“IT falles me here to write of Chastity,
  That fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest;
  For which what needs me fetch from Faery
  Forreine ensamples, it to haue exprest?
  Sith it is shrined in my Soueraines brest,
  And form'd so liuely in each perfect part
  That to all Ladies, which haue it profest,
  Need but behold the pourtraict of her hart,
If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art.” 

-Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)

Jessica C. Murphy is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at UCSB, currently finishing her dissertation, "Pushing through Paradox: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England" under the direction of Patricia Fumerton with Richard Helgerson, Michael O'Connell, and Mark Rose. "Pushing through Paradox" interrogates the notion of a rigid triad of feminine virtues--silence, chastity, and obedience--by examining literary texts together with conduct literature for women. In her next project, Sex Salves, Jessica will look at literary instances of female greensickness during Elizabeth I's reign. Her research interests include early modern literature, gender, culture, and history as well as the digital humanities. Since 2004, Jessica has been actively involved in the Early Modern Center's English Broadside Ballad Archive, most recently as the technical assistant. As part of her preliminary work on greensickness in literature, Jessica created a tag cloud of her reading of Britomart's greensickness in The Faerie Queene using TagCrowd.com.