English Renaissance literature demonstrates a remarkable range of attitudes towards women. While there are significant proclamations of chivalrous attitudes towards women like Walter Raleigh's devotion to Queen Elizabeth I, almost divine descriptions of love and faithfulness like the poetry of John Donne, and even rails against negative portrayals of women like "A Muzzle for Melastomus” by Rachel Speght. Much of the literature is steeped in distorted 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 portray such attitudes by presenting monstrous entities and beasts as female. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay While acknowledging that early modern England was a patriarchal society, it is perhaps simplistic to say that the portrayal of women as monsters, beasts, and devils is based on the misogyny bred by such a society. As critic Tim Reinke-Williams notes, “equating misogyny with patriarchy is misleading, not least because the latter term has such vague meanings” (325). There are other possible explanations for the anti-feminine tendency present in early modern literature. In “'The Devil's Gateway': Women's Bodies and the Earthly Paradise” Page Ann Du Bois points out that attitudes toward women “draw… from a long tradition of biblical, classical, and medieval misogyny” (Du Bois 45 ). Du Bois further assumes that some of the disgust shown for women in early modern literature is based on concern over women's supposed ability to change their forms through witchcraft. “Fear of women's power increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Du Bois 44) partly due to an increase in “witch hunts…[and] widespread belief in witches, even among scholars” (Du Bois 44 ). It is also possible that Henry VIII's propensity to behead his wives for personal reasons favored the "availability" of women. Queen Elizabeth I's long and moderately successful reign, particularly as an unmarried woman, may have created fear about man's place in the world. The changing religious environment may also have played a role as the push and pull of Catholicism and Protestantism may have emphasized the role played by Eve in original sin and called into question Mary's venerated and non-revered role as the mother of Christ. Faerie Queene features some hideous beasts as females. The first enemy Redcrosse encounters is the dragon Errors. Mistakes is "Half...a serpent...half...form of a woman...lothsom, filthy, disgusting and full of vile contempt." (Spenser 1.1.14). The text goes on to describe her as an excessive crossbreeding with “Thousand yong” (1.1.15) and a corruption of the female anatomy. Her breasts are described as "poisonous excavations, each / Of various shapes, but all unsightly" (1.1.15). The unveiling of Fidessa to reveal Duessa involves “stripping her naked” (1.8.46). Her discovery reveals her to be "a loathsome, wrinkled, bad-looking, old, ... bald witch ... covered with dandruff and dirty burns ... wrinkled [and] crusty" (1.8.47). Once again Spenser describes her as having a corrupt female anatomy that would be "detested [by] all womankind" (1.8.47). Her breasts are “dry excavations, like windless bladders [that] Hong downe” (1.8.47) and leak “filthy matter” (1.8.47). His genitals are called “His internal parts [and are] deformed, monstrous (1.2.41). It is also known as part of an animal with a fox tail andmismatched feet of an eagle and a bear. Some versions of Christopher Marlow's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus include a scene in which Lucifer shows Faustus the seven deadly sins. Curiously, only one of the seven deadly sins is identified by gender. The only exception is Lechery who is a woman even as Doctor Faustussi addresses her as "Mistress Minx" (Marlowe 5.324). In keeping with her identity, Lechery describes herself as "one who loves an inch of raw mutton better than an arm of fried stockfish" (5.325-27) saying that she prefers sex to food. Later, when Faust asks for a wife, Mephistopheles introduces “a devil dressed as a woman” (5.145). Faustus is disgusted, however, and says, "A plague on her for a hot whore" (5.147), still referring to the false woman as a "she" when it might be more appropriate to call the devil an "it." Paradise Lost also includes beasts as females while tying them to sin, evil, and lust. Lucifer, arriving at the gates of Hell, encounters a creature who acts as a guardian. The creature is described as "one [that] looked like a woman to the waist, and beautiful, but ended ugly in many scaly folds, bulky and vast: an armed serpent" (Milton 2.650-52). Like Spenser's Errors, this beast also has a problem with overbreeding as its young are numerous "hellhounds" (2.654). The female beast is called Sin. Although Lucifer claims to be unfamiliar with Sin and calls the sight of him "detestable" (2.745), he is apparently her father. Lucifer had raped his daughter, Sin, and she gives birth to a child named Death, who rapes her repeatedly. Equally disturbing is Sin's desire to rule alongside Lucifer, despite the rape and its aftermath, as his "daughter and... darling" (2.870). Interestingly, two of the three works discussed here, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, have beasts described as part serpents. The serpent is traditionally a metaphor for the devil based on the biblical story of Genesis, when 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 features Lucifer in the form of a serpent. In describing Errors and Sin as half serpent, “women” are not only monsters but are also half devil. Of course, the works discussed here are full of allegory, symbolism, and metaphor, and each level of meaning has different implications. The portrayal of women in a perverse 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 monstrous body [alludes to ] the sins of the State and its religious affiliations” (Orning 36). But at a certain point you have to see words for what they are, and words identify sin and lust as monsters, and often, those monsters are women. There are, as previously mentioned, works of early modern literature that portray women, at least certain women, with esteem and sensitivity. There are also others that portray women as lewd and devious or useless and senseless without making them monsters. A modern reader can at least chuckle at remarks lamenting the lustful nature of women – a complaint completely opposite to that of modern American men. Although this essay is rather narrow in examining only three works, an examination of summaries of other works from the era reveals that these cases are not isolated in their depiction of women as beasts with breasts. Consider women monsters, devils or the embodiment of.