Introduction: Castitas/VirginitasIt is the hymen that desire dreams of piercing, of bursting, in an act of violence that is (at the same time or somewhere in between) love and murder.
Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session"
The Virgin . . .
"I'm a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments is to lecture first-year engineers on the history of science and technology. . . . I was telling them about the Vestal Virgins, and how they could prove their virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve. I challenged the handful of girls in my immense class of a hundred and forty to try it, and some of them were good sports and did--and couldn't. Big laughs. Then I carried some water about twenty paces in a sieve without spilling a drop, and when they Oohed and Aahed at that I invited them to examine the sieves. Of course mine was greased, which proved that the Vestal Virgins had a practical understanding of colloid chemistry."1
This is a clever story that the fictional scholar Maria tells in Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels, and I open with it in order to illustrate that, in any given narrative, at the very moment virginity can be asserted, it can also be denied. The paradox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence is the subject of this book.
The concept of virginity (and/or chastity; distinctive as the meaning of these two terms are, they are sometimes blurred together, as I discuss below) is developed within and across a number of different discourses in the Middle Ages: medical and scientific treatises (and their classical antecedents), patristic writings and the medieval commentaries on them, legal records and documents, and literary texts. My focus is the representation of virginity and its verifications in these discourses (mainly texts of the thirteenth through the early fifteenth century), with a special emphasis on literary texts. However, I do not read other discourses merely as sources for literary texts. Medical treatises, for example, discuss virginity and tests of virginity in great detail, but this material does not appear in imaginative literature. On the other hand, the discourse of the judicial ordeal parallels, and sometimes underpins, several of the chastity tests found in vernacular romance. These discourses are best imagined in relation to each other as parts of a Venn diagram, overlapping only in their preoccupation with female virginity and in their anxiety about verifying it. And as in a Venn diagram, there is no center, no fixed point, at which virginity/chastity is sited.
Virtually all the tests of chastity and fidelity that I have been able to locate in medical and imaginative literature are designed for, or wished upon, women. (The major exception is the story of Galahad and the Holy Grail, which I discuss in Chapter Four.) Consequently, a large portion of this book is devoted to the study of the gendering of virginity within religious and secular culture in the late Middle Ages.
This book is intended as a contribution to the growing number of studies on the body in the Middle Ages and in contemporary Western culture.2 The represented "body," of course, is never quite the same thing through time and across space, but is instead the construct of complex and contradictory knowledges. What does not seem to change, however, is the notion that the body is a readable body; that is, while interpretations of the body are contingent upon culture, the body itself is persistently identified as a site or depository of information. By focusing on virginity and its verification, located in the body but inextricable from its relation to spirit (or soul, or mind) and its social expression, I explore how bodies come to have meaning--more precisely, how a specific part of a gendered body, the hymen and its analogues, as it were, functions as both metaphor and metonym for an array of ideas and beliefs about women, women's relations with and to men, and even relations between men. This book should at least suggest (following Caroline Walker Bynum) that the dualist concept of body/mind or body/soul that we sometimes impose on the Middle Ages is just that: an imposition. Virginity and its verifications, chastity and its confirmations, demonstrate that bodies and spirits are not easily separated in medieval practice.
In these introductory remarks, it is hardly possible to survey the entire history of virginity that underpins and runs through late medieval texts. Nor is it necessary to do so, given the many excellent studies that examine virginity in its specific historical contexts, particularly with respect to the cult of Mary, the virgin par excellence in the writings of the Church Fathers and in later medieval commentaries.3 In fact, it is Mary and her role as virgin/mother that underwrites what may be the most famous example of a chastity test: the legend of the unicorn who eludes all hunters but comes willingly to lay his head in the lap of a virgin. (This story has taken on a life of its own beyond the confines of religious and scholarly interest, while the unicorn itself has achieved the status of a pop icon.) In the present study, because of the wealth of scholarship on virginity in its mystical and religious valences, rather than focus on the many representations of the Virgin and her influence, I take Mariology as a given, as a starting point for exploring virginity and the various ways in which it has been subject to verification or proof. What I will try to do in what follows is to survey the ways in which virginity and chastity have been defined, and to show how Western Christianity's attitudes toward ascertaining virginity remained fairly consistent from late antiquity, when they were first formulated by the Church, through the Middle Ages. I hope that what emerges is the sense that virginity was (as it apparently still is) such an unstable and relative concept that it had to be repeatedly defined and described by early patristic writers and their medieval commentators.
In The Rebel Angels, Father Darcourt tells Maria that chastity is "a quality of the spirit," while virginity is "a physical technicality."4 For the most part, this distinction between the terms castitas and virginitas holds true throughout early patristic literature and later medieval commentaries. It is repeatedly asserted that spiritual chastity is superior to physical virginity. For Christian authors, the body--a flawed "earthen vessel" in which we keep our "treasure," as Paul put it (2 Cor. 4:7)--is an abject object that must be disciplined and subdued.
