Shame is often considered one of the quintessential social emotions, the embodiment of the failure to perform to the rules determined by society and a feeling to be avoided. For some thinkers, it is an old-fashioned emotion, with little place in modern society, despite the fact that it is has never entirely disappeared, even in very individualistic societies. If some theorists have placed its rise and fall as critical to a modernizing processes, what shame is, what it feels like, and what its consequences are is a now a topic of some debate. In Practising Shame, Mary Flannery brings cutting-edge theories from the history of emotions to this discussion in her exploration of the practice of shame in late medieval England. The use of “practice” in the title is intentional here, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, especially as deployed by Monique Scheer in the context of emotional experience. Shame, for Flannery, involves inhabiting a set of social rules, something taught through childhood and enforced by everyday practices and interactions. Medieval women were educated to believe that shamefastness was a key quality of honorable femininity; almost like an armor to be worn, women were required to keep it from being breached. Unfortunately, this was not entirely under their own control.

Across five chapters, and drawing on a range of medieval literature from gynecological treatises to conduct literature to romance, Flannery builds a picture of how shamefastness was understood, performed, and used to restrain female agency. In the first chapter, she explores how shame was tied particularly to private areas of the body that made any form of engagement with the naked female form a risk to female honor. Shamefastness required concealment. In the following chapter, Flannery extends this understanding through a discussion of how women were taught to comport themselves to enable such a concealment, especially through inculcating a fear of shame as a central emotional experience. Shamefastness was a set of behaviors and feelings to be learned and performed. Perhaps unsurprisingly given this emphasis, chapter 3 highlights the considerable social anxiety about whether such performances of chastity were authentic or faked. If shamefast behaviors could be taught, how could the observer know who was truly honorable? Indeed, given that women were often considered to be lusty, such a chaste armory could be reconceptualized as less of an innate quality than a barrier to sex that men could overcome with wooing or indeed force. Here manly masculinity was a form where men should overcome female scruples.

This theme is continued in the following chapter, where Flannery particularly attends to multiple retellings of the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, women who chose death over sexual violation. Virginia and Lucretia are the ideal shamefast women: their inner virtue and outer comportment align perfectly. However, they are also cases that trouble understandings of female virtue in not allowing honor to exist if there is any breach of chastity, regardless of female will or desire. They are examples that highlight how little agency women are accorded in this system, where any fissure of their armor destroys their honor, and Flannery suggests that it is likely their stories cause problems for male writers for this reason. I suspect this may be because women's sexual agency is largely not their own in the male imagining of this period, but this topic is not explicitly picked up. Rather in her final chapter, Flannery turns to how men, specifically the clerk Thomas Hoccleve, deploys the concept of shamefastness in his reconfiguring of masculinity. Hoccleve rejects the martial manliness of much medieval writing for a reserved (concealed) scholarly mode, where he deploys his own shamefastness as a barrier to his economic success. Flannery suggests that Hoccleve deliberately plays with the same performative aspect of shamefastness that troubles medieval imaginings of femininity, but he deploys it strategically, as such reserve is not expected of men.

The conclusion ties this history of shame to contemporary accounts of sexual violence, where women's performance of chastity remains critical to their capacity to be “rapeable,” as seen in questions that allude to what a victim wore, drank, how she behaved, and so forth. Shamefastness may no longer be a common word, but it is an idea that continues to hold resonance. I would go further and suggest that this book provides a medieval account of a depressingly familiar European story that would be played out repeatedly over the centuries as women sought to mediate the bind between practicing shamefastness and holding sexual (and other forms of) agency. The parallels with the eighteenth century are particularly striking, given their similar attention to emotional authenticity and potential disguise of moral corruption. Flannery's deployment of emotion as practice here is therefore especially helpful in explaining the tensions between emotions as inhabited but also performed and as moments of dispute when their veracity comes under contest. This is a timely book entering the field at a moment when the study of the history of both sex and emotion is suddenly exploding, and when greater attention is being paid to embodied experience, not least of emotion. Practising Shame will be of interest to those exploring these issues across time and place because it both offers an account with unnerving relevance for today and provides a successful model of how to answer some of these questions within a particular historical moment.