S2E2: Virginity and the Hype About Hymens in Early Christianity

With Dr. Julia Kelto Lillis

In Episode 2, we ask “to whom does a woman’s virginity belong”? Join Dr.  Julia Kelto Lillis and your hosts as we dive into the world of ancient purity culture, what wine has to do with the V-Card, and why the gods like to make babies with virgins. 

Like today, the concept of virginity was culturally significant in the ancient world. But unlike today, virginity as an act of devotion to God could propel a woman to the top of the social ladder.  We explore shifting ideas about what makes someone a virgin and the importance of virginity to the early Christian movement.

“Virginity is a concept that seems not to be going away as societies enter the twenty-first century. But what it is, it turns out, has always been multiple meanings—flexible, usable for a lot of different purposes. And whether it sticks around a long time as a concept or not, it seems like the possibilities are endless.”

— Dr. Julia Kelto Lillis

BIO

Dr. Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Christian History at Union Theological Seminary, where she specializes in gender and sexuality in early Christianity. Her book Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity, won the Best First Book Prize from the North American Patristics Society and the American Historical Association’s 2024 Prize in History prior to 1000 CE. She also received the American Society of Church History’s Jane Dempsey Douglass prize for one of her articles, “Paradox in Partu: Verifying Virginity in the Protevangelium of James.” Her second book will analyze ideas of genderless personhood that early Christians imagined for heavenly or earthly human life. She holds a BA from St. Olaf College, an MDiv and ThM from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Religion from Duke University.

• Transcript

  [Opening podcast music]

  Rebekah Haigh: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world! I’m Rebekah Haigh,

  Emily Chesley: And I’m Emily Chesley. 

  Rebekah: – Scholars, friends, and your hosts!

  In today’s episode, “Virginity and the Hype About Hymens,” we talk with Dr.  Julia Kelto Lillis about ancient purity culture, what wine has to do with the V-Card, and why the gods like to make babies with virgins.

  [podcast theme music continues]

  Emily: Once upon a time, there was a land where lots of men were obsessed with firsts. Not their own firsts—their girlfriends’, daughters’, and wives’. In particular, whether or not their partner was virgin territory. As a theme, virginity made it into pop culture, drama, and songs. There were the unbelievable stories of forty-year-old virgins. There were religious young people bravely taking a “counter-cultural” stance and kissing dating goodbye. Virgins were stereotyped in novels and pop culture. … Now, if you think we’re talking about the 90s and early 2000s, that’d be a reasonable guess. But we’re actually sitting about sixteen hundred years earlier. Welcome to the world of late antique Christianity, where the new faith’s strange ideas about chastity, virginity, and sex—or more particularly, lack of it— were making cultural headwaves.

  Rebekah: There’s a lot of talk about virginity in our world and the early Christian world. Pop culture expresses lots of ideas about virginity, not all of them accurate. The TV series Never Have I Ever (2020–2023) and Jane the Virgin (2014–2019) explored the persistent idea that losing your virginity is supposed to change your life. The Twilight saga, both books and films, warned that you’ll get pregnant immediately after losing your virginity. If you take American Pie (1999) or The 40-Year-Old Virgin(2005) seriously, if you haven’t lost your virginity by the right time, usually before the end of highschool, or to the right person there’s something seriously wrong with you. If you’re into horror films (or just need somebody to sacrificed to a dragon), it’s almost always going to be the virginal teen who dies.[1]  Easy A  (2010) looked at the unwinnable reputational game women have to play between being labeled a prude versus the awful s-word.

  Of course, all of these are myths, and some have been pretty psychologically damaging. But the point is that contemporary culture sure spends a lot of time mulling over virginity—holding onto it, losing it, to whom, when, where, and what it all means!

  Emily: What was significant about virginity differed between our world and the ancient Mediterranean, but it was culturally significant to both.

