English Renaissance literature demonstrates a remarkable range of attitudes towards women. Although there are important proclamations of chivalrous attitudes toward women, such as Walter Raleigh's devotion to Queen Elizabeth I, almost divine descriptions of love and fidelity, such as the poetry of John Gives, and even criticisms against negative representations of women, such as “A Muzzle for Melastomus” by Rachel Speght. “Much literature is steeped in twisted attitudes that border on misogyny. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, and John Milton's Paradise Lost tend to equate women with sin, evil, and lust and depict such attitudes by presenting entities and monstrous beasts like women. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay While recognizing that modern England was a patriarchal society, it is perhaps simplistic to say that the depiction of women as monsters, beasts and devils is based on the misogyny stemming from such Company. As critic Tim Reinke-Williams observes, “equating misogyny with patriarchy is misleading, not least because the latter term has very diffuse meanings” (325). There are other possible explanations for the anti-feminine trend present in modern literature. In “The Devil's Gate: Women's Bodies and the Earthly Paradise” Page Ann Du Bois points out that attitudes toward women “draw...on a long tradition of biblical, classical, and medieval misogyny” (Du Bois 45 ). Du Bois also posits that part of the disgust shown toward women in modern literature is based on concern with women's supposed ability to change shape through witchcraft. “Fear of women's power increased in the 16th and 17th centuries” (Du Bois 44), in part due to the increase in “witch hunts... [and] widespread belief in witches, even among scholars” (Du Bois 44). ). It is also possible that Henry VIII's penchant for beheading women for personal reasons promoted the "disposability" of women. The long and fairly successful reign of Queen Elizabeth I, particularly as a single woman, may have sparked fears about men's place in the world. The changing religious environment may also have played a role, as the opposition of Catholicism and Protestantism may have highlighted Eve's role in original sin and called into question the revered role and not venerated Mary as the mother of Christ. Faerie Queene features horrible beasts like females. The first enemy that Red Cross encounters is the dragon Errous. The errors are "Half...a snake...half...form of a woman...disgusting, dirty, foul and full of vile disdain." (Spenser 1.1.14). The text goes on to describe it as an excessive reproduction of “A Thousand Young Ones” (1.1.15) and with a corruption of the female anatomy. Her breasts are described as "poisonous breasts, each / Of various shapes, but all of poor quality" (1.1.15). Unveiling Fidessa to reveal Duessa involves “undressing” her (1.8.46). Her unveiling reveals her as "a loathsome, wrinkled witch, ill-looking, old,... bald... overrun with scabies and dirty burns... twisted [and] mangy" (1.8.47). Again, Spenser describes her as having a corrupted female anatomy that would be "hated [by] all women" (1.8.47). Her breasts are “dried excrement, like bladders devoid of wind [that] Hong downe”(1.8.47) and let “dirty matter” escape (1.8.47). His genitals are called “His abdominal parts [and are] deformed, monstrous (1.2.41). She is also known as being part animal having the tail of a fox and the mismatched feet of an eagle and a bear. Some versions of The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlow include a scene where Lucifer shows Faustus the seven deadly sins. Interestingly, only one of the seven deadly sins is identified by gender. The only exception is Lechery who is a woman even as Doctor Faustus calls her "Mistress Minx" (Marlowe 5.324). Consistent with her identity, Lechery describes herself as "someone who likes an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fried stockfish" (5.325-27), claiming that she prefers sex to food. Later, when Faustus asks for a wife, Mephistopheles summons “a devil dressed as a woman” (5, 145). Faustus is disgusted, however, and says, "A scourge for a sexy whore" (5.147), still referring to the false woman as "she" when it might be more appropriate to call the devil "it." Paradise Lost also includes beasts as female while linking them to sin, evil, and lust. Lucifer, arriving at the gates of Hell, encounters a creature acting as guardian. The creature is described as “one [who] resembled a woman from the waist down, and beautiful, but ending in many scaly folds, bulky and vast – an armed serpent” (Milton 2.650-52). Like Spenser's Errors, this beast also has an over-breeding problem because its young are many "hellhounds" (2.654). The female beast is called Sin. Although Lucifer claims not to know Sin and calls her sight "detestable" (2.745), he is apparently her father. Lucifer had raped his own daughter, Sin, and she gives birth to a child named Death, who also repeatedly rapes her. Also troubling is Sin's desire to rule with Lucifer, despite the rape and subsequent consequences, as his "daughter and... darling" (2.870). It is interesting to note that two of the three works discussed here, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Perdus, have beasts described as being part serpent. The serpent is traditionally a metaphor for the devil based on the biblical story of Genesis where the Devil takes the form of a serpent to convince Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (King James Bible, Gen. 3.3). Indeed, the Genesis story told in Paradise Lost also presents Lucifer in the form of a Serpent. By describing Errors and Sin as half serpent, the “women” are not only monsters, they are also half evil. Certainly, the works discussed here are full of allegory, symbolism and metaphor and each layer of meaning has different implications. The depiction of women in an evil form is often part of a larger allusion or metaphor. In “Fleshly Embodiments: Early Modern Monsters, Victorian Freaks, and Twentieth-Century Affective Spectatorship,” Sarah Orning suggests that “individual monstrous bodies [allude] to unbalanced and corrupt state bodies… [and that] a single monstrous body [ alludes to] the sins of the state and its religious affiliations” (Orning 36). But at some point you have to see the words for what they are, and the words identify sin and lust as monsters and, often, those monsters are women. There are, as previously mentioned, works of modern literature that depict women, at least some women, with esteem and sensitivity. There are also others who portray women as lustful and complicit or useless and stupid without making them into monsters. A modern reader can at least laugh at the remarks which.