Lodge’s Rosalind

Abstract This chapter contextualizes Lodge’s Rosalynde as an engagement in Elizabethan polemic about art, sexuality, and the morality of the nation, including analysis of Lodge’s response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, as well as two figures that stand behind Gosson: Calvin and Augustine. The chapter then explores Rosalind’s emergence as a response to arguments against sexuality, aesthetics, and femininity, and develops a notion of virtuous lightness as well as exploring Rosalind’s place in a queer mythography that also exerts considerable pressure on Christian sacraments. Through Rosalind, Lodge finally looks to the feminine, the erotic, and the aesthetic to find “concord” for divisions at the family, religious, and political levels.