  Before we talk about how Christianity changed the culture around virginity, we have to start with its prequel: the Roman world. First, let’s unpack the term, “virgin.” The Latin and Greek words often translated as “virgin” don’t map perfectly onto our modern ideas of a person who has never had sex. In Greek, the term for virgin, parthenos, could refer to young, unmarried girls or to women who hadn’t had yet sex.[2] When you stopped being a parthenos, you became a gyne, the word usually translated as “woman” in English.[3] In Latin writings someone who was a virgo was generally an unmarried girl of respectable status. By implication, these maidens would be chaste because respectability required chastity, but it wasn’t specifically about their anatomy.[4]  As Patricia Watson has pointed out, a victim of rape could still be called a virgo.[5]

  Rebekah: Virginity could have religious or cultic implications, too, in Rome as in the Greek world before it. In ancient Rome, some of the most financially autonomous and politically consequential women were the six vestal virgins. They were chosen for this role at birth and were required to retain their virginity for the length of their thirty-year term of service. They were so important to the state, if one of them lost her virginity, it was such a serious crime that the punishment was being buried alive.[6]Famously, one of the titles of the goddess Athena was Athena Parthenos. When a magnificent temple was built for her in Athens in the 5th century BCE, it became known as “the Parthenon.” A thousand years later, the temple would be converted into a church and dedicated to another great virgin: Mary the mother of Jesus. 

  Emily: Free elite Roman men were having plenty of sex with prostitutes, mistresses, and enslaved people. And since elite free men produced most of the textual sources that have survived, it’s not surprising that this idea dominates in our modern presumptions about ancient Rome. Salacious, perverted stories like Emperor Caligula sleeping with his sisters and Nero castrating and marrying a twelve-year-old boy circle Reddit and find their way into Netflix docuseries and HBO dramas.[7] Those stories are out there. In Rome, totally fine for upper-class men to have sex with anyone they pleased.

  Rebekah: But for everyone else, especially upper-class girls and women, sex was actually highly restricted. Free women were expected to only have sex with their husbands, as we talked about with Tom McGinn last season. Their bodies were off-limits to anyone else. Men demanded women stay virginal before marriage and faithful during it. Husbands needed to know that any children their wives carried were their heirs.   A woman’s chastity was critical both to her family and to the Roman state.

  Emily: Seneca the Elder, writing around the turn of the Common Era, tells a story of a virgin (virgo) in his Controversia. She’s captured by pirates, sold to a pimp, and then kills a soldier when he tries to force himself on her. A court acquits her of the crime and sends her back to her family. But her dreams of being a priestess are still dashed because all the men involved in the case agree that her chastity is by no means certain because they cannot just trust her word. One man retorts sarcastically, “A marvellous defence of one’s chastity: ‘I killed a soldier.’ But [yet] you didn’t kill your pimp” (Declamations 1.2). Although the virgo resisted assault, the men of her community would not accept her testimony. There was no way to win their trust. Stories like this illustrate the stakes for women in preserving their chastity. It was a woman’s responsibility, but it was also all of society’s business. For the ancient Romans, virginity was a matter of social, familial, political, ritual, reputational, and economic consequence.

  Rebekah: As far as sex was concerned, Christianity brought two big changes into  Roman culture.  First, making sex for men off-limits to anyone they weren’t married to. No longer were wives required to stay faithful to their husbands without reciprocity. Now husbands, too, had to stay faithful to their wives. [sarcastically,] How groundbreaking!

  The other big change was that suddenly, marriage and motherhood were no longer the highest virtues for women. Moved to the top of the social ladder was the holy and abstinent virgin.[8] Men and women renounced sex permanently out of devotion to God, and took up the mantle of a monk, following ascetics like St. Anthony into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. (We’ll learn more about them in a later episode.) This strange new value system said that abstaining from sex was a way to pursue purity and draw closer to God. Women started renouncing their engagements. We met Thecla last season, the young woman who broke off her engagement to follow the Apostle Paul. A fourth-century daughter of a patrician family, Macrina the Younger, followed Thecla’s example. When her fiancé died before their marriage, Macrina claimed their betrothal had been a real marriage and pursued an ascetic life instead.[9]

  Emily: Of course, early Christians didn’t just adopt ideas of virginity from their Roman neighbors. Their ideas were also shaped by reading and hearing the Bible. A law in Deuteronomy deals with hypothetical husbands wanting proof of their brides’ virginity (Deut 22:13–18). There are also stories about virgin daughters (e.g., Judg. 11:34–40; Gen 19:6–8). And of course, the Virgin Mary.

