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The language and literature of chastity

amb206 — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 15:00:00 +0000

When BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour used the topic ‘purity’ as a talking point for a late night discussion, the themes that emerged ranged from sex to food to spirituality. The common denominator was the female body and the ways in which women feel, and are judged, as pure and impure. For most of the contributors, purity was perceived as a state experienced on a personal basis – through control and denial – often at great cost to themselves.

In her introduction, the presenter Lauren Laverne equated chastity (“a word you don’t hear bandied about much these days”) with celibacy and she wasn’t challenged by her guests. And why would she be? Chastity has come to mean abstinence from sex and is often used synonymously with virginity. However, for members of the world’s religions chastity has a much wider meaning that is lost in the language of secular Britain. Four centuries ago the opposite was true: chastity was one of the most important virtues, not just for individuals but for the public discourses through which the period’s greatest political controversies played out.

In her book Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) describes how chastity became a cult that was as much embodied by the ceremonies and performances of the court as it was espoused by the anti-court Puritan writers working in the new world of popular print. Lander Johnson writes that chastity, as an important Christian virtue, was “one of the key conceptual frameworks through which individual men and women understood their relationship to their own bodies, to their community, to the wider Christian world and to God”. But “the same virtue that could protect the body from infection and a marriage from dissolution could eventually help to topple a government and undo a King”.

Chastity played a powerful role in both national affairs and international relations. Elizabeth I was famously the Virgin Queen of the Protestant country created by her father Henry VIII. Her unsullied state was much more than simply personal. It offered her subjects a vision of the nation itself as both impenetrable against outside invasion and purified of the ‘popery’ of Catholicism. The Protestantism of the Church of England was chaste and pure; in the vitriol of religious schisms, the Roman church was “the whore of Babylon”.

The Virgin Queen’s Stuart successors were on shakier ground. Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France, a devoutly Catholic princess who had spent her childhood in a convent and was dedicated to her mission of re-Catholicising England. She arrived in her adopted country not only with a fabulous trousseau of worldly goods, but also an entourage of friars and firm ideas about devotion and decorum. Although fiercely loyal to her husband and supportive of his power as monarch, she did not recognise his status as head of the English Church.

For England’s Catholics, living mostly in obscurity and practicing their faith illegally, Henrietta Maria became the unofficial leader of the Catholic Church in England. While the King and Queen lived harmoniously together for over two decades, the religious tensions that had only barely been kept in check since the establishment of the Protestant Church began to erupt around them. At the heart of these tensions was a debate over which of the country’s religious and political factions could lay the greatest claim to the virtue of chastity.

“Importantly, chastity was not the same as virginity,” writes Lander Johnson. “Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.” Sanctified by God, marriage and sexual relations between man and wife could be chaste – as could childbirth. By implication, a ‘chaste’ relationship produced a healthy child. By the same token, an ‘unchaste’ union created a monster. When the child in question was born of a royal marriage that was surrounded by accusations of religious ‘unchastity’, the outcome could have far-reaching effects.

The royal household was under intense scrutiny as religious factions tussled for ascendancy. When Charles and Henrietta Maria’s first child died at birth, suspicions about the chastity of their marriage as an inter-religious union grew. The remarkably resilient Queen went on to give birth to a further eight children, seven of whom survived.

This fecundity was celebrated in court masques and portraits. The central message of the court’s various spectacles and ceremonies was that the chastity of the royal marriage, and of the nation, was sanctified and maintained by the Queen’s prodigious fertility. For this reason, Lander Johnson argues, the Queen’s birthing ceremonies need to be considered as important events among the many forms of art, writing, and performance generated in the 1630s.

Each delivery was an elaborate performance, carefully orchestrated to draw down the greatest blessings from God, to ensure the most fortuitous outcome, and to communicate Henrietta Maria’s piety, purity and queenly authority. The Queen’s many births also became platforms for debates over the relative chastity of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Who was allowed to attend the Queen in these important and dangerous moments? Who would most safely deliver the future head of the nation and Church?

The Queen’s unsuccessful first birth was mourned across the country, and at the English and French courts. It had been attended by Chamberlen, Physician to the King, a figure viewed with suspicion by the Queen, her French cohort and her family at home in France. Chamberlen was not only Protestant but a man (something the French, with their excellent reputation for female scholar-midwives, thought particularly unchaste). But Chamberlen was also a maverick whose secret instruments (eventually revealed to be an early form of forceps) were increasingly thought to do as much damage as good to mothers and babies.

In her grief over her first child, Henrietta Maria took charge of her subsequent births, employing a French midwife and surrounding herself with nuns, Catholic nurses, pictures of the Virgin Mary and all the comforts of Catholic devotion: incense, music and gestural prayer. The second birth was a success, producing an heir both healthy and male: the future Charles II.

