SOURCE: Scodel, Joshua. “The Pleasures of Restraint: The Mean of Coyness in Cavalier Poetry.” Criticism 38, no. 2 (spring 1996): 239-79.

In the essay below, Scodel argues that Cavalier poets “playfully and sometimes outrageously” replaced temperance with “a mistress's tantalizing coyness or a man's tantalized desire” as the appropriate middle ground between abstinence and lust.

Up through the middle ages, Christian attitudes toward sexuality combined an ascetic repugnance toward sinful carnality with a Christianized version of the pagan ethical focus on moderating bodily pleasures. The former celebrated celibacy as the purest state; the latter fostered restrained, temperate sexuality between married couples. With the Protestant Reformation, celibacy was unseated as an ideal and the promotion of moderate conjugal love intensified.¹ Like the medieval Scholastics, late sixteenth-century English Protestants often invoked Aristotle's conception of temperance, the mean with respect to bodily appetites, to define proper conjugal sexuality. Temperate sexual relations between married partners...