  Mary was the archetype for human chastity in western and eastern Christianity. Do you remember the ambiguity in the Greek word parthenos? How it could mean both “young girl” or “girl who hadn’t had sex”? Well, early Gospel writers found the need to specify which definition of parthenos applied to Mary. Matthew’s version of the Christmas story quotes a passage by the prophet Isaiah who had promised one day a parthenos would give birth (Matt 1:22, quoting Is 7:14). Mary came along and gave birth to a son, Jesus. To Christian theologians it made a huge difference whether Mary was just a younggirl or a chaste girl: was Jesus’ conception miraculous and divine, or just some youthful hanky-panky? That’s why the gospel writers make such a point of saying Mary had never been with a man (Luke 1:26–37; Matt 1:18–25). The word parthenos by itself wouldn’t cut it.

  Rebekah: As late antiquity went on, ideas about Mary’s virginity grew, and a new theological ideal emerged: her perpetual virginity. In this view, Mary wasn’t just a virgin when she gave birth. She stayed a virgin her entire life. Our earliest account of this idea comes from The Protoevangelium of James, a second-century gospel that didn’t make it into the New Testament. In this recounting, Mary and her betrothed Joseph were forced to shelter in a cave and find a midwife when she was about to give birth. Joseph tells the midwife that Mary had conceived without his help, but the midwife isn’t convinced. A miraculous sign appears when the baby Jesus is born, and the midwife believes. Another bystander, Salome, still insists, “As the Lord my God lives, if I do not put my finger [and] examine her nature, I will not believe the virgin gave birth” (Prot. Jas. 19:15, trans. Zevos).[10]

  Emily: This story about testing Mary’s virginity reflects not only an emerging anxiety about the evidence for her virginity, but also changing ideas about what constituted a “virgin” in the first place. Texts like Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium underline the spiritual value of virginity and its fragility. Once lost, it could never be repaired. Saint Jerome wrote, “I will say it boldly, though God can do all things He cannot raise up a virgin when once she has fallen. He may indeed relieve one who is defiled from the penalty of her sin, but He will not give her a crown” (Jerome, Ep. 22.5, trans. Fremantle, Lewis, and Martley).[11]

  A few male Christian authors write about tests carried out on women’s bodies to check whether they were intact. We don’t know how often these hymen tests were actually conducted in practice, but the conversation itself tells us men were starting to think about virginity as a bodily state that could be physically confirmed. Which brings us the topic of today’s discussion: virginity and its importance in early Christianity.

  Rebekah: Dr. Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Christian History at Union Theological Seminary, where she specializes in gender and sexuality in early Christianity. An accomplished and awarded teacher, she earned a BA from St. Olaf College, an MDiv and ThM from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Religion from Duke University. She received the American Society of Church History’s Jane Dempsey Douglass prize for her article, “Paradox in Partu: Verifying Virginity in the Protevangelium of James.” Her second book will analyze ideas of genderless personhood early Christians imagined for heavenly or earthly human life. We’re talking with her today about her first book, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity, recently published by University of California Press. We’re excited to welcome her to the podcast.

  [music interlude]

  Rebekah: What was virginity? This might seem at first to have a fairly obvious answer. When someone mentions virginity or the loss of virginity today in 21st-century North America or Europe, where most of our listeners though not all hail from, most imagine a first-time sexual encounter, which might include pain and bleeding because the hymen has been ruptured. That is, virginity is something physically embodied. But as you've shown, that's not necessarily true of the ancient past. What did virginity variously mean throughout the Mediterranean world?

  Julia Kelto Lillis (Julie): There are a lot of written sources that mention virgins as a distinct group from full-fledged women, but what “virgin” means can mean a bunch of different things. So four pretty common ones that were usually on the menu... [laughs]

  One is age. So virgins are teenagers, not yet adults.

