By Kathleen Coyne Kelly
This ebook demanding situations the assumption that girl virginity should be reliably and unambiguously outlined, demonstrated and proven. Kelly analyses a number of medieval Western ecu texts - together with scientific treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historic and criminal files. the main target is the illustration of either female and male virgins in saints' legends and romances. the writer additionally makes a comparative learn of examples from modern fiction, tv and movie within which trying out virginity is a subject. appearing Virginity and trying out Chastity within the center a long time provides a compelling and provocative learn of the parodox of physically and non secular integrity as either presence and shortage.
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Extra resources for Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages
Example text
The male body was the uncorrupted base text, as it were; the female, an imperfect copy. ”25 By quoting Galen, I do not mean to imply that his theory of sex “difference” was the only one available in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but to acknowledge that it certainly was an influential one. 26 However, I would like to stress the power and pervasiveness of the rhetoric of analogy that underpins not only Galen’s conception of the human body but also Aristotle’s notion of the superior, perfected man and inferior, flawed woman.
116 It is not clear if the blood here refers to hymeneal blood, or to the blood that may result from a violent attack. The other signs—the hue and cry, the torn garments—point to evidence of resistance on the virgin’s part, not necessarily to virginity. However, in De Legibus, physical examination is called for when it must be determined if a woman is pregnant or not. 117 On the other hand, ecclesiastical law on marriage and divorce sometimes called for verifying virginity in a way that most likely depended on a physical examination.
46 Heterosexual intercourse was the most efficacious cure in either case, but fumigation, the application of ointments, or even massage was also prescribed, especially for virgins and widows, for whom intercourse was theoretically not an option. In a fifteenth-century English text, the author makes a distinction between suffocation caused by the retention of menses and that caused by the retention of seed. In the latter instance, he advises that: it is profitable to haue company with man. But þus vunderstonde: in lawefull company, as with her housebandes and with none other; for in certayn it were better for a man other for a woman to haue þe grettest sekenesse of þe body the whiles þei leven than to ben helyd thorough a dede of lechery other ony other dede ayenst goddis hestys.