The Bible provides the spiritual and theological underpinnings for defining chastity, and the writings of the church fathers provide the detailed exposition. The earliest patristic writers follow Paul in his insistence on the necessity of both bodily and spiritual integrity ("the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit" [1 Cor. 7:34]). Yet the writings of Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and others do not furnish us with an ideologically uniform, internally consistent body of thought on the subject of virginity/chastity.5 Depending on the context, the patristic authors and their later commentators who use the terms castitas and virginitas may be referring either to one's never having experienced coitus (that is, a "virgin" in one, purely physical sense); or to an individual's commitment to the celibate religious life (regardless of whether that individual was single, married, or widowed); or to sexual faithfulness in a monogamous marriage.
That the definitions and descriptions of virginity and chastity so vary (but also overlap) reveals the degree to which these concepts were negotiable within the evolving institution of the early Church, when virginity became a key issue in the struggle to consolidate ecclesiastical authority. The conflict is not over the nature of virginity (which has no existence as a pre-cultural condition), but over the issue of who gets to "speak" it. One might say that the early Church aimed to create a monopoly on virginity.
John Chrysostom's De Virginitate (c. 380-90) is a classic statement of a political and theological strategy of regulation and containment of virginity/chastity. In this influential text, Chrysostom eloquently praises virginity/chastity and its heavenly rewards, arguing that true virginity can be achieved only if the celibate life is chosen freely.6 But encomia are not his only agenda: Chrysostom also attacks certain Gnostic sects that condemn marriage as inherently evil. Such a heretical view makes chastity no choice at all, and diminishes the sacrifice that a true virgin makes when she (emphatically she in this text) renounces the world and dedicates her body and soul to God. "The virginity of the heretics," says Chrysostom, "has no reward"; that is, it is not recognized in heaven.7 The heretical virgins are false virgins, not because they have lost physiological virginity--Chrysostom does not doubt their physical integrity--but because they practice, as it were, their virginity outside of the Church hierarchy. Chrysostom thus politicizes virginity, using it as a weapon against the perceived enemies of the Church. De Virginitate is a formative document in an emerging policy that makes the Christian Church the only institution with the power to define, recognize, and reward virginity.8
Chrysostom says: "Even if [a virgin's] body should remain inviolate the better part of her soul has been ruined: her thoughts. What advantage is there in the wall having stood firm when the temple is destroyed?" Later, he elaborates:It is not enough to be unmarried to be a virgin. There must be spiritual chastity, and I mean by chastity not only the absence of wicked and shameful desire, the absence of ornaments and superfluous cares, but also being unsoiled by life's cares.9
By enumerating--if not inventing--the characteristics of virginity, Chrysostom establishes it as an orthodox state, arguing that consecrated virginity has value only within the boundaries created by the institutionalized Church.
In another treatise, On the Necessity of Guarding Virginity (also known by its Latin title, Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non debeant) Chrysostom again takes up virginity in order to reserve for the Church the authority to recognize it. In the early Church, men and women who had taken vows of chastity sometimes shared the same household.10 Such an arrangement had its advantages, but it could also prove hazardous to one's spiritual health, as Chrysostom, Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, and others made quite clear in their condemnation of such households. In On the Necessity of Guarding Virginity, for example, Chrysostom affirms that physiological virginity and spiritual chastity are not necessarily the same thing. He says:When a virgin learns to discuss things frankly with a man, to sit by him, to look at him, to laugh in his presence, to disgrace herself in many other ways . . . the veil of virginity is destroyed, the flower trampled underfoot.11
Spiritual chastity takes precedence over its bodily analogue, and it is extremely fragile: true virginity is even endangered by verbal intercourse.
Jerome's Ad Jovinianum (393) is another early patristic text in which the regulating of virginity is made to serve institutional ends. As does Chrysostom, Jerome glosses Paul (the original advocate for the institutionalization of virginity), but he also quotes extensively from other Scriptural and even classical authorities. Jovinian had argued that the chastity of virgins, wives and widows was equally admirable and deserved the same heavenly reward. In his response to Jovinian, Jerome--who says he was asked to "crush [Jovinian] with evangelical and apostolic vigour"--takes up the challenge to prove the superiority of virginity over marriage.12 The interest in Ad Jovinianum, not only that of Jerome's immediate successors, but of later scholars and readers (including the Wife of Bath, who was particularly interested in Jerome's borrowings from a certain "Theophrastus"), has been focused on the misogynist arguments that Jerome marshals against marriage. What is relevant to the present study, however, is the way in which Jerome reaffirms the Church's power to name and to hierarchize virginity.