  Marriage. Virgins are single women, not married.

  The more familiar category of sexual inexperience is one of the common meanings.

  And once in a while you even see ancient Mediterranean sources talk about virgins in a sort of reproductive way. Virgins could even be young sexually active wives who just haven't had kids yet. So these are some of the more familiar options.

  Anatomical virginity—the idea that virginity is some kind of anatomical condition of the body—joins that menu very late. It's really, really rare before the 5th century CE to come across that idea in any sources. So virginity gets physical and anatomical and perceptible in a way that it hadn't before in very late antiquity.

  There are sources suggesting that the hymen is getting kind of conceptually invented near the very early Common Era. And by that I mean, hymen tissue would still be there in women's bodies, but for a long time it seems like people just saw it as part of the landscape of the genitals and not some kind of meaningful body part of its own. So that kind of conceptual invention for hymens happens probably very early in the Common Era, takes a few hundred years to catch on.

  Meanwhile, other people have some other ideas shaping around the same time about how virginity is perceptible physically in women's bodies. That arises as this new kind of common sense by around the 5th century, 6th century CE. So then the menu expands and includes this physical or anatomical kind of idea as well.

  And I should mention that you can even see virginity terms get used multiple ways in the same community, in one locale, in one text corpus—sometimes by the same thinker [chuckles] or inside the same religious community. It's not always that it's competing definitions between different groups or places.

  Emily: What were some of the authors who talk about virginity in these different ways? Or who were the authors that you looked to if you're trying to understand what a virgin was in late antiquity?

  Julie: I break things down when I'm looking at developments in late antiquity into what we see change in medical literature, which is actually the latest place that hymen ideas infiltrate [laughs]. In other kinds of Greco-Roman and later Roman and Greek literature—encyclopedias, etymologies. In Jewish sources, the differences between earlier things and the Mishnah compared with later ideas manifesting in the Talmud.

  And then in a lot of different kinds of Christian sources, where you also see transformations in how people are thinking expansively about virginity early on. And then the ways that their definitions kind of multiply, proliferate, merge, sometimes conflict. And they have to figure out what to do about that. And just develop into, again, a different kind of palette or menu over time. Where there's still a lot of definitions like before, but more of them get kind of merged together, especially when you look at a figure like the Virgin Mary.

  Rebekah: Which we will get to. [laughs]

  Emily: Which we will get to.

  Rebekah: Hold that thought.

  Emily: So it's really helpful to get I think this understanding of the multitude of ideas about virginity. And I want to pick up on this idea of anatomy because ancient conceptions of anatomy, as you've written about, influenced a variety of ideas and practices related to women's bodies, from fertility and sexuality, to pregnancy and virginity. You recount in your book this unusual story of virginity testing, where Rabbi Gamaliel III has a woman sit atop a barrel of wine, and the fact that that smell of wine does not travel up through her body confirms for him her internal closure and lack of previous penetration (Bavli Ketubot 10a; HEEBT 11:10a).[12] So it confirms that she is in fact a virgin. [chuckles] Can you talk about this? How did ancient anatomical understandings of the female body relate to the ways that they proved or tried to confirm a woman's virginity?

  Julie: That story about doing a virginity test with the wine barrel is a perfect illustration [all three chuckle] of the ways that things change. Because that test in earlier Egyptian and Greek medicine was actually a fertility test. In more ancient sources elsewhere you use fumes under the genitals to check for fumes emerging on the breath of a woman to make sure that her system is open enough to be able to conceive. That's sort of theorizing women's bodies as something with a pathway that goes through it, and things are supposed to be able to move through it pretty freely. It's relatively unobstructed. This is the ideal for feminine health in a lot of ancient medical literature.

  But in that story in the Talmud, in the Babylonian Talmud, you get an idea that virgins are closed in some way, that the body is innately obstructed for women. The sort of test mechanism familiar for other purposes from before, changes so that you have this idea of a closed body instead that you can check for.

