'And in the midst of those words shot him': Satire and the Virtue of Romance in 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'

As its title suggests, Margaret Cavendish's 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' interrogates female virtue and the ways in which prose romance's generic structures depend on it. While silence and obedience were often subordinate to chastity, early modern conduct manuals ask women to uphold these and other virtues simultaneously. Early modern prose romances, however, demonstrate the difficulty of doing so. In taking up the romance genre, Cavendish satirizes the importance of chastity for the virtue of real and imagined women alike in order to renegotiate conventionally female roles in romance, and, by extension, their allegorical representations of active moral and political agents