The Queen marked each of her births with elaborate court masques that celebrated her chastity, fertility and spirituality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Queen’s religious convictions and devotional tastes became increasingly popular in and around the court. In response, the pro-Parliamentary plain-religionists who eventually deposed the King worked harder than ever to claim the virtue of chastity for their cause and to accuse the Queen of infecting the King and the Throne with her unchaste religious practices. In a new world of public debate, dissenters made full use of mass print technology to rapidly disseminate their fiery sermons and commonwealth political theory.

Throughout the 1630s the court’s claims to chastity, primarily through the prodigiously fertile body of the Queen and her elaborate masques, were highly successful. But the young John Milton was preparing to enter the debate with his own masque of chastity. Milton’s skilful recoding of the virtue as Protestant spiritual adventure bolstered the moral strength of pro-Parliamentary arguments. Within a decade the King, Queen and their many children were dead or in hiding and the court’s depiction of chastity as familial, fertile, and spectacular was replaced with a version of chastity more at home in the written word, more masculine, and more martial: a steely and inviolate virtue fit for revolution.

Lander Johnson has written her first book in order to look in depth at chastity as a theme running through the life of the royal court, and the circles of power around it, in the first half of the 17th century – as seen through the literature of William Shakespeare, John Milton and a number of lesser known poets and playwrights, including John Ford. It is a scholarly book, aimed at an academic readership, but it touches on universal human preoccupations – how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, how we curate our own image through private and public performance.

“I was motivated to explore constructions of chastity, and manifestations of the virtue in literature, by a desire to recover a moral code that is rapidly disappearing from current cultural awareness but which was of the greatest importance to our predecessors and a primary consideration in our revolutionary history,” says Lander Johnson.

“I’m interested in the ways a society’s beliefs, in all times and places, can shape those words and images that have the power to sway public opinion so decisively. Today we are interested in tolerance and equality. Even if we don’t practice these modern virtues as much as we like to think we do, they have the power to grant moral strength to any public speech, debate, or Facebook post.”

Chastity in Early Stuart Literature by Bonnie Lander Johnson is published by ��Ī University Press

In her debut book, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) shows how deeply the Christian virtue of chastity was embedded into the culture of the early Stuart world. In the struggle between the newly established Church of England and Roman Catholicism, chastity was a powerful construct that was both personal and political.

Virginity was an anatomical state; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.

Bonnie Lander Johnson

Reproduced with permission of Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

Charles I and Henrietta Maria with their children by Anthony Van Dyke (detail)

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Heart-Breaking History: Voices of sick children from the past

bjb42 — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:40:08 +0000

Life for children during the Tudor and Stuart age has often been depicted as a pretty miserable experience, characterised by disease, physical hardship, and aloof and strict parenting. But Dr Hannah Newton's book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580 - 1720, adds to an emerging view among historians that society at this time was not as unforgiving as we sometimes think.

Her investigation into the little-studied subject of how families responded to children falling ill and dying uncovers evidence for close familial ties, openly emotional fathers, and even the beginnings of specialist children's care among medical practitioners.

Drawing on sources like doctors’ casebooks, and the letters and diaries of parents, it also brings to life often heart-rending stories about parents who had to sit helplessly at their child's bedside, and of children who tried to keep their parents' spirits up even as they struggled for breath.

Newton chose her sombre topic because it provides an unusual level of insight into what life was like at the time, especially for children. She also wanted to understand more about society's attitudes to children, and how doctors and laypeople approached the task of treating them.

"We don't usually hear much about children's lives during the early modern age," Newton said. "When children became sick and died, however, this all changed. Parents often wrote detailed accounts of their child's life and death, desperate to convince themselves and their relatives and friends that the child had gone to heaven."

"They also wrote letters to other family members and medical advisers, which give us a real sense of what it was like to be there, because they recorded exactly what was happening and what the child was saying. Sources like this offer us a very rare opportunity to hear the voices of children speaking to us from the past."

Although childhood sickness has largely been neglected by researchers, in the 16^th and 17^th centuries it was a fact of life. Between a quarter and a third of children at this time died before they were 15. For every 1,000 babies born alive during the same period, between 123 and 154 did not make it past their first birthday.

The sheer rate of infant mortality alone has led some historians to conclude that parents were to some extent desensitised to the death of children. This has contributed to an overall picture of a society in which parents were often strict and distant figures.

Newton believes that the reality may often have been quite the opposite, however. The personal documents of parents who were trying to nurse their dying children, abound in expressions of unimaginable grief. Discovering the death of her little daughter Pegg in 1647, for example, one mother, Mary Verney, recorded: "I am not able to say one word more, but at this time there is not a sadder creature in the world."

The experience of child sickness also appears to have brought out the close bonds between family members and blurred gender distinctions. Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers all turn up in the historical record coming to each other's aid.

Perhaps surprisingly for a society which placed such an emphasis on masculine and feminine "roles", the men's behaviour was often as openly emotional as that of the women. One account, of the death of 12-year-old Caleb Vernon from Battersea, records how, when Caleb knew he was dying, he bequeathed his toys to his sisters and then consoled his father, who had burst into tears at the bedside, that he “longed to be with God". He died a few moments later. The study also suggests that the affection of parents was often reciprocated passionately by their children.