Most patristic writers and their later commentators echo the opinion that bodily integrity counts for nothing if the soul or spirit is not chaste.13 In De Virginitate (377), Ambrose declares that "mere physical virginity does not gain merit, but rather, the integrity of the mind."14 The spirit, in fact, is more easily corrupted than the body. According to the logic of the church fathers, a woman could retain her chastity even if her body is violated, so long as she did not consent to the sexual act. Yet that same woman could lose her chastity through her lascivious dress or actions or thoughts--or even if she were simply the focus of the male gaze. In Adversus Helvidium (383), Jerome constructs chastity as a fragile state that can be maintained only in isolation, declaring, for example: "I certainly do not know if she who is engaged in the shopkeeping business remains a virgin in body, but I do know that she does not remain a virgin in spirit." Here, the marketplace stands in for the secular world, which is full of dangers for even the most resolute of virgins.15 Augustine, in De Civitate Dei (begun in 413, finished in 425), puts a great deal of emphasis on the will, saying that "no one, however magnanimous and shamefast, has it always in his power to decide what shall be done with his flesh, having power only to decide what he will in his mind accept or refuse."16 By the time the English abbot Aldhelm writes De Virginitate (late 7th century), the privileging of spiritual chastity over physical integrity has the ring of received opinion, the fixedness of a trope, such as when Aldhelm asserts that "carnal integrity is in no way approved of, unless spiritual purity is associated with it as companion."17
If defining and claiming virginity in the early, formative centuries of the Church helped to consolidate Church authority, then the renascence of interest in virginity in the twelfth century might be said to represent a crisis in that authority. As John Bugge chronicles in Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal, the twelfth century was marked by, as he puts it, "opposition between monastery and cathedral."18 At the heart of the great monastic reform movement, led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others, was the issue of clerical celibacy (that is, male virginity). Reformers argued that the only road to spiritual perfection was through virginity and the cloistered life. However, extolling the virtues of the contemplative life for all proved to be impractical, given the very material and prominent role the Church had taken in world affairs. Those of the "cathedral," while not rejecting the importance of virginity, repositioned it within an ecclesiastical hierarchy of values. In accordance with such a move, proponents of the new scholasticism began to pose quite different questions about virginity from those of their patristic predecessors, such as whether and how to classify chastity and virginity as virtues.19 To ask, as Augustine so urgently did, whether chastity and virginity were qualities of body, mind, or spirit, tended to become a mere exercise in classification and systemization in the twelfth century.
In his superb Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages, Pierre Payer stresses that no single monologic definition of chastity/virginity dominated the religious thought of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Europe. With respect to thirteenth-century usage, Payer says thatcontinentia connotes self-restraint in general, but is often used with a marked sexual reference; castitas connotes restraint from illicit sexual behaviour; pudicitia [purity] connotes areas tangential to sex such as touches, looks, and kisses, but it is sometimes taken to be synonymous with chastity.20
Even with a variety of specialized terms at their disposal, many theologians recognized that it was difficult to identify absolutely the parameters of chastity/virginity. One had to be willing to recognize degrees or types of virginity. "[T]here are cases," Payer says,
in which physical integrity would be lost and we would not want to say that virginity was lost, or in which women could have sexual experience and retain physical integrity and we would want to say that virginity was lost. Then there is male virginity, which has no meaningful physical integrity associated with it. It must have been considerations such as these that led many medieval writers to distinguish among types of virginity in order to highlight the virginity that has moral and spiritual worth.21
Albertus Magnus, as Payer discusses in some detail, carefully distinguishes among four types of virginity in his Quaestiones de Bono: De Castitate (c. 1240): first, that of infants before the age of reason who possess innate virginity; second, that of individuals who possess virginity without having taken a religious vow; third, that of individuals who possess virginity and have taken a religious vow; fourth, that of individuals who possess virginity, but behave foolishly in their overbearing piety or inappropriate manner and dress-who might even look and behave like prostitutes, as a matter of fact.22 The third type of virginity is the most admirable, of course. Like Augustine, Albertus Magnus locates virginity ("incorruption") in the will. Payer notes that in doing so, Albertus Magnus intends "to obviate a conception of virginity that would locate its essence in a requirement of physical intactness."23
We find a similar impulse in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiæ (c. 1269-74), under the heading "Temperance," Aquinas discusses abstinence, continence, chastity, and virginity (in the Summa, virginity, along with purity, is a subset of chastity). These commentaries illustrate some of the problems--and opportunities--for defining these terms. Aquinas says that castitashas a proper and a metaphorical meaning. Properly speaking, it is a special virtue having its own well-defined material, namely the desires for pleasure of sex. Metaphorically speaking it is broader.24
