Cultures across the world have been and still are fixated on the concept of virginity, and this fixation has affected women most of all. Yet, as Julia Kelto Lillis argues in her new book, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity, the anxieties, beliefs, and ideologies that inform this fixation vary widely. Lillis persuasively challenges the assumption that early Christian writers—mostly men who thought of gender as binary, sex as penetrative, and eroticism as heterosexual—were in general agreement about the meaning and significance of female virginity. She argues that the concept of female virginity, ubiquitously valued, defended, and often tested in patriarchal cultures, not only resists stable definition today but also lacked a fixed point in antiquity. Criteria shifted from the cultural, spiritual, physiological, or anatomical and overlapped in a complex web of “discourses” on virginity. Focusing on Greek, Latin, and some Syriac texts, mostly from the fourth century CE, through the lens of new intellectual history and feminism, Lillis shows that “very few things about virginity met with general consensus” (218), requiring us to resist the impulse to look at early Christian sources as a homogenous bloc. Nevertheless, Lillis traces a steady trend towards what she coins the “perceptibility turn” in the late fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian authors began to promote more consistently a conception of virginity as a visible and verifiable feature of female anatomy.
The book is divided into three loosely chronological parts of two chapters each. In Part I, “Virginity with and without Virginal Anatomy,” Lillis analyzes the varying assumptions and ideologically inconsistent body of thought on virginity among Christian and non-Christian authors from the fifth century BCE through the fourth century CE. This broad section both lays the foundation for the later sections and serves as a microcosm of the whole book’s central thesis by recommending methodology for approaching “virgin territory.” She uses this phrase as far more than just a convenient metaphor. It is an intentional approach that builds on the work of J. Z. Smith (himself building on the work of the semantics scholar Alfred Korzybski) on the distinction between “territory” (reality) and “maps” (descriptions of reality). The politically fraught baggage of the phrase “virgin territory” also serves to remind us of the political, personal, theological, and consequential nature of this particular kind of “mapmaking.”
Lillis begins her examination of these “maps” in Chapter 1, “Testing, Showing, and Perceiving Virginity in Antiquity.” This wide-ranging chapter surveys the “plurality of concepts” (3) of virginity and its im/perceptibility in the female body by considering descriptions of virginity tests in four types of sources: 1) medical literature, 2) Greek and Latin “pagan” literature, 3) Jewish literature, and 4) Christian literature. Here Lillis establishes both synchronic variety and a diachronic trend towards anatomical virginity (the “perceptibility turn” mentioned throughout the book). Chapter 2, “Mary’s Forms of Virginity in Early Christian Writings,” narrows the focus to second- and third-century Christian authors’ diverse conceptualizations of Mary’s virginity during and after childbirth.
The “debut of the hymen” (32) is a slow trend that does not gain a firm foothold in Christian texts until late antiquity. The first mention of genital virginity inspections appears in Cyprian (third century CE), but it is only by the fifth century CE that such anatomical perceptibility becomes “common sense.” Pre-Christian and non-Christian sources, on the other hand, regularly conceive of virginity as a general bodily state with potential, though inconsistent and thus unreliable, physiological signs but no clear concept of an anatomical barrier, confirming the findings of Giulia Sissa and others who have demonstrated the Greeks and Romans had no widespread notion of a genital barrier or “hymen.”[1]
In the book’s centerpiece, Part 2, “Christian Conceptualizations of Virginity in the Fourth Century,” Lillis examines a particularly vibrant century of change and growth not just for Christianity at large but also for Christian asceticism and the valorization of virginity. Despite much scholarly work on these themes in the past four decades, Lillis manages to bring in a fresh perspective by highlighting the nuanced, but significant, differences in four writers and Church leaders—Basil of Ancyra, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem of Nisibis, and Ambrose of Milan—chosen not to be representative of regions or language, but illustrative of diversity of thought despite several similarities in vocabulary and themes.
Chapter 3, “Virginity of Body and Soul: Fourth-Century Christian Configurations,” explores the heterogeneous ways these four thinkers understood the interplay of virginity in/of the body and of the mind or soul. As Lillis points out in the Introduction, scholars of early Christianity have too often characterized this interplay as competing beliefs about the locus of virginity. Through a close reading of each author in turn, Lillis convincingly shows that “body versus mind” is too schematic a framework. Bodily virginity is a sine qua non for each author, but they have distinct differences in emphasis on the body, each creating their own unique recipe for virginity that blends personal qualities, modes of life, mindsets, and sexual inexperience. Chapter 4, “Sealed Fountains: The Imagery of Fourth-Century Christian Discourse,” continues to juxtapose the same four authors in order to reveal the variety of thought masked by the recurring shared imagery of water, on the one hand, and signets, seals, or the act of sealing, on the other, to describe the virgin herself or the ideal virginal lifestyle.