  Now, before late antiquity, most tests for sexual virginity involve something very different than that. Not bodily inspections, not these other kinds of less invasive things with the same kind of logic about, you know, barricaded bodies versus penetrated ones.

  Usually before late antiquity, the tests for sexual virginity involve verbal testimony or ordeals. There is an oath, or there's witnesses testifying about someone’s character or behaviors, or there's verbal questioning and examining of a person. Or with ordeals it's, you know, situations where a person whose reputation is suspect gets put in a situation where God is going to rescue them from danger, or natural forces are going to show whether they're pure. Like a river is gonna rise or not rise, or something like that, right. And there's a bunch of different kinds of situations where things outside of the person themselves are supposed to show—in what sounds to us kind of like a magical way—whether they're virginal or not.

  There's not strong evidence for a practice of examining vaginas to verify women's virginity until about the 3rd century CE in some Christian sources. Att that time in those earlier eras, medical and popular thought seemed to look at virgins’ bodies as you know, changing gradually to a womanly state from a childhood state. It's only much later that you get this stronger sense of women's anatomy being closed off and that sexual activity has an immediate, permanent effect. You see that newer belief in the ways that texts and stories about the Virgin Mary change over time, and in that new practice of midwives conducting inspections, or stories like that one in the Talmud.

  Rebekah: So I'm thinking of—as you were talking—the passage, I think it's in Deuteronomy 22, where the man who might “detest his wife,” whatever we take that to mean, could potentially divorce her, and there’s some ambiguous language about blood on the sheets. Or at least that's how it's been interpreted later.

  Julie: Yeah, yeah.

  Rebekah: So how do we think about those kinds of scenarios? What's going on there? What sort of test is that?

  Julie: Yeah so that kind of proving of virginity, there's a few things to say about it. Some scholars have interpreted it as something pretty different originally from a virginity test. Some of the theories—not always, you know, widely convincing or widely received—include that something else about menstruation and pregnancy is at stake. That there's other options for understanding what kind of thing on a garment is being shown, because it's a little bit vague.

  But if we take it as confirmation of premarital virginity, and if we take it as bleeding, like coital bleeding, on a garment to demonstrate premarital virginity—then the couple of things to have in mind are, first, that that physiological proof of blood is not the same thing as anatomical theories. A lot of times folks will look at that and say, “Oh, okay, in the ancient world people sometimes mention that virgins might bleed when they first have sex.” Then they'll assume, “Okay, so everybody believed in hymens already.” [chuckles] And in fact, you don't need both of those things to be true.

  Oftentimes physiological ideas come up here and there, but they sometimes get different anatomical explanations by Greek medical writers. Or just don't really get theorized. They get treated as an important phenomenon without that translating into the body having this obvious anatomical indicator or mechanism for testing virginity.

  One other point to have in mind with Deuteronomy 22 is that it is a very unusual instance. It's a really unique text for even treating physiological things as evidence for virginity. A lot of times, scholarly and popular readers will look at it and say, “Oh okay, so back then this is kind of what people thought [laughs] everywhere about virginity and sex.” But in fact, if you look across more ancient Middle Eastern kinds of sources, it's highly unusual to see that kind of procedure.

  Rebekah: So if we're thinking about a whole range of procedures, be it whatever this garment is that they're showing, or an oath testimony, or witnesses, or a physiological test later—how often do you think these sorts of virginity tests are actually performed? Or is this a matter of male writers using the idea of virginity test for their own ends?

  Julie: Mmmm, yeah. We probably have a mix. So there are some early sources where people are telling very fanciful tales of that time that somebody's chastity or virginity got proven. Or people will tell stories in Greek romance novels in the early Common Era that have these kinds of episodes. In those cases, you're seeing what people might imagine. Sometimes you're seeing what people put into law.

  It's hard to know exactly what did or didn't happen all the time. The ones that we know sometimes actually happened are the inspections by midwives that Christian authors eventually talk about. And even those were probably not routine.

