Academic article

Philoclea’s Vows: Falling in Love, Protestant Neoplatonism, and the Structure of Romance in Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia

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Abstract

Romance as a literary mode is deeply involved with ideas of chastity, virginity, falling in love, and marriage, and Sir Philip Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia is no exception. Since Sidney’s romance was written in a period when, as a consequence of the Reformation, ideas of virginity, chastity, and marriage, and the vows people made concerning them, underwent major changes, and since the Arcadia was a vital influence on many subsequent early modern texts, from Shakespeare to Milton and beyond, Sidney’s treatment of these topics is of great interest. Historically informed by Protestant and Christian Platonist texts and otherwise methodologically indebted to Northrop Frye’s conceptualization of romance, this article considers (paying special attention to the character of Philoclea) how the plot of Sidney’s work is organized by the trope of falling in love, and the relationship of this trope to the Christian narrative of Fall and Redemption.

Keywords: Marriage, Virginity, Chastity, Elizabethan Literature

How to Cite: van den Brink, B. (2026) “Philoclea’s Vows: Falling in Love, Protestant Neoplatonism, and the Structure of Romance in Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia”, Moveable Type. 16(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.1755-4527.2287

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