The Chastity Plot

"There is a compelling story to be told about the rise, fall, and transfiguration of the ideal of chastity, and Lisabeth During is the perfect person to tell it. In The Chastity Plot, During reveals how the obsession with chastity has played a powerful role in the history of our moral imagination. The metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. The demand for chastity has shaped social institutions and figured in the construction of political power; sexual renunciation has been an ornament to sainthood and a technique of ascetics both sacred and profane"--

In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.

How does a modern woman keep a handsome, virile husband in deep submission? The answer for some wives is Enforced Male Chastity. M. J. Rennie's groundbreaking novel of Feminine Domination reveals the discoveries of three contemporary couples who embrace the exalted highs, the deep, submissive lows, and the extreme ecstatic climaxes that Enforced Male Chastity produces. Adults only. Cover art by Rebecca.

John is a college student currently separated from his fiance Laura, while she begins a hot sexual affair with her roommate Christine. Though John is anxious to have Laura back, with Christine now a permanent fixture in Laura's life, the terms of the relationship are about to radically change. Either John agrees to be submissive in a menage a trois with two dominant females, or he's out. Eager to stay in Laura's good graces John agrees to anything, including public humiliation, panty wearing, and Laura's unique punishment for unauthorized masturbation: a locking chastity device. She tricks him into putting it on, not telling him that Christine has the keys. Later he learns from Christine that a key has been hidden in his weekend bag all along. But now, the demanding Christine wants him to consciously choose to remain in chastity! John can't help wonder who's running the relationship, Laura or Christine? As the two femmes take charge, John is trained to serve their every whim, to call them mistress, and play their humiliating sexual games. When he fails to please this daunting duo, he suffers a variety of painful punishments from bondage to whipping to being sodomized with a strap-on. Despite the rough demands of his new life, John finds his surrendering role strangely pleasing, and highly erotic. All misgivings aside, he's still in love with Laura, and willing to slavishly serve both women in order to have her. But how long can this strange menage a trois survive? Will John ever have Laura to himself again? Is Christine really falling in love with him? Although John's journey into chastity has just begun, it's certain to take some curious twists as these two lovely, in charge females turn this wary college boy into their groveling slave.

Using a comparative, feminist approach informed by English and Italian literary and theatre studies, this book investigates connections between Shakespearean comedy and the Italian novella tradition. Shakespeare’s comedies adapted the styles of wit, character types, motifs, plots, and other narrative elements of the novella tradition for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and they investigated social norms and roles through a conversation carried out in narrative and drama. Arguing that Shakespeare’s comedies register the playwright’s reading of the novella tradition within the collaborative playmaking context of the early modern theatre, this book demonstrates how the comic vision of these plays increasingly valued women’s authority and consent in the comic conclusion. The representation of female characters in novella collections is complex and paradoxical, as the stories portray women not only in the roles of witty plotters and storytellers but also through a multifaceted poetics of enclosed spaces – including trunks, chests, caskets, graves, cups, and beds. The relatively open-ended rhetorical situation of early modern English theatre and the dialogic form and narrative material available in the novella tradition combine to help create the complex female characters in Shakespeare’s plays and a new form of English comedy.

In a last-ditch effort to find the man of her dreams, Chastity O'Neil, an editor and soon-to-be spinster, gives online dating a try, with interesting results.

Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley has been side-lined to prevent her from causing trouble, but her new job turns out to be far from dull when she finds herself involved in taking down an Albanian mafia kingpin. First in an addictive, wildly original series from the Queen of Krimi... 'Stripped back in style and deadpan in voice, Blue Night is a scintillating romp around the German criminal underworld and back' Doug Johnstone, Big Issue 'By turns lyrical and pithy, this adventure set in the melting pot of contemporary Hamburg has a plot and a sensibility that both owe something to mind-altering substances. Lots of fun' Sunday Times ***WINNER of the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2022*** ***WINNER of the German Crime Book of the Year Award*** _______________ The career of Hamburg's most hard-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been transferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble. However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under police guard in hospital, Chastity's instinct for the big, exciting case kicks in. Using all her powers of persuasion, she soon gains her charge's confidence, and finds herself on the trail to trouble... Fresh, fiendishly fast-paced and full of devious twists and all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the best noir, Blue Night marks the stunning start of a brilliant new crime series, from one of Germany's bestselling authors. _______________ 'Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space ... A palpable hit' Independent 'Disgraced state prosecutor Chastity Riley chases round the dive bars of the port city pursuing and being pursued by a beguiling cast of cops, criminals and chums, delivering scalding one-liners as she goes' The Times ' Blue Night has great sparkling energy, humour and stylistic verve ... and the story itself is gripping and pacey' Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network 'A must-read, stylish and highly original take on the detective novel, written with great skill and popping with great characters' Judith O'Reilly, author of Killing State 'Constantly surprising, Blue Night is an original, firecracker of a read' LoveReading 'If Philip Marlowe and Bernie Gunther had a literary love child, it might just explain Chastity Riley – Simone Buchholz's tough, acerbic, utterly engaging central character' William Ryan

For much of the history of the western legal order, jurisdiction has been the first question of law. This book investigates the difference that jurisdiction continues to make to the ordering of normative existence. It also follows the speculation that without an account of jurisdiction, jurisprudence would be left speechless, with no power to address the conditions of attachment to legal and political order. The starting point of this book lies with the claim that a sharper focus can be given to normative legal ordering through questions of jurisdiction than can be through those of moral responsibility or social action. This is so because jurisdiction articulates both the potentiality of law and the conditions of its exercise. It provides the idiom of response to the fact that there is law and to the fact that law institutes, judges and addresses a form of life. From this viewpoint the contributors to this book examine the institution of human rights, the new global and national orders of sovereign power and of trade and information, the judgment and government of death and desire, and the address of colonial and post-colonial legal idioms. In doing this the contributors also provide for the elaboration of questions of jurisdiction as part of the resources and repertoires of jurisprudence. This book provides a point of entry to an emergent genre of writing within doctrinal, historical and critical jurisprudence that has returned to questions of jurisdiction to think again about juridical order and change. In so doing, it also points to questions that must be asked for there to be any interdisciplinary study that addresses law.