Practising Shame

Practicing shame explores how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to secure their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against shame. The book transforms our understanding of the construction of femininity in the past and offers a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come. How can one know if a woman is honourable? In medieval culture, female honour rested most heavily on one thing: sexual continence, or chastity. But how could one be absolutely sure that a given woman was chaste? Practising shame demonstrates that, in the literature of medieval England, female honour was a matter of emotional practice and performance – it required learning how to ‘feel’ in a specific way. In order to safeguard their chastity, women were encouraged to cultivate hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame through a combination of inward reflection and outward comportment. Often termed ‘shamefastness’, this practice was believed to reinforce women’s chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others through a combination of conventional gestures. At the same time, medieval anxiety concerning the potentially misleading nature of appearances rendered these gestures suspect – if good conduct could be learned, then it could also be counterfeited. Practising shame uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from emotional practices linked to female honour, as well as the unexpected ways in which those practices could be reappropriated by male authors.Written at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies, and the history of emotions, this book transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come. Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of ‘shamefastness’ was believed to reinforce women’s chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. The book uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.