Instead of lifelong celibacy, The Faerie Queene’s female virgins occupy a transitional space positioned between an understanding of chastity as “abstinence from all sexual intercourse” and “purity from unlawful sexual intercourse.”11 They have entered a Protestant narrative of chastity, in which women no longer have an institutionally supported alternative to marriage—but their marriages remain beyond the poem’s narrative horizon. Spenser embraces a devotional ideal of vowed virginity in only one instance, and then only for men: priests in the temple of Isis “by the vow of their religion / They tied were to stedfast chastity / And continence of life, that all forgon, / They mote the better tend to their deuotion” (5.7.9.6–9).12 Celibate monasticism is possible for religious men, but, in this mirror of Elizabethan England, it is not an option for women.13 In what follows, I will demonstrate how the multiple virginities—and multiple deferred marriages—of The Faerie Queene reveal the fractures in a social system that simultaneously elevated married chastity, celebrated powerful virginity, and denied women a religious vocation.
Spenser suggests that Elizabeth made every facet of female virginity her own, leaving him with no basis for the representation of chaste women who did not fit within England’s post-Reformation religious and political system.14 By the last decade of her reign, iconography associated with England’s Virgin Queen proliferated in literary and visual representations, and Elizabeth’s youthful intimation that “it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage” had resulted in the seeming paradox of a Protestant monarch dedicated to perpetual virginity.15 Critical scrutiny has focused not simply on the queen’s choice to live and die a virgin but on the similarities between her representation and that of the Virgin Mary, leading many scholars to interrogate discourses of virginity in early modern England as part of an Elizabethan appropriation of Marian iconography and Catholic devotional materials.16 Recent work has questioned this narrative of substitution and suggested that, rather than replacing the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth “functioned as an icon of Protestant reform and England’s newly imagined identity.”17 Indeed, like England’s religious settlement, Elizabeth’s virgin status remained under near-constant scrutiny, especially during the first twenty years of her reign.18 While she imagined a monument raised in commemoration of her rule in 1559—“in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”—it would be many years before this statement could be viewed retrospectively as a kind of prophecy.19 Elizabeth’s early preference for an unmarried life was a savvy political maneuver, one that enabled her to avoid the inevitable questions of how a queen would negotiate the internal contradictions of a patriarchal system in which the ideology of marriage necessitated female submission. But it was also one of many ways that virginity came to be redefined for English Protestants: even as the queen adopted a rhetoric of perpetual virginity, she positioned herself as an object of courtly desire and remained at least conjecturally open to a future marriage.
Virginity was essential to both courtly and literary figurations of Elizabeth’s power, though the queen maintained the possibility that she might eventually conform to a Protestant ideal of married chastity. Theodora A. Jankowski has argued that “Elizabeth used the cultural ‘fact’ that there was no profession, no place for adult women virgins in the early modern sex/gender system to stress how unlike other women she was, as well as how unlike other rulers.”20 The Virgin Queen’s exceptional status, in other words, depended in part on the religious and cultural shifts that accompanied the Protestant Reformation: if nuns had remained a significant presence in England, Elizabeth’s vow to remain unmarried until “it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life” would have carried devotional rather than political implications.21 Just a few years after Queen Mary had restored Catholicism and attempted to revive English monasticism, Elizabeth’s accession meant both the perpetual exile of England’s remaining nuns and a significant shift in the early modern religious, political, and literary representation of virginity.
In the years following the dissolution of the monasteries, English nuns had largely disappeared. While some former monastics remained in England, their diminished social positions and meager pensions led to lives of poverty outside the cloister walls.22 A number of women traveled to the continent to join religious orders, individually and in groups, but exile in foreign monasteries prevented them from fully participating in sixteenth-century English religious and political life.23 When Mary took the throne, the renewal of monastic foundations briefly became possible: in 1557, members of Syon Abbey—the only convent to survive the dissolution intact—returned to England after exile on the continent and were “restored” to their “former happy foundation and monastery of Syon.”24 But their restoration was short-lived, and, with Mary’s death, they “were once again cast into the sea of their previous sorrow and tribulation, and expelled from their monastery and from all their first hope and consolation.”25 This second exile coincided, on the one hand, with Elizabeth’s attempt to position herself as a politically self-contained virgin for whom marriage was not essential and, on the other, with a significant reconfiguration of the relative social status of marriage and vowed virginity in humanist thought on both sides of the doctrinal divide.26 Protestant writers were especially eager to valorize female chastity within marital relationships; virginity, in their tracts, became a “transitional phase” to be supplanted in every woman’s life by chaste married sexuality.27 The complexity of religious life in early modern England, however, prevented such cultural constructions from solidifying. Thus, while I find Jankowski’s argument regarding Elizabeth’s self-representation and “the cultural ‘fact’ that there was no profession, no place for adult women virgins” useful as starting point in 1559, when Elizabeth offered herself as a uniquely Protestant and exceptionally powerful virgin at precisely the moment nuns were forced to leave England, this chapter will question both the validity and the relevance of that “cultural ‘fact’” in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, when literary representations of vowed virginity reflected on the unsettled status of chastity and religion in post-Reformation England.
In the proem to Book 3 of the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser suggests that his depiction of chastity is superfluous, since Elizabeth already provides the best example of “that fairest vertue” (3.proem.1.2). “Sith it is shrined in my Soueraines brest, / And form’d so liuely in each perfect part, / That to all Ladies, which haue it profest, / Need but behold the pourtraict of her hart, / If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art” (1.5–9). Chastity lodges like a relic enshrined in the reliquary of Elizabeth’s breast, in a devotional image that is swiftly overtaken by a series of conditionals and reversals that recall those initiated by Fidelia and Speranza in the House of Holiness. Instead of worshipping Elizabeth’s chastity directly, women should look at the portrait of her heart, if such an artistic reproduction is even possible. Spenser asks whether art is sufficient to represent the virtue most prominently associated with the queen, says no, and then says yes. Sculptors and painters “may not least part expresse” and even poets will not dare to try “for fear through want of words her excellence to marre” (2.1, 9). Yet Spenser’s “lucklesse lot doth me constraine / Hereto perforce,” and he asks Elizabeth’s pardon “sith that choicest wit / Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine / That I in colourd showes may shadow it” (3.4–5, 6–8). Allegory, in the form of “colourd showes,” is an unsatisfying solution to an intractable problem, for here and in the first line of the proem (“It falls me here to write of Chastity”), Spenser implies that he must write of chastity, and that he must do so here, in the final book of his 1590 Faerie Queene.
As the virtue “farre above the rest” (1.2), it makes sense that chastity would serve as a culmination, and yet Book 3 is only a temporary endpoint. Both the title page, which advertises “The Faerie Queene. Disposed into twelve books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues,” and the letter to Ralegh printed at the end of the poem promise twelve books—twenty-four if the moral virtues are “well accepted” and Spenser frames “the other part of polliticke vertues.”28 Chastity is only a temporary conclusion, for both his poem and his characters. Rather than perpetual, vowed virgins, Spenser