Practicing shame explores how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to secure their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against shame. The book transforms our understanding of the construction of femininity in the past and offers a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.

Mary C. Flannery is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford

Introduction
1 Show and tell: shame and the subject of women's bodies
2 Lessons in shame
3 Shame under suspicion, shame under siege
4 Death or dishonour: the problem of exemplary shame
5 Shamefast Hoccleve and shameless craving
Afterword
Bibliography
Index