  So to give a sense of what it sounds like and some of the different sources in the 3rd, 4th, 5th century as Christians talk about virginity inspections—

  —And by the way, I'll just say parenthetically, there's a very famous early text called the Proto-Gospel of James where there are midwives that show up after Mary has given birth to Jesus. And there's a whole thing, a whole episode there [laughs] that people usually see as a hymen-based virginity test. I think it actually is about reproductive virginity. And there's some more things I can share about Mary in a bit, but that's a text often on people's minds when they hear me say that these testing sources really begin in the 3rd century.

  And the same with the Dead Sea Scrolls. People read parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls as being about midwives checking vaginas. I think it's more likely to be women questioning other women, examining them in that sense.—

  So the picture in the Christian sources that begin talking about virginity inspections by midwives give really interesting snapshots. But it's hard to know what to make of them, for how often even these tests were actually occurring. On the one hand, you have someone named John Chrysostom in Syria who says midwives are sprinting every day to get to the virgin's houses as if they're going to deliver a baby, but they're going to check who's still a virgin. And he's probably exaggerating to make a point. We don't think that that is actually what was happening every day in Antioch and other places.

  In contrast, if you're over in Italy, where some of these hymenal kinds of ideas have been circulating longer, you've got somebody like Ambrose of Milan saying to another bishop that he really doesn't think virginity inspections are an okay procedure to use. He asks these sarcastic questions like, “Should everybody who's about to get married get inspected first? Should everybody who's about to take virginity vows get handled like this before that?” And clearly these sarcastic questions are meant to make the bishop he's writing to say, “Oh well, no, of course not. Yeah, this is kind of an unusual practice. This isn't something that we do all the time.”

  Part of it too, midwives had all these other ranges of tasks, but then in late antiquity this is a new one that gets added to their portfolio of responsibilities. I think it was a new kind of area of authority or expertise that midwives suddenly had. So that's interesting too, from the vantage point of what's going on for women's health practices and things.

  So thinking about the times that we see virginity tests happening in Christian sources. The purposes are sometimes clear, sometimes a little bit hard to get a handle on. You've on the one hand got a couple of times in Roman North Africa—once in the mid-third century and possibly again in the fifth century—where it seems that virgins got inspected because leaders wanted to check whether cohabiting couples (celibate couples of men and women living together) were telling the truth about abstaining from sex while they lived together. So sometimes it's a way to check on the status of both the women and the men.

  You've also got cases like these letters I mentioned by Ambrose writing to a fellow bishop where, as he tries to discourage virginity testing for a woman named Indicia [pronounced with a k sound] or Indicia [pronounced with a sh sound], who is actually a friend of his family that he really wants to protect from having this happen—he wants her reputation to get salvaged other ways cause he's convinced that she is being falsely accused, and there's this whole needless scandal that could be put to rest. But Ambrose doesn't want virginity testing to be how you resolve these questions or scandals.

  And one of the ways he argues against that practice is to say that he knows of a case where somebody's slave was inspected to check her sexual status. But then when an even more experienced and well-off midwife—who should be very reliable and trustworthy because she's not going to be able to be bribed, and she's not going to be able to be fooled—even after this other expert person inspected that unnamed enslaved woman, there still was uncertainty about her sexual status. So there we get some glimpses. This named woman, Indicia, and we don't really know what happened with her. And this unnamed enslaved woman, who apparently did undergo two virginity inspections, but we're not really told why.

  Judging by comments in some of the sources by early Christians, there are possibilities that some women might have welcomed virginity testing. At least the writers who talk about this are concerned that women could use the availability of virginity tests to justify things like celibate cohabitation when they want to have a male roommate. So at least in the rhetoric, there's this possibility that women might be using this to their advantage, that some would be very comfortable saying, “I know, I know who I am. I know that I'm a virgin. And I can prove it if I need to.”

  On the other hand, some of those same sources imply that the situation that we would expect, knowing that today a lot of people find virginity testing painful or traumatic. There are times when the writers say, “Some women refuse and then they're in disgrace just because they didn't want to get a virginity test.” Or they show that they're expecting the test to be seen, experienced as humiliating or painful or unpleasant at least. So we would expect some women in antiquity to find that kind of experience distressing or difficult or painful. And there probably would have been a range in how people responded to this scenario

  Emily: And regardless of the type of testing that's undergone, whether it's physical or verbal, sort of a witness statement, it's worth stating the obvious that you can't actually reliably test someone’s virginity through these methods, right.

