Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England by Jessica C. Murphy (review)

It is difficult to write about conduct literature without replicating the tedium of early modern didactic texts, especially those that advise women on proper behavior. But call to mind Laertes's caution to Ophelia if she should open her "chaste treasure" to Hamlet's "unmastered importunity"—"Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister"—and then consider Ophelia's retort that he should not, as some "ungracious pastors do," show her "the steep and thorny way to heaven / Whiles, a puffed and reckless libertine," he treads "the primrose path of dalliance" and "recks not his own rede" (that is, ignores his own advice, 1.3.30–32, 46–50, Arden 3 Hamlet). Suddenly those injunctions spring to life with animated complexity. The best parts of this book examine places where didactic literature for women and the "literary" meet to figure models of conduct as "much more multivalent and open than critics have so far acknowledged" (7). The first chapter focuses on the paradox of chastity in relation to Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, Book 3 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Milton's Comus; the second treats other forms of female virtue addressed in conduct books, reading them along with Robert Greene's Penelope's Web. The last three chapters analyze advice to women in two Shakespeare plays, in women-authored texts, and in English broadside ballads. This structure reinforces the author's claim that those books were not read in isolation from other kinds of literature and that even ideals of chastity, silence, and obedience could prompt behaviors, and textual representations of them, that were ambiguous, contradictory, and paradoxical.

We have only to look at the diversity of present-day opinions about women's conduct to be reminded that consensus rarely exists in any given historical moment on how women should or should not behave. Approaches to early modern conduct books in the late twentieth century tended to make them speak with one fairly consistent voice, however; hence this book's more nuanced approach is very welcome. An even greater diversity of opinion can be found in those early modern texts than is acknowledged here: readers would, for instance, benefit from some explanation for why certain conduct books are cited in a given instance. The work quoted most frequently is Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christen Woman, written in Latin in 1523, translated into English by Richard Hyrde, and published circa 1529; it was reprinted nine times during the course of the sixteenth century. Dedicated to Catherine of Aragon and composed with the education of the Princess Mary in mind, it was written by a Spanish Catholic converso whose advice to women was particularly rigid and restrictive. Murphy could have made more use of the excellent edition of Hyrde's translation by Virginia W. Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell that describes Vives as "severe and pessimistic" and critiques his invectives as an "assault on a group so large and nonspecific" that he implies "women and wrongdoing are in some definable way synonymous" (xxxviii, xlvii). Vives has always struck me as exceptionally strict and even fearful of women. Murphy does take Vives to task for suggesting that all women give their consent to sexual relations to some degree, even—alarmingly—if they were raped (19). Nonetheless, she seems to present his opinions as if they were the norm. Vives's contemporary Erasmus, in his well-known Colloquies, showed far more sensitivity to women's predicaments and was readier to acknowledge and argue for the healthy function that marriage played in social life.

Hence the advice available to early modern Englishwomen was quite diverse, and events in the latter half of the sixteenth century prompted many to rethink the topics on which Vives had spoken so...