Eloquent Virgins

The tales of the virgin martyrs inevitably emphasize the torture and mutilation of beautiful young women. To the modern reader, these popular texts seem like exercises in sadism, but while they could be made to function as vehicles for active misogyny, they also provided Medieval women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc with role models who helped them to shape their own extraordinary destinies. This book explores the ability of the virgin body to generate contradictory meanings, both repressive and liberating, depending on who told the tale and how it was told.

The tales of the virgin martyrs inevitably emphasize the torture and mutilation of beautiful young women. To the modern reader, these popular texts seem like exercises in sadism, but while they could be made to function as vehicles for active misogyny, they also provided Medieval women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc with role models who helped them to shape their own extraordinary destinies. This book explores the ability of the virgin body to generate contradictory meanings, both repressive and liberating, depending on who told the tale and how it was told.

Hrotsvit, a canoness in the German convent Gandersheim, wrote Latin poems, stories, plays, and histories during the reign of Emperor Otto the Great (962-973). She expresses a strong sense of authorial mission in letters, prefaces, and dedications. These personal writings, as well as her full literary corpus, are studied in twelve original essays by scholars from Europe and North America, who bring several perspectives to bear. Her historical roots are shown, both in her use of Christian literary tradition (e.g., the legend) and in her understanding of political forces shaping her time. Her strong spirituality emerges from vivid portraits not only of martyrs but also of men and women who question and doubt the Lord, while her openness to problems of sexuality, and of the need for women to realize their individuality and particular gifts, is surprisingly modern. Contributors include: Walter Berscin, Katrinette Bodarwé, Jay Lees, Gary Macy, Linda McMillin, Florence Newman, and Lisa Weston

The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.

This book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.

This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.

Lipsett's approach is theoretically versatile, drawing on the writings of Foucault, psychoanalytic theorists, and the ancient literary critic Longinus. Lipsett offers close readings of each story, while advancing discussions of ancient views of desire, masculinity, virginity, and the self. --Book Jacket.

This book examines evolution of medieval patience literature from a focus on male and female sufferers to a focus on female suffers in particular. Using feminist revisions of genre-theory, Waugh analyses the concept of counterfeit consciousness in the works of Margery Kempe and Chaucer among others.