  Julie: Right.

  Emily: Even if they thought they could, or some of them thought they could.

  Julie: Right. That's right. Yeah. And some of the ancient Christian writers openly admitted, this does not seem like the most reliable way, [laughs] like scientifically, to try to confirm virginity. Plus, it doesn't get at the sort of holistic spiritual senses of virginity they were also concerned about.

  Today, health experts increasingly emphasize that sexual penetration or its absence cannot usually be verified by vaginal examination.

  Rebekah: So early Christianity did not have a monopoly on virgins, although the prominence of the Virgin Mary might make her the first person our audience thinks of. The Vestal Virgins were central to ritual and cultural life in pre-Christian Rome. According to Ovid, Jupiter came to Perseus's mother in the form of a golden shower, and impregnated her (Metamorphoses IV). In Hinduism, a mortal woman was impregnated when Vishnu descended into her womb to be born as Krishna.

  Now, of course, as you've already talked about, different communities meant different things by the word “virgin.” But how were Christian instantiations of virgins different from those that came before. Or were they different?

  Julie: It's a great question. There are a few ways that Christian virginity is pretty distinctive. In the most practical sense, the value of lifelong virginity for Christians was somewhat distinctive. Vestals were only required to be virgins and perform their functions up to a certain age. Whereas lifelong Christian virginity was supposed to be a whole different course of life permanently, and this allegiance and devotion to a different world. So that part is a little bit different.

  A second way that Christian virginity could be distinctive is in God-like-ness. There are ways that Christians could picture a sort of spiritual eroticism between God and humans. But being virginal—and this could apply to men too—being virginal sets people apart, kind of like the divine is set apart from the realm of birth and death and sexuality. It's a way of stepping into a whole other world with the divine. So being virginal is to leave the sort of realm of birth and death, growth and decay, and join this world of permanence, of tranquil purity, of spiritual generativity. Increasingly, virginal women got told that they were Christ's brides, but in a lot of cases, Christians often seem to have looked at virgins as vivid examples of becoming like God.

  A third way that Christians seem a little distinctive is in the very exceptional situation of Mary, as you mentioned. Mary’s reproductive virginity is something quite exceptional and distinctive that's worth saying a little bit about.

  Before Christians gave Mary a hymen and started talking about her womb staying miraculously closed during childbirth—all of which became official church teaching—the miracle in the Nativity story for the more miraculous versions that got told about Jesus's birth, was that her body did not have to go through everything that other women's bodies did to get pregnant or to give birth. There's this early tradition that midwives show up right after Jesus is born, and they can hardly believe what they're seeing. And the texts telling this story are pretty vague about what's supposed to be going on at the scene. But it seems like Mary seems to the women who come see her at the birthing scene, as a woman who's never given birth. She hasn't had to experience the mess, the violence, the exhaustion, the impurities, associated with childbearing in ancient cultures. So this is something special about her and a bit different about Christians that stands out.

  There are conflicting pictures of Jesus' birth. Other early Christians are not always invested in that idea of a very pristine nativity. Sometimes they're theologically concerned about making the case that Jesus was fully human, not just divine. And so they want him to have a pretty messy, pretty ordinary-sounding kind of childbirth or kind of birth.

  Some early Christians assumed too, that Mary went on to have more children after she had Jesus. But increasingly she was said to be a lifelong virgin who even got exempt from ordinary childbirth. So she becomes sexually virginal, reproductively virginal, and starting in really late antiquity anatomically virginal as well.

  Emily: And if you had to put a date on the rise of this idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary, do you have a sense of when that started?