The virtue of chastity, along with its opposite, the vice of lechery, may be located in the "commingling of bodies" (corporis commixtione). But Aquinas moves to the broader metaphorical meaning of chastity when he argues that it is possible to speak of spiritualis castitas (which is "refrain[ing] from enjoying things against [God's] design"), and its opposite, spiritualis fornicatio, (which is "delighting in things against God's order").25 Aquinas also says, citing Augustine, that "Virginitas implies a certain purity" ("pudicitiam quamdam importat"), and dwells in the soul; it "does not consist in a bodily condition" ("non consistit in carne incorruptione.")26
By defining virginity/chastity primarily as a spiritual quality, patristic and scholastic writers reconfigured the limits of the physical body. However, the fact that virginity may exceed bodily boundaries and actually reside in a given discourse did not prevent various writers from attempting to locate virginity in the flesh--female flesh, that is, for it is invariably women who are praised for their chastity or condemned for their lack thereof. The tension between a constructed, immutable chastity and an equally constructed, mutable body is one that informs most of the texts that I have examined for this book.. . . and the Test
The signs of virginity vary considerably in the texts under consideration in this study, depending upon the discursive tradition in which a test or proof or ordeal is found. Generally speaking, medical discourse addresses the physical body itself, while other discourses approach the physical body only obliquely: the body is present only through a fetishized object or externalized symbol. It is worth repeating that there is virtually no overlap or cross-influence between tests found in medical discourse and those found in imaginative literature (in the latter, the "test" is really a cross between a test and an ordeal, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter Three.) As Mary Wack has shown in Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries, the physical signs of lovesickness as they were constructed in medical treatises were transferred wholesale to literary texts depicting the lovesick hero or heroine.27 Such is not the case with medical tests of chastity, which apparently had no place in the discourse of romance. We can immediately identify a very pragmatic reason for this lack of crossover: urinalysis, a common medieval medical test for virginity, is decidedly unromantic (both in the modern and generic senses of the word). Moreover, the medical test is a private affair, while the ordeal is staged as a public event. While a husband may have very sound reasons for wanting to know if his new bride is a virgin or if his wife has kept her marriage vows, in the romance, the question of marital fidelity is often framed as an issue of communal interest, in a society in which "adultery, the secret deed par excellence, automatically becomes a matter of public policy," as R. Howard Bloch puts it.28 The virginal or sexually faithful female body may occupy the same position in medical and literary texts, but it seems to have a different, genre-specific, discursive force in each.
Given the unreliability of the physical indicators of virginity--an abstract idea residing in an anatomical metonym--it is not surprising that a society like that of medieval Western Europe, so invested in the concept of chastity in both the religious and secular realms, turned to other means of verifying female virginity, given that virginity is a prerequisite and corollary to that other crucial but equally unknowable condition, paternity. And both virginity and paternity are essential to the workings of a feudal society that held the bulk of its wealth in private, aristocratic hands and passed on such wealth from father to son. Biological facts do not always correspond to cultural needs, and therefore biology must be supplemented in some way. Moreover, as Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp argue,sexuality's biological base is always experienced culturally, through a translation. The bare biological facts of sexuality do not speak for themselves; they must be expressed socially.29
As a social expression of a biological uncertainty--or, better, of a desire for certainty over biology--tests of chastity have a rich textual history. Folklorists and literary scholars have long collected and attempted to classify the numerous examples of chastity tests and ordeals that are found throughout medieval imaginative literature, in such languages as Arabic, English, French, German, Icelandic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, Spanish, and Welsh.30 There is no distinct ur-test from which all others spring: rather, we find a nexus of tales that have their origins in oriental, classical, and Celtic texts (the last is most likely the immediate source for the motif in French romances, in turn the source for German and English romances.) The thirteenth-century Middle English romance, Floris and Blauncheflur, is a fine example of the chastity-testing motif, illustrating how literary discourse represents the testing of virginity, and how biology is "translated" into the social sphere. In the poem, the Sultan of Babylon owns a magic fountain, about which we are told:
Yif a woman com that is forlaught
And she be do to the streme
For to weshe her hondes clene
The water wille yelle as it were woode
And bicome red as bloode.31
[If an unchaste woman comes down to the fountain in order to wash her hands clean, the water will scream out as if it were completely mad and become red as blood.]In Floris and Blauncheflur, the chastity test is framed as an ordeal: the maiden who fails is put to death. Taken out of its narrative context, the episode of the magic fountain becomes just another static entry in the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, ready to be counted alongside all the other curious tests and ordeals of chastity that are found in literatures around the world. However, as is true of many other chastity tests found in medieval vernacular romances, the fountain in Floris and Blauncheflur is actually an extremely compromised and complicated object when examined within the larger context of the narrative.