Children, like their parents, believed that sickness was God's punishment for their sins. For both parties this could be a bittersweet experience. Parents felt desperate guilt as well as grief, and children themselves often reflected on how "naughty" they had been prior to their illness.

Yet there was also the prospect of going to Heaven, where parents and children believed that they would one day be reunited. In the 1670s, six-year-old Jason Whitrow took his mother by the hand, and said ‘Mother, I shall die, oh that you might die with me, that we might go to the Lord together’.

As well as the accounts of families, Newton has studied those of medical practitioners. These range from case notes and full-scale academic treatises to housewives’ recipe books, which at the time often included recipes for medicine.

They reveal evidence for what she terms "Children's Physic"; the first recognition among doctors that children were more than "small adults" and needed specialist care. Though hardly comparable with modern paediatrics, 17^th century medics did regard children as physiologically distinct: their medicines had to be adapted to make them gentler and more pleasant – for example, sugar was added, and the dose was lessened. Doctors and laypeople were producing special remedies for children themselves, and taking age into account when treating their patients.

The picture of society that emerges is one in which children were, at least some times, treated with respect, compassion and care. "Parents and relatives had a deep-seated desire to look after their offspring, and when faced with the desperate reality of a child falling ill, the niceties of things like gender or manly behaviour perhaps ceased to matter," Newton said. "Investigating how children and their families responded to sickness and death tells us about far more than medicine: it provides a window into the emotional and spiritual lives of people from the past”.

The launch of The Sick Child in Early-Modern England, 1580 – 1720, published by Oxford University Press, will take place on Wednesday, 25 April.

A new study into the grim and frequently heart-breaking history of childhood sickness and death has opened a window on to a surprisingly tender world of close families and devoted parenting in early modern England.

Parents had a deep-seated desire to look after their offspring. Faced with the desperate reality of a child falling ill, the niceties of gender or manly behaviour perhaps ceased to matter.

Hannah Newton

Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Sick Child

Case notes: How records of illness allow children to speak to us from the past.

It is notoriously difficult to investigate the experience of childhood in the seventeenth century. Children rarely left written records. However, there is one context in which their voices do survive: illness. Acutely aware of the likelihood of death, parents recorded the thoughts, words, and actions of their sick children in detail. The resulting evidence provides rare and intimate insights into the lives and deaths of seventeenth-century children. Below, a sample of children’s stories are given; they are taken from parents’ diaries and doctors’ casebooks.

As she climbed into bed one October night in 1625, three-year-old Elizabeth Wallington said to her father, ‘Father, I go abroad tomorrow and bye you a plomee pie’. Her father, Nehemiah, recorded in his diary that ‘these were the last words that I did here my sweete child speeke’, for several hours later ‘the very panges of death seassed upon her’. She ‘continued in great agonies (which was very grievous unto us the beholders)’ for two days, and died at ‘foore a clocke in the morning, being the eleventh day of October’. Elizabeth’s death greatly affected Nehemiah: he was ‘much disstrackted in my mind and could not be comforted’. This man, a carpenter from London, was to lose four of his five children to childhood disease.

At two o’clock in the morning in 1675, twelve-year-old Caleb Vernon from Battersea, sick of consumption, announced, ‘Now I think I shall die’. He bequeathed ‘all his toyes’ and his pet bird to his sisters Nancy and Betty, and told his mother ‘I love your company dearly’. Seeing his father ‘gush into tears’, he pleaded, ‘Father do not weep, but pray for me[:] I long to be with God’. Caleb began to grow breathless, ‘as if choaked with plegm’, and his father, who was ‘in great care for him’, ran downstairs to fetch some medicines ‘for his relief’. Returning quickly, he saw his son ‘thrusting, first, his finger, and then his whole hand in to his mouth’ to clear his throat. Hearing his father coming, Caleb gasped, ‘O Father, what shall I do!’, and then ‘immediately lay back’, uttered ‘God, God’, and died.

One afternoon in the 1630s, fourteen-year-old boy Richard Gilmore vomited ‘black Worms, about an inch and a half long, with six feet, and little red heads’. After vomiting, he ‘was almost dead, but a little time after he revived’. The next day, the boy’s father went to see a doctor from Stratford called John Hall, ‘earnestly desiring’ his advice. He brought with him some of the worms ‘wrapped in Paper’, which, upon examination, ‘crept like Earwigs’. The boy was so ‘cruelly afflicted’ that ‘he was ready to tear himself to pieces’ to remove the worms. Dr Hall administered a remedy which made the boy vomit seven times, and bring up ‘six Worms’, the like of which the doctor had ‘never beheld or read of’ before. Dr Hall noted in his casebook that these treatments ‘delivered’ the boy of his infestation, so that when he visited him two years later, he ‘told me he had never been troubled with it since’.

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�������������Ī - Stuarts

The language and literature of chastity

Heart-Breaking History: Voices of sick children from the past

��Ī - Stuarts