The Overblown Rose: Chastity, Knowledge, and Skepticism in English Literature, 1595-1713

This dissertation offers a literary history of intertwined developments in early modern English imaginings of chastity and skeptical philosophy. In the aftermath of the Reformation and amid rapid social changes, chastity accrued new meanings. The closure of monasteries, nascent capitalism’s restructuring of family formation, and the medico-scientific debate over the existence of the hymen (and its efficacy as a marker of virginity) offer some examples of the social forces that revised conceptualizations of chastity. This dissertation highlights how writers in the period explore chastity to test the problem of other minds and to think through crises of the reliability of sense perception and knowledge-making, all of which were central concerns for the skeptical philosophy of the age. Deploying historicist methodologies and inspired by gender and sexuality studies, I offer readings of early modern philosophy by the likes of Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and John Locke alongside literature to underscore how chastity was contoured by developments to early modern skepticism. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the misreading of virginal bodies in Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) and Thomas Middleton’s city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613). The second chapter focuses on the anti-fruition subgenre of Cavalier poetry, centered on poems by Sir John Suckling (first printed in the 1640s), which debate the merits and demerits of abstinence with inconclusive results. The last chapter discusses Jane Barker’s novel Love Intrigues (1713), detailing how her semi-autobiographical persona Galesia moved through disappointed love to celibacy. Barker’s narrative demonstrates that the questions of hyperbolic skepticism raised in the seventeenth century are not resolved in the eighteenth, despite empiricist efforts to settle them.