‘Fortune is a Mistresse’: Figures of Fortune in English Renaissance Poetry

Reade, Orlando (2021) ‘Fortune is a Mistresse’: Figures of Fortune in English Renaissance Poetry. In: Fate and Fortune in European Thought ca. 1400-1650. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 327 . Brill, Leiden, pp. 118-147. ISBN 978-90-04-35972-7

Abstract

Having been a goddess in ancient Rome, Fortune enjoyed a lively retirement in Christian Europe. As a figure for the unequal distribution of worldly goods, Fortune was praised by queens and bankers, and criticized by abandoned lovers and imprisoned princesses. From St. Augustine to Descartes, Christian thinkers rejected the goddess’s reality in order to assert the supreme reality of God’s Providence. Nevertheless, she provided a rich array of meanings even to those who did not, strictly speaking, believe in her. This essay looks at poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where a man’s mistress is figured as Fortune. In these poems, the association between Fortune and women is asserted, ironized, and finally refused. If moral philosophy pitted a male subject against a feminized Fortune, poetry can reveal the process by which Fortune’s attributes are transferred onto women. By representing discourses on Fortune as embodied, passionate and artful speech acts, poems betray the work of figuration within the construction of gender. In figuring Fortune as a mistress, their poems show that the figure itself is liable to change.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item Edit Item
Altmetric

View Altmetric information about this item.