Chastity signifies sexual purity and restraint, either through virginity or through fidelity in marriage. While Augustine and Aquinas define chastity as a virtue for both men and women, Shakespeare depicts chastity almost exclusively as a female virtue, repeatedly using the term in connection with feminized representations of nature, the virgin goddess Diana, and young women (married and unmarried). Although Shakespeare’s plays include male characters who fixate on the chastity of female characters, chastity is a virtue of self-government that must, by definition, be under the control of women themselves. For Shakespeare’s female characters, chastity functions as a means of expressing bodily autonomy and rejecting attempts at patriarchal control, concepts that are still relevant for young women today. Shakespeare’s chaste heroines now lend their names and stories to projects designed to promote social justice and advocacy for young women. The cultural authority of Shakespeare’s plays can help provide a historical and ethical reference for a virtue that centers on control over one’s own body. In the context of current global debates about women’s rights and sexual assault, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that chastity is not only a relevant virtue — it is crucial to understanding the importance of women’s autonomy.

The Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s central argument: that in post-Reformation England, when girls were expected to marry and turn their minds toward husbands, early moderns viewed the stage of girlhood between puberty and marriage as one of cognitive liberty and productivity. The Introduction explains how the brain’s anatomy and mental faculties were commonly perceived, and when and to what extent the brain came to be sexed. It traces the transmission of ancient and medieval depictions of pubertal change, and demonstrates how early modern English adaptations of these sources reveal a gendered shift in the cognitive vocabulary used to describe what happens to male and female body-minds when they experienced “the change of fourteen years.” It articulates the interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks that inform the study: theories of embodied cognition, studies of adolescence, work by historians of science on the early modern humoral body, and recent scholarship in Girls’ studies. Also included are discussions about constructing a feminist literary practice that analyzes depictions of embodied female experiences, and how early modern scholars largely have overlooked girls and failied to recognize the dynamic brainwork that Shakespeare and his contemporaries attributed to adolescent females, fictional and real.

This chapter turns inward, considering how the performance of vice haunted the early modern child, how the positionality of boyhood or girlhood inflected and shaped the act of performance, and the possible reasons for casting children as rule-breakers, sexual deviants, and seducers in a pedagogical context. Plays and masques with antimasque style roles were performed by schoolgirls and boys, including a boy who played an unruly scholar celebrating truancy in song, young ladies who sang as Furies and witches, and schoolgirl dancers who enacted scenes of murder and violence. Children of both genders also practiced the arts of musical seduction: a boy, Wentworth Randall, sang as Dame Siren in Apollo Shroving (1627), before his costume was violently torn from him, revealing a monstrous fish tail; a girl sang to persuade Paris to choose Venus and pleasure in Beauties Triumph (1676), even as she warned of the dangers of doing so. As these entertainments reveal, the performance of vice was dialectical – the pedagogues who crafted the entertainments claimed they displayed immorality only to uncloak its rottenness. Yet, given early modern pedagogical theories, there was also the very real danger that children might become what they performed – imitatio gone terribly wrong.