Kirjahaku

While many scholars find the early modern triad of virtues for women—silence, chastity, and obedience—to be straightforward and nonnegotiable, Jessica C. Murphy demonstrates that these virtues were by no means as direct and inflexible as they might seem. Drawing on the literature of the period—from the plays of Shakespeare to a conduct manual written for a princess to letters from a wife to her husband—as well as contemporary gender theory and philosophy, she uncovers the multiple meanings of behavioral expectations for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Through her renegotiation of cultural ideals as presented in both literary and nonliterary texts of early modern England, Murphy presents models for “acceptable” women’s conduct that lie outside of the rigid prescriptions of the time.Virtuous Necessity will appeal to readers interested in early modern English literature, including canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as their female contemporaries such as Amelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary. It will also appeal to scholars of conduct literature; of early modern drama, popular literature, poetry, and prose; of women’s history; and of gender theory.

This dissertation is intended as a contribution to philosophical debates about the relationship between law and morality. My basic claim is that this relationship is importantly illuminated in various ways and at different levels by an understanding of the way in which a theory of law necessarily incorporates a metaphysics of human nature. As we will see, sometimes this incorporation is explicit, as when Jeremy Bentham's psychological hedonism gives rise to an understanding of law's bindingness as grounded in peoples' causal history with incentives. More contentiously, I argue that though contemporary positivists take their account of law to be metaphysically noncommittal, views of what it is to be human agent continue to motivate, if implicitly, their positions. This is the case, I suggest, with H. L. A. Hart's analysis. I argue that Hart, in his various engagements with rival jurisprudential theories, draws tacitly on an underlying ontology of human agency. Likewise, these rival accounts often have reasons for rejecting Hart's analysis that go deeper than can be addressed at the level of substantive theory. In order to properly understand these debates, I suggest, we must understand better the relationship between a theory of law and the conception of human agency that underlies it.