This chapter, by Hugh Magennis, considers the theme of the interpretation and application of Christian knowledge as reflected in treatments of the apostles in vernacular writings in Anglo-Saxon England. The acta of the apostles originated in the East but were transmitted and reworked by western writers, not least in pre-Conquest England. Surveying depictions of the apostles in Old English, Magennis’s chapter emphasises the definitive place that the apostles occupy within Christian systems of knowledge and understanding but also examines how traditions of the apostles are appropriated and reconceived by Anglo-Saxon writers (including the poet of Andreas, whose reworking of his source is considered in greater detail in the chapter in this volume by Richard North).

This chapter begins by using the subject of women’s preuytees (or shamefuls, as genitalia might also be termed in Middle English) as a gateway to examining the relationship between shame and the embodied nature of female honour in medieval English culture, focusing on the links between postlapsarian shame and the body in the medieval imagination. It then considers how postlapsarian shame contributed to medieval understandings of pain and shame as universal features of women’s experience of childbirth. Finally, it explores how the prologue of one version of the mid fifteenth-century gynaecological treatise now known as The Sickness of Women, as well as the prologue of The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, employ strategies to mitigate the social and emotional risks women faced in exposing their bodies even for the ostensibly innocent purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment. While they perhaps inevitably replicate the gestures of concealing and revealing that characterize the practice of female honour, these prologues also present women’s shamefastness as something deserving of sympathy, respect, and protection.

This chapter shows that medieval English conduct texts exhort women to be invested in being hypervigilant against the possibility of shame, and that they function as guides for practising that shamefastness, advocating and describing ‘manipulations of body and mind’ that are intended to intensify and communicate a woman’s sense of shame. The chapter begins by situating conduct literature in relation to the education of girls and young women in medieval England, and in relation to the chaste ideals to which medieval women were expected to adhere. It then turns to the conduct texts themselves, focusing primarily on four examples of conduct literature in Middle English and Middle Scots: the Middle English translation of Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles, and the poems How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wife Would a Pilgrimage, and the Middle Scots Thewis of Good Women. The final section of the chapter demonstrates how the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry situates its advice regarding how to secure womanly ‘honoure and goodnesse’ within a recognizably literary frame, one that recasts the pursuit of female honour in heroic terms.

This final chapter examines Hoccleve’s engagement with both female shamefastness and masculinity in two of his early works, the Letter of Cupid (his translation of Christine de Pizan’s anti-misogynist Epistre au dieu d’Amours) and La Male Regle, through the lens of what has been characterized as Hoccleve’s distinctive pattern of self-effacement. It argues that, in presenting himself as a ‘poore shamefast man’, Hoccleve plays on two of the key beliefs underpinning the medieval practice of honourable female shamefastness: the belief that such emotional practices can be learned, and the belief that they can also be counterfeited. The chapter begins by taking a closer look at the Middle English language of ‘manhood’ and ‘manliness’ in relation to shamefastness. It then turns to Hoccleve’s treatment of misleading appearances in his Letter of Cupid, in which Hoccleve claims to have proto-feminist intentions but ultimately suggests that the behaviour of neither men nor women can be taken at face value. Finally, it considers La Male Regle in order to show how Hoccleve exploits the idea of shamefastness as a replicable practice, transforming what medieval women were encouraged to make an apparently artless performance of virtue into a performance of conspicuous artifice.