Crocker explores what happened to virtue when late-medieval and early-modern English poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered male agent but rather, and as women more frequently experienced it, as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others.

Introduction. Virtues That Matter
PART I. PRESCRIPTIVE FAILURES
Chapter 1. The Fragility of Virtue, from Chaucer to Lydgate
Chapter 2. The Matter of Virtue, from Henryson to Shakespeare
PART II. GRACE, ENACTED: ROMANCE AND MATERIAL VIRTUE
Chapter 3. Virtue's Grace: Custance and Other Daughters
Chapter 4. Virtue's Knowledge in Lodge and Spenser
PART III. HOMELY VIRTUES
Chapter 5. Shrewish Virtue, from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Conclusion. Legends of Good Women
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Holly A. Crocker is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina and author of Chaucer's Visions of Manhood.