In an interesting mix of eastern custom and western mores, the Sultan of Babylon has a harem at his disposal, but he does not browse among his many choices night after night. Instead, he marries a new maiden at the end of each year, discarding the previous one. He uses the magic fountain to weed out unsuitable brides. This fountain, which runs with blood and screams, is thus capable, apparently, of impersonating the young woman at the precise moment of penetration, as it were; that is, what caused her to shed the blood of virginity. (The screaming does not only alert those who may not be able to see the blood, but also suggests that first intercourse is necessarily painful. As we shall see, pain often constitutes evidence of virginity.)
Once the maidens have passed the first test, they must undergo a second test, which is, as we would say today, rigged. Growing alongside the magic fountain in the Sultan's private garden is another wonder, called "þe tree of loue" (631). The chosen virgins are led under this tree, and the one on which the blossoms fall is made the next Queen. However:3if any mayden þer is
þat þe Amyral telleþ of more pris,
þe flour shal be to her sent
þrou3 art of enchauntement. (637-40)
[If there is a particular maiden that the Sultan considers to be the worthiest (or, "the most valuable"), the blossom shall be sent to her by magical art.]In other words, this tree is not at all magical, but is manipulated by the Sultan's own "art"--and desire. This passage follows so quickly upon the description of the magical fountain that it ought to give a reader pause: what are we to think of the efficacy of the fountain, if the tree is obviously a fraud perpetrated by the Sultan? The two signifiers, fountain and tree, participate in a destabilizing exchange by virtue of their narrative juxtaposition. That a signifier can be so patently false as the tree casts doubt on the signifier immediately preceding it--namely, the fountain. The story of the fountain and the tree in Floris and Blauncheflur demonstrates how a literary test of virginity is sited not in the private and physical (feminine) body, but in material objects that apparently have already undergone reification, and now function as completely separate from the psyche, individual and/or collective.
Hymenologies
It may be helpful at this point to anticipate part of the argument in Chapter One, "Hymenologies: the Multiple Signs of Virginity." Today, the primary physiological "sign" of virginity in women is considered to be the "unbroken" hymen; "proof" of first intercourse is the flow of hymeneal blood. I use scare quotes here to emphasize that even at the end of the twentieth century, the hymen is commonly figured in ways that do not coincide with the known medical facts. Considered to be the physiological mark par excellence of virginity, the hymen is in fact a notoriously unstable and ambiguous concept, with an anxious and uncertain history. The basic assumption that the presence of the hymen is proof of virginity hardly varies across a wide range of discourses and registers today, from technical medical texts to popular oral lore to representations of the virgin in literature (high and low), films, and television.
In medieval medical treatises, however, the hymen was recognized as but one of many physiological signs of virginity. The concept of the hymen, the notion that it was a normal feature of female anatomy, did not have the same sort of currency in the medical literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages that it has in today's gynecology. One way to approach the "discovery" or "invention" of the hymen is to ask to what degree it has been recognized as a discrete structure in female anatomy. This is not to say that the structure was not always "there," but to suggest that its meaning or import as a structure was not always in operation. In the ancient Greek medical and natural historical corpus (that is, in Aristotle's works, the texts now known as the Hippocratic corpus, and in those texts attributed to Galen), we find no description of the hymen as it is defined and illustrated in, for example, Gray's Anatomy, or in the more popular AMA Encyclopedia of Medicine and The New Our Bodies Our Selves: A Book By and For Women. (The word hymen does appear in one medical text of antiquity, but this is a special case. See Chapter One for further discussion.) Gray's Anatomy defines the hymen as "a thin fold of mucous membrane . . . the internal surfaces of the fold are normally folded to contact each other and the vaginal orifice appears as a cleft between them," and goes on to add that the hymen "has no established function."32 According to the most recent AMA Encyclopedia, the hymen is the "thin fold of membrane surrounding the vaginal opening. The hymen has a central perforation that is usually stretched or torn by the use of tampons or during first sexual intercourse."33
In recent years, in response to the growing number of child sexual-abuse cases in which expert testimony is called for, a small, quite technical, body of literature has evolved in which the hymen is described, measured, and classified according to what strikes a non-medical person as an arcane morphology. In this literature, the hymen is described as "annular," "crescentic," "fimbriated," "septated," or "cribriform," terminology that attests to the fact that the size, shape, and thickness of the hymen can vary remarkably from girl to girl, woman to woman.34 It may be barely discernible, simply a thin ridge of tissue that edges the vaginal opening, or a more obvious tissue with one or more perforations.35 In rare cases, a woman may be found to have an imperforate hymen, a condition that requires surgical attention. Given the pronounced variations in size and shape from woman to woman, perhaps it would be more accurate to identify the hymen as a site than as an anatomical part. To make an analogy: we all have insteps, but to identify precisely where the "top" of the instep is would be very difficult. However, if identifying the exact location of the top of the instep were, in some Swiftian fashion, crucial to social identity, then insteps would become the subject of much controversy indeed.
