At the very end of The Matter of Virtue, Holly Crocker disavows the notion that this might be “a book about philosophy's or theology's influence on literature,” or, on the other hand, “a book that argues certain poets are philosophers or theologians” (p. 269). These statements about what the book is not are helpful to keep in mind as one navigates its fascinating arguments about the power—and misfortunes—of feminine virtue in medieval and Early Modern English literature. Crocker is interested in uncovering “an alternative foundation for ethics” centered on bodies in community, on vulnerability to suffering and endurance of that suffering, and on protecting others. This mode of ethics is embodied by female characters in a variety of works—poetry, drama, visual arts, and prose narrative—from the late medieval period to the Renaissance. The book emphasizes the pragmatic, everyday discourses and practices that engage what Crocker terms “material virtue”: the inherent powers of a body (not necessarily a human body) interacting with other bodies in the world. Paying attention to such virtues as they emerge in literary texts offers not just a recuperation of feminine virtue—a quality so often derided as weak or inauthentic—but “a rival idea of what it means to be human” (p. 6).It is helpful to disentangle these literary arguments from the philosophical or theological partly because some of the brief discussions of the history of philosophy can be misleading, as when the destabilized relationship between habit and virtue in the fourteenth century is redescribed as a severing of the connection between volition and action, with the impression that medieval scholastic philosophy was consumed with the problem that a vicious person might merely perform good acts (p. 10). It was not, although Crocker convincingly demonstrates that literary and instructional texts were in fact so consumed. More importantly, the role of Aristotle's moral philosophy, treated throughout the book, is somewhat unsettled. Crocker often aligns female virtue with Aristotelian virtue theory. Katherine, in John Capgrave's Life of St. Katherine, “exemplifies the Aristotelian idea that virtue develops as a result of constant guidance and deliberate practice . . . [she] is fostered by an ethical habitus that promotes her innate goodness” (p. 117). Katherina in Taming of the Shrew inhabits virtue along Aristotelian lines and thus “achieves material virtue” (p. 234). This understanding of Aristotelian virtue as involving both body and mind, unifying action and intention, is linked to Crocker's recuperation of feminine ethics as involving inherent power, distinct from a rules-based ethics that might merely be performed. Yet elsewhere Aristotelian ethics is highlighted for its masculinist assumptions and rootedness in a heroic culture that celebrates the independent rational agent. Thus the book also describes “traditional virtue ethics” as standing for individualism and masculine norms rather than the vulnerability that is marked feminine in the works treated here. This bifurcation can be confusing, as the reader sometimes gathers the impression that the recovery of a premodern virtue ethics in the process of being superseded is key to the recognition of an alternative feminine virtue. But that is not, in fact, the story the book has to tell.Instead, taking the readings and arguments on their own terms—and thus taking the book's gestures to classical, premodern, and contemporary philosophy as contingently relevant rather than forming a linear historical argument—allows the lineaments of feminine material virtue to emerge more clearly. The book describes a cultural environment in which women's conduct was increasingly subject to overt and specific direction (e.g., in conduct books) and yet constantly under suspicion for its propensity to cover viciousness with virtuous appearances. In the works under study, female characters find unexpected power in the capacity to defy misogynist expectations and either to shape their environments or to indict their social contexts when that shaping fails.The first chapter asks the intriguing question of why Criseyde is absent from the “famous women” catalogue tradition that includes Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. Crocker turns to Lydgate's Troy Book for an account of Criseyde's excellence, and she persuasively reads Lydgate to understand Chaucer, rather than the more (understandably) usual tack of reading the earlier author's influence on the later. Lydgate's depictions of both Criseyde and Helen reveal that social standards for women's virtue are more to blame for their infidelity than some internal flaw. One of the pleasures of the chapter is in Crocker's uncovering of the ironies in Lydgate's narrative address to Helen, as though she were an errant housewife who should have guarded her honesty more carefully—why did she not stay at home, why go out “strangeris for to se”? In both Lydgate and Chaucer, the ethical tension for Criseyde in being bound to external prescription at the same time that she strives to maintain an internal virtue leads to her loss of dignity. Yet the object of critique in these works is not feminine virtue, or