This study examines the sixteenth-century English Reformation background of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3. Recovering this material is not simply a matter of opening a Bible, for various groups in the period, both Catholic and Reformer, interpreted its passages differently. The Book's four primary female characters, Belphoebe, Florimell, Britomart and Amoret, embody different aspects of the virtue, and these come into sharper focus in the light of this background. After a general survey of previous discussions of this topic, Chapter 1 examines the virgin Belphoebe and attitudes about celibacy and virginity current in sixteenth-century England, finding that neither Catholic nor Reformer disparaged this state, although in practice they differed dramatically. Chapter 2, considering the plight of Florimell, shows how her actions demonstrate that her chastity is, as these Reformation writers urge, a matter of the mind and soul, the springs from which virtue and its opposites flow. Her quality derives from such inner conviction. Next, Chapter 3, looking at Britomart, shows that Reformation writers generally do not speak of human love, even in marriage, in a way that comes close to Spenser's poem. However, when they deal with spiritual love, the love the soul is to have for God, they describe it in terms which sound very like those of passionate romantic love. The final chapter brings the insights of the preceding essay to bear on the closing cantos and Amoret's distress. Seen against this background, while she may appear helpless, her mind, like Florimell's, is constant and firm; she remains chaste. Indeed, she prefers imprisonment and even death, to surrendering to her captor. Like both Belphoebe and Britomart, what underlies her behaviour is her prior love for her beloved, which is the basis of her chastity, just as the Reformation writers understand it. The perspective on Spenser's poem provided by this Reformation material gives rise to new insights into the text

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The thesis investigates the fictional uses of the figure of the unchaste woman over the period of the early feminist movement in order to trace attitudes towards woman as a sexual being and as a person in her own right. The cheap and popular literature of the period has been used both to illuminate accepted conventions, so that the achievement of major novelists can be more clearly understood, and to discover differences in style, moral intent, and emotional content of the fiction consumed by women of various social classes which may be related to class-based differences in feminine role, expectations, and self-image. [continued in text ...]

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-159).