In her elegant study, Greek Virginity, Giulia Sissa says, "as an organ of virginity, the hymen of imagination is a cover."36 She continues:The hymen today is a part of the body whose function as sign or signaculum, hence as seal, is alleged to be valued and whose actual existence is not questioned. It is a sort of biological undergarment protecting the female genitals. . . . the conviction [is] that this membranous veil is as natural a part of the female body as the clitoris and that its rupture is universally acknowledged to be a bloody injury . . . Is the hymen perhaps a hypostasis, a fetish, an article of faith? Neither mariology nor psychoanalysis nor forensic medicine nor erotic literature can renounce belief in this material token of female intactness.37
In a way, the hymen had to be invented. How else to read the figurative language in the Song of Songs ("A garden locked, a fountain sealed" [4:12])? How else to understand Ambrose on the nature of virginity ("And close your vessel discretely . . . Lock it with the key of integrity" and "open your mind, preserve your seal"38)? The hymen is not a seal; it cannot be broken, pierced, or perforated. But the hymen is a seal; it is an (ideological) barred door, a sealed fountain, the gateway to a hortus conclusus. We have stepped into metaphor, and only as a metaphor can a hymen be "broken" or "lost": the figural has shifted into the pseudo-factual. As we shall see, the many attempts to fix virginity in/on the body are inevitably compromised by recourse to metaphors and metonyms--tropes which make visible not only virginity's constructed character, but its gendered and heterosexualized nature as well.
The Paradox of Virginity
Mary Louise Pratt argues that "people and groups are constituted not by single unified belief systems, but by competing self-contradictory ones."39 While we no longer view the "Middle Ages" as a product of a unified, monologic discourse or as a set of fixed polarities, Pratt's point is worth remembering as we examine the construction and representation of virginity in medieval culture. Verifying virginity is a theme that recurs across a number of discourses, but how it is represented can vary immensely. I try to capture this variety and its conflicts by reading a wide assortment of texts in English, French, German, and Latin. Though my methodology sometimes has much in common with the survey or Toposforchung of traditional medieval scholarship, I move beyond the conventions of the traditional survey in order to interpret selected texts, using feminist criticism and gender studies as a frame and a guide.
The motif of the chastity test (and/or ordeal) antedates the corpus of medieval texts under consideration here. Thus a chastity test often has a curious ahistorical feel to it. In vernacular romance, for example, the test sometimes seems to have been included merely because it was available as a trope. While it may have a crucial intratextual function, the episode of the test rarely connects to or reflects the immediate cultural and historical moment that produced the romance in the first place. Donna Haraway, in a very different context, observes that:Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings.40
Always an effect of a confluence of discourses and generic constraints, the chastity test may be seen as an example of such a "formalization" or "frozen moment" functioning as an "instrument" that defines and constructs female virginity/chastity. Its very repetition from text to text, a repetition that links an episode in one text to another episode in another text in a hermeneutic (and performative) chain, attests to the chastity test's continuing value in activating complex narratives about female virginity and its cultural uses.41 Yet as we saw in Floris and Blauncheflur, such "instruments" for verifying virginity are themselves not foolproof and absolute, but subject to manipulation--a fact which is repeatedly foregrounded in almost all of the texts that I consider here. This is one reason that, while I occasionally move from history to literary text and back again, my primary interest lies in the troping of virginity/chastity as a paradox. In this respect, the (sometimes-oppositional) theories of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan have proved useful (though their theories rarely appear in full orthodox force). By interrogating the very systems that are predicated upon its verifiability, virginity defies close scrutiny and resists definition. Thus virginity contains within it the seeds of its own deconstruction; it is an "absence of event," to borrow a phrase from Derrida.42 My borrowings from Lacan are less quotable and more abstract: in formulating the operations of desire as presence and absence, he has provided me with a language that best captures the paradox that is virginity.