its mutability and failure, but a heroic culture that cannot accommodate feminine ethical action.The second chapter takes up Criseyde's legacy in Henryson and Shakespeare. It expands the familiar story of “what Henryson did to Chaucer” (p. 79) by taking up Henryson's influence on sixteenth-century verse. Henryson's destroyed, leprous Criseyde emerges as more powerful, dignified, and sympathetic in the Testament itself, only for her character to emerge in later verse as a whip to discipline women and a figure of terror and repulsion for men who should learn to fear feminine deception. Ironically, as Crocker demonstrates, such cynicism about feminine virtue evacuates the didactic function of prescriptive writings. They inevitably present themselves as merely descriptive, with virtue and vice as inherent qualities that cannot be transformed. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Criseyde is retrieved as a heroine who might once again exhibit corrupted virtue not as an indictment of women, but as a critique of a masculine social system.Chapter three turns to Chaucer's Custance and the tradition of virgin martyr legends. In these stories, virtue comes from a source outside the self: from God. Such grace does not diminish the power of feminine virtue, but instead it contributes to the development of an idea of virtue that circulates (“Custance's virtue is catching” [p. 125]), takes place in a network of relations, and involves dependency on others. The chapter suggests an intriguing analogy between the networks of feminine bodies and the production and circulation of books and images for women. Indeed, even more than working by analogy, each network authorizes the other. The chapter contains a reading of the frescoes in Eton College Chapel that include a version of the “Empress of Rome” narrative depicting a wrongly accused queen. These kinds of narratives accumulate a sense that ethical action can be reactive: constancy in the face of suffering, and even constancy in response to grace, offers a positive model of virtue at odds with individual action.The fourth chapter returns to the question of an interiority divided from bodily practice. Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America is read as indicting cultural prescriptions that disallow “women's capacities for moral discretion” (p. 155). Spenser's Faerie Queene, in turn, positively constructs a model of material virtue—enacted, bodily virtue—joined to intelligence. It is not only literary texts that create the possibilities for acknowledgment of feminine virtue, but the cultural significance of Elizabeth I, who is read here not only as a threat to male power, but as a feminine object of ethical admiration. Crocker provides an intriguing rereading of Spenser's Florimell, the constantly fleeing beauty. She observes that Florimell is often judged in terms of the “regard or disregard of those who behold her beauty” (p. 167), when in fact beauty, in Platonic and other terms, has an ethical intelligence of its own.The final chapter takes in the unexpected parallel pairing of Griselda and the shrew, under the name of “Shrewish Virtue.” Crocker shows that Griselda stories actually demonstrate this figure's industriousness and integrity, not so much her passivity. Yet the chapter argues further that the binary of active and passive is better understood as undone by Griselda. She is a model for agency as endurance rather than action. In a reading of John Phillip's Plaie of Pacient Grissell, both the shrew figure (the Nurse) and Grissell are seen to articulate the same critiques of male household tyranny, placing the shrew and the patient wife on a continuum rather than in opposition. Masculine dominance is shown to depend upon this dichotomy of shrew and virtue. The most famous shrew, Shakespeare's Katherina, is read as destabilizing these categories further; via her “radical obedience” (p. 234) she usurps Petruchio's role and rather than disciplined shrew turned patient wife she is a self-created embodiment of only seemingly passive virtue that still has the capacity to unsettle and embarrass.The book concludes with Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, a work that has long troubled scholars for its unsatisfyingly limited portrayals of feminine virtue and its occasional silencing of female voices. Among other arguments, Crocker observes persuasively that in “suspending feminine complaint” Chaucer “departs from the tradition that makes women's pain a site of poetic production” (p. 260). This claim might be considered productively alongside Marjorie Curry Woods’ scholarship on the role of classical women's speeches in the medieval classroom, especially her recent book Weeping for Dido. Giving voice to women cannot be assumed in this context to be a sustainable gesture of cross-gender solidarity.The Matter of Virtue offers much of interest for feminist literary scholars and scholars invested in ongoing critiques of humanism. Its culminating portrait of feminine virtue rooted in shared vulnerability, dispossession, and endurance offers a provocation for rethinking our understanding not only of premodern literature and culture, but also our contemporary ethical models.