In the third chapter of his Curtaine Lecture (1637), intended as ‘Encouragement to young Virgins and Damosells to behave themselves well in their single estate, that they might become eminent Wives and Matrons’, Thomas Heywood praised ‘that brave Roman knight’ and great ‘Arch-champion of virginitie’, Virginius, for killing his chaste daughter Virginia rather than allowing her body to be ‘vitiated and dishonoured’ at the hands of the corrupt and lustful judge, Appius Claudius.2 As a Curtaine Lecture, intended to satirise how wives ‘carp’ at their husbands in bed, Heywood presented the state of marriage as honourable and to be desired as long as unruly wives could be tamed.3 To exhort women to such good behaviour, Heywood employed historical exempla, ‘calling to remembrance the famous and notable acts of illustrious persons’, that women may through ‘observation and imitation’ become ‘inflamed’ to ‘aspire unto that celsitude honour and renowne to which they arrived before us’.