In Chapter One, "Hymenologies: the Multiple Signs of Virginity," I examine embodied virginity/chastity as it is discussed in medical treatises of antiquity and the Middle Ages, from Soranus (second century A. D.) to Avicenna (eleventh century) and Averroës (twelfth century), to pseudo-Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century). In classical and medieval texts, the uterus was thought to be the single most important part of female anatomy. While this chapter is primarily intended to be a survey, I argue that the Greek model of the uterus--an open vessel with a constricted neck--was central to the idea of virginity in Greek medical texts. Though the Greeks did not discuss the constriction or relaxation of the uterus as an index of virginity (that is, as something that would indicate the presence or absence of chastity), medieval authors explicitly cite the shape or condition of the uterus as one such sign. In fact, it is the condition of the uterus, not the hymen, which is the sign of virginity par excellence in medieval texts, with the blood of first intercourse being a more important sign than the hymen. (In medieval gynecology, the presence of blood did not ipso facto indicate a hymen.) I also discuss other methods for verifying virginity that appear in medieval medical literature, such as examining the urine, observing the effects of certain decoctions and fumigations, and even reading astrological signs.43
One finds, as well, numerous recipes for faking virginity in medical texts. I argue that the sheer variety of ways to test virginity--and of ways to cheat on a test--undermines rather than supports the idea of a stable, readable, knowable female body. Finally, I discuss what the early patristic writers and medieval scholiasts have to say about verifying female virginity. All of these churchmen express concern, and often disdain, for the idea that virginity can be subjected to medical scrutiny. (However, as we shall see, medieval canonists often called for physical examinations in certain legal cases.) As Ambrose puts it, a virgo intacta is not the same as a virgo integra. For the scholars of the Church, the proof of virginity/chastity is not to be located in the body physical, but in the body ecclesiastical.
The body ecclesiastical is the subject of Chapter Two, "'Armour of Proof': The Virgin and the Church in Hagiography," in which I discuss proofs of virginity as they have been conventionalized in the discourse of hagiography. The "proofs" under discussion have little in common with the medical and magical tests for physiological virginity or marital fidelity that are treated in Chapter One. Here, I make what I hope is a useful distinction between a "test" of virginity, which suggests that the subject's virginity is in doubt, and a "proof" of virginity, which is a public affirmation of the "fact" of virginity/chastity. Though I cite a number of examples of such proofs from various late antique and medieval sources, my main focus is the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea and its retellings of the stories of Agatha, Agnes, and Lucy, celebrated virgin martyrs of late antiquity.
When Eusebius makes the statement that a certain pagan governor, frustrated in his attempts to break the virgins he has consigned to torture, was thus "always defeated by women," he suggests its obverse: Christianity is defended--shielded--by women.44 I explore how and why the virgin body comes to function as a metonym--a rhetorical shield--for the Church, particularly in the tale of circumvented rape. In this tale, a consecrated virgin is threatened by a pagan official (or frustrated lover) or sent to the brothel, but is protected by a miracle. The miracle serves as proof that the menaced girl or woman is indeed a virgin; however, it also affirms, even celebrates, the power of the Church to identify and legitimate the paradigmatic Christian virgin while obscuring the sources of that power. Moreover, the narrative of circumvented rape paradoxically makes most visible that which should be most hidden from view; that is, the virgin body, while masking (or avoiding) the historical and material facts of rape. This rhetoric of simultaneous display and disguise seeks to remove the virgin martyr from history in order to re-place her in an idealized, transcendent narrative more in keeping with the Church's image of itself.
I move to the discourses of romance and the lai in Chapter Three, "'Love's Traces': The Lady and the Test in Romance," in order to examine the literary representation of the ordeal of chastity, in which marital chastity, that is, sexual fidelity, is the subject of proof. I read Heinrich von dem Türlin's Diu Krône (1215-20); Robert Biket's Lai du Cor (third quarter of the twelfth century); Jean Renart's Romance of the Rose, also known as Guillaume de Dole (early thirteenth century); the Italian Tristan (La Tavola Ritonda, second quarter of the fourteenth century); and Malory's retelling of the Tristan story in the Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470; printed by Caxton in 1485). Once again, it is necessary to be precise about terminology, for a chastity "ordeal," while it may have much in common with the proofs of virginity as discussed in Chapter Three, is emphatically a matter of performance--in both the Butlerian and the theatrical sense--as the faithful wife must swear an oath, and/or successfully complete an impossible, magical, or dangerous task in order to demonstrate her chastity.
In vernacular romance and the lai, the chastity ordeal typically depends upon a fetishized magical object--a drinking horn, a cloak, or other common article--and, in the case of the equivocal oath, upon fetishized language itself. On first impression, the ordeal seems to function as a didactic lesson, if not a warning, for women; however, the ordeal as it appears in these texts has a curious habit of boomeranging on the men who have insisted upon it in the first place. In Lacanian terms, the ordeal, a quite literal example of the Law of the Father, reinforces the bar separating the Imaginary from the Symbolic; at the same time, the chastity-testing story and its ambiguous ending undermines the very idea of any such Law functioning absolutely.
