Description
Book SynopsisChastity and lust, charity and greed, humility and pride, are but some of the virtues and vices that have been in tension since Prudentius’ Psychomachia, written in the fifth century. While there has been widespread agreement within a given culture about what exactly constitutes a virtue or a vice, are these categories so consistent after all?
In Ambiguous Antidotes, Hilaire Kallendorf explores the receptions of Virtues in the realm of moral philosophy and the artistic production it influenced during the Spanish Golden Age. Using the Derridian notion of pharmakon, a powerful substance that can serve as poison and cure, Kallendorf’s original and pioneering insight into five key Virtues (justice, fortitude, chastity, charity, and prudence) reveals an intriguing but messy relationship. Rather than being seen as unambiguously good antidotes, the Virtues are instead contested spaces where competing sets of values jostled for primacy a
Trade Review
"This ambitious volume is written with great verve and stands to open many doors for future comedia study." -- Shifra Armon, University of Florida * Bulletin des Commandants, 2019 *
"The book confirms the great potential of Golden Age drama as a source of case studies. The commercial stage was a locus where popular demand intersected with the sort of normative discourse generated by the cultural, religious, and political elites: as Kallendorf points out, the theater can be viewed as an ‘artificially constructed laboratory for the study of moral behaviour.’" -- José María Pérez Fernández, Universidad de Granada * Renaissance Quarterly, Summer 2020 *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements List of Figures Prologue: Virtuous Genealogies Introduction 1. Blind Justice 2. Fleeting Fortitude 3. Charity as Greed 4. Loose Chastity 5. Prudence: Panacea or Placebo? 6. Class Trumps Sex: (En)Gendering Virtue Conclusion Epilogue: Virtual Virtue
