This thesis considers the Renaissance understanding of the virtue of chastity within the French court, countering the view that the Renaissance courtier perceived chastity to be simply an attribute properly assigned to women as a protective virtue. From within a context of Renaissance moral paradigms, religious and secular, this study demonstrates how the French nobility championed individual perfectibility and denounced passion, embracing reason as paramount moral virtue and valorizing social codes of conduct as signs of rational activity. The rational control of the body in a social context was perceived to be necessary to the smooth- running of the State, and this control was symbolically represented as 'chastity', being grounded upon principles of self-restraint familiar to women, who were nominally pre-eminent in this area of behaviour. Such an analysis informed the discourse of Perfect Love played out at court, in which a chaste female beloved stood as an icon of universal concord. Through her perfect status she induced a publicly chaste conduct in her lover, whose pursuit was rational and stabilizing to the social milieu. This 'chaste' game was a fiction which had little relevance to private morality, but was concerned with exhibiting chaste harmony to the public gaze. It exalted the female form as an icon of the purified social body, thereby bestowing symbolic control upon woman. This study also explores the extent to which the Renaissance noblewoman was a prisoner of her own corporeal nature within this chaste discourse of love. She was influential by reason of the sexual purity attributed to her, but precariously so, because her very sexuality risked the accusation that her real 'virtue' lay not in her purity, but in her dissimulation of desire.

Key to an understanding of the broad political developments in Ireland and Scotland in the 1650s is an appreciation of the relationship between the English governments of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate and the Irish and Scottish landed elites. Political power and landholding went hand in hand, and in the absence of large standing armies and a centralised administration, governments relied upon the support of regional power-brokers to maintain law and order in the localities. This thesis is a non-anglocentric study of the developing relationship between the republican regime and the Irish and Scottish landed elites during the Interregnum. As such it complements current research on the elite in the early modern period, and because of its integrationist approach to the three kingdoms, represents a useful addition to recent works on the New British and Irish histories in the seventeenth century. Scottish and Irish proprietors represented the standard bearers for the Stuart cause following the execution of Charles I. The thesis examines the process by which the policies the English parliament adopted to destroy the influence of the Scottish and Irish landed elites in the wake of its conquest of the two kingdoms came to be buried during the 1650s by other measures introduced simultaneously to promote peace and stability and efforts to increase the revenue and reduce the cost of government. Patronage and kinship networks also served to save many Irish and Scots from ruin and encouraged compromise. Grounded on the close study of surviving Irish and Scots estate archives as well as official sources the thesis adopts an approach in which the power and influence landowners retained during the English occupation is fully recognised and reveals a continuous process of accommodation between proprietors and the government, beginning as soon as the English army entered the countries.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Greifswald.

Univ. do Algarve, Diss.--Faro, 1998.

Inaug.-diss.--Halle-Wittenberg. / Curriculum vitae.

Tesis - Valladolid. / Bibliography: p. [9]-18.

Inaug.-diss.--Greifswald. / Lebenslauf.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 312-322).

Tesis - Valladolid. / Bibliography: p. [9]-18.

Inaug.-diss.--Halle-Wittenberg. / Curriculum vitae.