In Chapter Four, "Oxymoronic Bodies: Male Virgins in Hagiography and Romance," I discuss the figure of the male virgin. Building upon Chapter Two, I distinguish between the proofing of virginity and the assaying of virginity: in the corpus of late antique and medieval hagiography, women are invariably threatened with rape; men, however, are threatened with seduction; that is, with the temptations of the flesh, not with sexual assault. I argue that the rhetoric of seduction found in the tale of the assayed male virgin is designed to direct our attention away from the male virgin (ostensible object of desire) and toward his seductress (ostensible instrument of desire), a strategy that checks the trajectory of the potentially fragmenting (and socially feminizing) gaze, leaving masculine subjectivity intact. In fact, it seems that male virginity is made intelligible only by reference to an elaborate feminized and feminizing signifying system. This is particularly evident in the tenth-century legend of Pelagius, in which Pelagius, as the object of the caliph's desire, is represented under the sign of the feminine.
I then turn to medieval romance, to Malory's Morte Darthur, arguing that the male virgin in this text can best be recognized or represented through a semiotics of the feminine. When the male body is threatened with penetration and fragmentation--that is, at the very moment when we would expect it to be most visible--either the fetishized female body is substituted for it, or the male body is feminized. Thus masculinity, along with the code of knighthood that constitutes it, remains protected from critique. I also consider what is perhaps the most famous medieval example of assayed male chastity: the episode of Gawain and the Lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400), arguing that Gawain's resolute adherence to his vow of chastity further compounds the problem of masculine identity as it is represented in this text.
In Chapter Five, "Multiple Virgins and Contemporary Virginities," I move from the Middle Ages to the present and explore modern ideas about verifying virginity and chastity. I opened this Introduction with a scene from The Rebel Angels in which Maria demystifies the legend of the Vestal Virgin and the sieve for her undergraduates while illustrating a chemistry lesson. She then tells the story to a group of sophisticated academics, who go on to intellectualize the problem of ascertaining virginity. Yet one can imagine Maria's first audience, those engineering students, gleefully staging the sieve trick at the next fraternity party, thereby restoring this ancient "test" to the mix of contemporary popular lore about virginity. It is from this stock of popular lore (film, television, popular fiction, and personal narrative, including responses to a Web site that I created on the subject of verifying virginity) that I draw my examples in this chapter.
When we--that is, we as inheritors of Western European culture, whether we are scholars or not--look back on the Middle Ages, we are faced with two equally alluring but mutually exclusive temptations: to see medieval people as very much like ourselves, or to see them as radically different. In late twentieth-century America, no one would think of trying to ascertain if a woman has had intercourse by looking at which way her breasts point or by administering a urine test. These methods strike us as ludicrous and ignorant. Yet there are many today, from purveyors of pornography to Christian fundamentalists, who still believe (or make a tactical decision to believe) that verifying virginity is necessary, important--and possible. The methodology for ascertaining virginity may have changed, but the desire to do so has not, and for many of the same reasons medieval people wanted to verify virginity. In fact, we can still find traces of certain "medieval" ideas circulating in contemporary popular culture: for example, it is commonly believed, as it was in the Middle Ages, that in comparison to the vagina of a sexually experienced woman, a virgin's vagina is "tighter," and a virgin will inevitably (and perhaps should) experience pain at first intercourse. This motif surfaces quite regularly in modern romance novels, in which the heroine triumphantly and happily bears her pain, making a perverse gift of it to her lover. Moreover, in contemporary popular culture, as in the Middle Ages, running parallel to the narrative of verifying virginity is the narrative of faking or simulating virginity: in fact, as I will discuss, women today may avail themselves of hymen "reconstruction" surgery in order to do so.
One fact that quickly emerges in an examination of late twentieth-century American ideas about virginity is the degree to which virginity, in addition to being gendered feminine, is the product of a dominant heterosexual paradigm; that is, "loss" or absence of virginity is usually defined in terms of the penetration of a vagina by a penis. This is a subtext that runs through earlier chapters: in this final chapter, I address this issue more explicitly, examining the ways in which representations of gendered virginity in popular culture help to secure what Adrienne Rich calls "compulsory heterosexuality." Both respecting and transgressing the boundaries of the female virgin body are actions and ideologies that attempt to fix identities through biological and social difference, while sanctioning the "opposite" sex as the object of desire. These two distinct and contradictory narratives--one in which female virginity is praised and revered, the other in which female virginity is "lost" or "taken"--valorize heterosex while suppressing gay and lesbian constructions of sex and desire.Virginity Matters
Judith Butler, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", describes how she initially made an attempt to "fix bodies as simple objects of thought." However, she found thatNot only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies "are."45
There is no better example of the body exceeding its own physical boundaries than that of virginity, which exists on the cusp between the body and culture. By definition, virginity is an abstraction greater than the sum of body parts.
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