Each chapter in this section ends with an analysis of the potential agendas of each author—Basil and Gregory in Chapter 3 and Ephrem and Ambrose in Chapter 4—creating a somewhat disjointed reading experience but nevertheless essential and fascinating context for understanding each author’s view on virginity. For example, in Chapter 3, Lillis argues that Ambrose shows a development in his understanding of virginity from “a state of general purity” in his writings of the 370s and 380s to a “state of genital integrity” by the 390s (125). It is only over twenty pages later that this development is placed in the context of the heated debates of the 390s over the relative value of virginity and marriage providing a motivation for Ambrose’s technical argument for Mary’s intact sex organs after giving birth.
In the final section, Part III, “The Cost of Anatomized Virginity for Late Ancient Christians,” Lillis shifts from an emphasis on overall variety to an exploration of the consequences of “maps” made of female virginity post-“perceptibility turn.” To paraphrase Peter Brown, a study of virginity, and especially female virginity, is a study of the body and society and here Lillis engages in a provocative consideration of this nexus by exploring or, at times by necessity, imagining the real or possible implications of the “perceptibility turn” on the lived experiences of women from the perspective of different positionalities.
In Chapter 5, “Perceptible Virginity: Its Usefulness and Consequences,” Lillis picks up and alters the question briefly proposed and problematized in the conclusion of Chapter 1—what motivated the shift towards anatomized virginity—and speculates not on causes of the shift but on its effects. She divides her discussion between possible but not well-documented consequences on social and economic systems beyond or outside the Christian Church—sexual relationships and expectations within marriage and the sex and slave trades—and effects on the lives of consecrated virgins, who could be subject to, or even request, anatomical virginity tests.
Lillis also revisits issues surrounding Mary’s open and/or closed womb discussed in Chapter 2 to look at how anatomized virginity became a strategically useful tool in the debates surrounding the later fourth and fifth century Jovinian and Nestorian controversies. While Jerome, a loud and divisive voice in the virginity debates of the fourth century, gets his fullest treatment here, Lillis notes that much more could be said about his configuration of virginity, as well as that of John Chrysostom, who is discussed briefly in this chapter and in Chapter 1. Additionally, though a note on page 180 points out that such debates concerning virginity and asceticism were more pressing by the 390s than the Trinitarian debates of the earlier fourth century, Lillis misses a potentially valuable opportunity to discuss how a post-Nicene understanding of the incarnate Christ places more emphasis on the body as a locus of salvation, thus intensifying the significance of its external features (including sex organs) and possibly contributing to the “perceptibility turn.”[2]
In the book’s final chapter, “Augustine of Hippo and the Problem of Double Integrity,” Lillis challenges the assumption of some scholars that Augustine viewed sexually assaulted virgins as still virginal in light of his arguments against suicide to avoid sexual violence in his City of God. Augustine’s configuration of virginity, like many Christian thinkers before him, was both of a bodily and spiritual nature, but, as Lillis argues, the anatomization of virginity “complicated the task of prioritizing virginity of the soul” (194), and Augustine never says unequivocally that a sexually assaulted virgin remains a virgin. Through an analysis of his terms used in City of God and his other works, she shows that “chastity” (pudicitia) and “purity” (castitas) for Augustine are much broader, holistic terms than the anatomically specific terms “integrity” (integritas) and “virginity” (virginitas). For Augustine, coerced or forced sex may not affect the purity of the soul but it most certainly permanently alters a part of the body.
Lillis’ book is an exciting and essential addition to the ever-growing body of scholarship on the body in antiquity, and especially asceticism and virginity in early Christianity. She also provides an effective model for further studies on the broader shift towards anatomization of virginity within other intellectual or religious traditions. By reexamining early Christian texts with an eye to variety through a feminist lens, she compellingly shows the relevancy of such a study for a modern world that continues to be acutely interested in the physical and/or sexual features of the body to serve a multiplicity of often competing configurations and agendas.
Notes
[1] G. Sissa, Greek Virginity. Cambridge 1990.
[2] Lillis sets up such a discussion on page 165 (“One could say that virginity ‘takes flesh’ in an incarnation of its own during this period of rich theological reflection on the incarnation of Christ”) but does not flesh it out (no pun intended) in the following pages. Susanna Elm posits a similar connection between theological orientation and the organization of ascetic communities (Virgins of God, Oxford 1996, especially pp. 373-385).