian materialism is due, I suggest, to the sense that human excellence must be set in relation to physical powers that worked, for good or ill, as part of a broader ethical ecology in the premodern world. In a darker affirmation of these physical powers, when Laertes conspires to poison Hamlet he tells Claudius the potion is beyond the powers of any medicine:

And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratched withal. . . (IV.vii.112-18)

Such references are not just figurative, but mine a vocabulary of practical, material virtue that was believed to suffuse all physical bodies. As the herbals' and medicinals' practical appeals to readers indicate, thinking of virtue as the animate force of a material body was commonplace in early modern England.

One of the central contentions of this book is that material virtue makes an ethical difference in premodern England. If material bodies have inherent, animating powers, then those bodies typically and insistently associated with matter—namely, women—are not passive, inert, and therefore incapable of ethical action. Rather, bodies exert moral influence by means of their proximity and connection to us. Virtue might very well be transformed on account of its association with feminine matter. For that reason, I will ultimately argue that a rival idea of what it means to be human emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. This conception of humanity includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others. Before detailing the difference matter makes to virtue, in the following section I shall give an overview of virtue's ethical history, or at least the Western tradition of virtue ethics that extends from antiquity to the early modern period. I do so principally to highlight the fact that women's exclusion from virtue ethics is widely acknowledged by modern philosophers. I do so also to demonstrate how a shift in the foundation of virtue changes what it means to be human. This shift does not simply produce a new set of virtues; rather, many of the qualities that I highlight across this study intersect, and frequently overlap, with familiar schema. The difference, I contend, derives from thinking of the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent, whose cultural supremacy is guaranteed by prevailing social structures. Rather, if we consider physical bodies as women more frequently experienced them, as fragile and open, as well as connected and subjected to others, then our virtues will be, like the worlds we share, transformed.

Heroic Virtue Ethics and the Virtues in Medieval England

As Alasdair MacIntyre acknowledges in After Virtue, the heroic society in which Aristotle devised his ethical framework was masculinist in its assumptions about who qualified for areté, or virtue. Because "Aristotle believed that women could not exercise the requisite control over their emotions," they could not be citizens, and therefore they could not cultivate the virtues that accompanied public life in the polis. Stephen G. Salkever details how virtue in ancient Greek thought was inseparable from the ideal of virility, and the inveterate misogyny that structured republican politics. Even if, as Salkever contends, Plato and Aristotle contest the exclusively male orientation of ancient virtue, he explains that ancient writers who come after them do not vest "women and womanly activities [with] a greater dignity." The classical formulation of virtus, with its emphasis on empowered, public action, rendered women's excellences largely invisible.

This heroic tradition dovetailed with medieval misogyny in a powerful fashion. Indeed, in the long history of virtue ethics, women's association with matter denied them an equal ability to develop virtues derived from ancient thinkers. With his influential Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville establishes women's explicit association with matter from the seventh century: "A mother is so named because something is made from her, for the term 'mother' (mater) is as if the word were 'matter' (materia)." Women's materiality, which for medieval thinkers was associated with the flesh's fallen-ness, meant they could never take up the active, autonomous pract...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0812251415
• ISBN 13: 9780812251418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 360