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Introduction
Material Virtue Like Hamlet, we often refer to virtues as qualities that humans might perform, and for good reason. As this study shall acknowledge, the virtues are fundamentally engaged with what it means to be human. Yet, during the period studied in this book, virtues are also the defining properties of material things. In medieval and early modern England, a rich vernacular vocabulary reveals that premodern virtues are physical qualities. Like better-known areas of virtue ethics, this tradition can also be traced to Aristotle, who claims in The Physics, “the virtues are perfections of nature.”3 Prominent contemporary philosophers, including Philippa Foot, Julia Annas, and Rosalind Hursthouse, have argued for virtue’s “naturalism,” and the argument that follows in this book arises from their contention that our very species is morally situated—that the flourishing of the human qua human relies on its virtues.4 Unlike modern moral philosophers, who by and large focus their discussions on human excellences, I emphasize one aspect of premodern virtues that makes this naturalism possible: in premodern English, “vertues” were not exclusively human. Rather, the Middle English Dictionary defines “vertu” as “an inherent quality of a substance which gives it power.”5 Similarly, early modern English continued to refer to “vertues” as forces that imbued physical bodies with vitality and power.6 From heads to hands, and from rocks to plants, virtues suffused all material bodies in premodern England.7 “Vertues” were not simple or inert characteristics of a physical body. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorizes “vertu” as “life force: reproduction and vitality, affect and intellect and health, that which moves the flesh.”8 The Peterborough Lapidary characterizes “vertu” as proof of divine power: “no man schall be in / dowte 4at god ha3e set & put gret vertu in worde, stone, & erbe, by the wyche, if it so be 3at men be not of mysbeleue & Also owte of dedly synne, & many [wonder]full mervailes my9t be wrow9t 3orow her vertues.”9 As Mary Carruthers explains, virtue was a “principle of biological energy.”10 Elsewhere, she notes, “vertu” signified “that innate ‘power,’ ‘energy,’ or ‘desire’ of the soul animating the body, which (as with babies, puppies and plants) requires channeling, habituation and training.”11 The fourteenthcentury Dives and Pauper credits such energies to divine power: “God 9af gres, trees and herbis diuerse vertuys.”12 We might best understand each of these virtues as an affordance, or the capacity for a specific body to flourish in a particular environment. In the most fundamental sense, “vertues” improved the bodies they inhabited.
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