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.

Here Ann Buckley presents an appraisal of the collection known as ‘The Cambridge Songs’, found in a mid-eleventh-century English manuscript but derived from a German source which also included material from the international clerical court culture of the period. Buckley suggests that the collection can be viewed as an example of an ‘anthology of musical knowledge’, which informs on genres, techniques, performance practice and the types of repertory that would have been usual in the eleventh century among learned audiences. The chapter focuses firstly on the collection’s song texts as a source of information on musical knowledge and musical practice in German court culture of the eleventh century but takes account too of the wider European clerical and intellectual framework, interrogating the raison d’être of such a collection in the context of anthologies of knowledge of the time.

This chapter explores how anxieties regarding women’s ability to feign virtue contribute to the idea of female shamefastness as an enemy to be besieged and conquered by desiring men. This adversarial dynamic emerges clearly in personification allegories of varying scale and complexity, which present Shame as a stubborn adversary who must be defeated by Love by any means necessary, including by force. The chapter begins by considering the origins of the enmity between desire and shamefastness in the nature of personification allegory, focusing in particular on Prudentius’s treatment of lust (Sodomita Libido) and modesty (Pudicitia) in his Psychomachia. It then examines how personification allegories such as the medieval French Roman de la rose and its Middle English translation draw on anti-feminist tradition in order to explicitly establish female shamefastness as an obstacle or opponent to be overcome by male desire. The chapter’s final section turns to Lydgate’s discussion of female shamefastness in the Troy Book, and demonstrates how his depiction of Medea’s ‘staged’ shamefastness and his allegorization of her subsequent emotional turmoil articulate the anti-feminist logic that puts female honour at risk.

In this chapter Marilina Cesario addresses the subject of weather forecasting in the Middle Ages as revealed in the meteorological prognostics that survive abundantly from throughout the period but particularly from the eleventh century onwards. The chapter focuses in particular on one fifteenth-century medical manuscript from Germany containing an anthology of seven Latin weather texts. Cesario edits and translates the texts for the first time and offers detailed discussion of them. She finds that these treatises contribute to their manuscript’s overarching interest in natural philosophy and that they were mostly given theoretical rather than practical usage, having their place in a context of academic learning (eruditio). One item stands out from the others, however, a puzzling salt prognostication found uniquely here. This text relies not, it is argued, on erudite knowledge but on knowledge acquired empirically and appears to have been designed for practical use.

In the final chapter in the book Donald Scragg focuses on the very practical issue of the size and the layout of Old English manuscripts from the eighth century to the first half of the twelfth, in order to explore the role of books in the transmission of thought, knowledge and practical experiences of the age. The chapter considers how the dimensions of surviving books can give clues ‘about their intended use, about how they were created and about what that may tell us about the role of the written vernacular in the society of early England’.

In the opening chapter Sándor Chardonnens focuses on medieval collections on dream divination. Taking account of a vast corpus of such writings, widely dispersed chronologically and geographically, he argues that alphabetical and thematic dream books, dream lunaries and mantic alphabets belong to the same branch of divination, that of oneiromancy, but that they were rarely anthologised in clusters within the same collection. He investigates patterns of transmission of dream divination in manuscripts and early printed texts in order to understand whether the ways in which those three types of dream divination were clustered together may give us an indication of genre awareness.

This chapter takes up the problematic relationship between female shamefastness and the model of hardy masculinity and considers its disturbing implications for female exemplarity founded on shamefastness. As Chaucer’s adaptations of the narratives of Virginia and Lucretia demonstrate, women’s shamefast chastity is not only under threat from masculine hardiness, but can even provoke that threat, either by stimulating masculine desire or by inviting men to prove their manhood. The chapter begins by exploring how Chaucer represents the irreconcilability of shamefast femininity and forceful masculinity elsewhere in his work. It then continues to the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, and shows that Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower (c. 1330–1408), approach the theme of ‘manly force’ from very different angles. Whereas Gower invites readers to consider what might have happened in a Rome that was justly governed by chaste rulers, Chaucer engages readers in a deeply uncomfortable experiment in counterfactual thinking about female honour, an experiment that threatens to reopen the question of whether the binary of death or dishonour need exist in the first place.