Afterword

Abstract

In the literature of medieval England, being an honourable woman is a matter of emotional practice and performance-it requires learning how to feel in a specific way. While certain emotions like pity or compassion might be closely associated with ideals of womanhood or womanliness, a very different, more specific emotional disposition was required to preserve female honour: hypervigilance against the possibility of shame. In their engagement with this concept, and with its possibilities and complications, medieval English texts reveal a keen interest in what Peter N. Stearns has described as 'the anticipation aspect that extends shaming's social utility' by making a virtue out of one's efforts to avoid shame. 1 This alertness to shame might also be seen as a kind of proneness to shame, a hypersensitivity and predisposition to the experience of shame. Thus, somewhat ironically, a woman like Chaucer's Virginia who might be described as '[s]hamefast … in maydens shamefastnesse' (The Physician's Tale 55) was simultaneously more likely to try to avoid shame and also more predisposed to feel it. Like Latin and various European vernaculars, Middle English had a term for this complex of ideas connected to averseness to shame: shamefastness. Although the word itself might describe the fear of any kind of general disgrace, when applied to women it referred more specifically to aversion to sexual shame-that is, shame that might attach to a woman deemed to be unchaste of body, mind, or habit. A woman's ability to secure her chastity (and therefore her honour) corresponded directly to her ability to practise shamefastness. Medieval English texts point to the various ways that women might seek to hone or mobilize their inward sense of shame by reflecting on what they would lose if disgraced (as the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry proposes) and by inhibiting their motor impulses. They also highlight how a woman's honour depended on her ability to perform her virtue before others. The