The Insatiate Countess sounds an alarm against the allure of the lusty widow exploited by early modern English comedy. On the stage, the nubile widow provided the audience’s younger sons and poor unmarried men with the opportunity to fantasize about the windfall of socioeconomic privilege normally reserved for those blessed with primogeniture. Marston’s tragedy strips bare this fantasy of securing a legacy that will leave an impression on social memory. It does so by dramatizing the detrimental effects the widow’s extraordinary concupiscence has on two primary memory arts for perpetuating male identity: commemoration (the remembrance of the dead husband) and nosce te ipsum (the remembrance of the male self). For all its dire warnings, the plot’s finale, however, cannot resolve the troubling contradiction of the countess’s lustful body: the “insatiate” widow induces men to forget themselves and simultaneously and inescapably constitutes the vehicle through which patriarchal memorialization depends for its continuity.

Dante’s Francesca, damned for what she claims Love did to her, refers to Lancelot as cotanto amante, “so great a lover,” at the very moment she recounts that her unnamed consort in hell kissed her on the mouth. The problem is not just that she has been befuddled by romance, misapplying it to the facts on the ground, but that she has been seduced by the wrong story and ignoring the greatest of lovers. “If only,” she says wistfully, “the king of the universe were my friend.

The chapter distinguishes serial lust killing from other forms of serial killing, such as those motivated by attention-seeking, revenge or material gain. However, it notes that other motivations such as those reflected in mission-killing and ego-boosting can combine with killing motivated by sexual desire. It also distinguishes serial lust killing from mass killing and spree killing. The notion of motivation is key to understanding lust killing as the behaviour is guided by a clear purpose and intention, such as to obtain sexual pleasure by the exertion of dominance over a victim. Most serial lust killers are not judged to be insane and are thereby held accountable by law. The chapter rejects the dichotomies of nature versus nurture and social versus biological, suggesting that such killing can only be understood in terms of a dynamic biology-social interaction. The importance of the acquisition of control is described.

Lust or luxuria, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, was a rich and resonant term in the medieval Christian world, evoking a whole range of appetites and desires while speaking to penitential and other ecclesiastical discourses on human sexuality. Chaucer was an avid and inventive theorist and narrator of lust in its many emotional, affective and incarnate permutations, treating the category of lust with great ingenuity though with a surprising inconsistency inherited in part from scholastic discourses on the sin and its ramifications in human life. In Chaucer’s representations of Criseyde, Troilus, the Wife of Bath, and the Parson, among many others, lust functions as both a simple human desire for some end as well as a direct pathway to sin.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.