Abstract
Queene.' Had he chosen, at this moment, to deploy one of his many enigmatic and punning slippages that recur throughout his epic, Spenser could have just as appropriately announced that it fails him to write of chastity; for if it is true that, unlike the more properly epic legends of holiness in Book 1 and of temperance in Book 2, it is chastity that is the subject of Spenser's first failed, selfunravelling narrative in his epic, then we might consider the possibility that the concept of chastity, despite its surface innocence, may be a kind of representational scandal. 2 It falles me here within the bounds of this essay to examine two key representations of chastity in English literary history. Of one thing we can be certain from the outset: the concept of chastity (that fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest [proem.3]) and its privileging of the female body as the site of its operations always make their appearance at the intersection of what has come to be known as sexual politics. In her recent book Chaste Thinking, Stephanie Jed, for example, uses the metaphor of chaste thinking to show how Florentine humanism was structured on a virtual ideology of
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