  Julie: Yeah, the main things that seem to drive the appearance of the— I sometimes call it an incarnation of virginity, virginity taking flesh in Mary's body, right, parallel to Christ’s Incarnation. There are earlier sources where you're not really seeing that yet, even though some of the thinkers say she stayed a virgin her whole life. The rise of the notion that she had a closed womb or what people end up later calling an intact hymen, that first appears in controversies of the very late fourth and early fifth century, the 390s to the 430s. You get it first in some Latin stuff, then in some Greek stuff.

  And these are in intra-Christian debates, where it turns out to be a very helpful tool to talk about Mary's miraculous closed womb in order to argue that asceticism, celibacy, singleness is superior to marriage. Or to argue that Christ’s divine and human natures were so fully united from the beginning that he could get born in this wondrous way.

  The point when the idea of a hymen first starts to show up a little bit in Roman society might suggest that it's invented because of the kind of time that folks in Rome are experiencing. A time when there's some concerns about the levels of freedom that women are exercising, possibly more awareness or worries about whether contraception might be changing the traditional ways to be able to monitor women's sexual behaviors, and also just the larger picture of becoming an empire. All of these rules are changing about status, about social mobility, who's got what kinds of power, and how can they keep it. And these are exactly the kinds of times when a lot of societies look for more clear-cut hierarchies and more mechanisms for being able to monitor something like women's purity. So it's possible that those kinds of circumstances help to prompt the rise of the new anatomical way to think about virginity.

  Likewise, Christians seem to take up anatomical ideas about virginity as consecrated virginity is on the rise and becoming this new institutional reality, as they're engaging in all these intra-Christian debates and needing clearer-cut positions, and as there’s new concerns about Christianity’s status in the world and how to draw appropriate boundaries. So the boundaries around the church—which is often thought about as sort of a woman's body, a bride of Christ to the church—you see it gets sort of literally embodied or, again, incarnate in the ways that virgins’ bodies get very nicely boundaried-off and sort of become impenetrable, or at least not yet penetrated.

  Emily: Yeah, I really liked what you began talking about a bit ago of one of the takes on virginity as virgins being set apart. Because in some of the sources and stories being recounted, virginity is not necessarily the woman's choice, right. It's something that could be owed her husband [or] seized violently by another.

  But paradoxically, chastity also opened doors for early Christian women, as numerous scholars of late antiquity have demonstrated. (Kate Cooper and Susan Ashbrook Harvey we heard from last season.) So sort of could allow a way for some women to avoid marriage and gain a kind of control over their life and body. We've heard about celibate women like Thecla and Eustochium [and] Macrina serving as spiritual leaders. Could you talk a little more about this side of virginity? In what ways could virginity or chosen chastity be an empowering choice?

  Julie: One of the first things to think about with what you said there is what women got to avoid if they chose virginity. This is really talked up, played up in the Patristic sources, the quote-un-quote “church fathers” who say, “Yeah, if you choose the life of virginity, you don't have to defer to a husband and put up with him all the time. You don't have to go through the risks of childbirth. You don't have to then have kids who might not survive childhood. You don't have to worry about grief to the same extent as a married woman. And you don't have to deal with all of the same kinds of managing of households and property that somebody in the ordinary world would have to do.”

  So there's a lot of rhetoric—and probably some amount of reality—to the ways that things could get left behind. The kinds of independence and further opportunities virginity brought are quite interesting. Some of them are even more pronounced perhaps with widows than with virgins, where families had enough wealth and education to really have lots of freedom in choosing how to use their money, how to spend their time.

  Some of them studied a lot. Some of them traveled. Some of them went off and founded monasteries. There are chances to pursue faith-related goals full time, more freely, if people are not bound to the traditional sort of route of marriage and babies and dealing with regular roles in society.

  There are some other variations on this too. A lot of the women who stay more local are thought to benefit the church community and local community in really important ways. And could receive a lot of prestige, certain kinds of protection. Some brought wealth into the church, others would get financially supported by the church. And they would often, as celibate women, engage in this very important ministry of prayer on behalf of their community. Christians took this sort of spiritual economy of prayer very seriously.

  So these are ways that people could become very prominent, even if they look to us like they're leading a very secluded kind of life, or doing this kind of modest old-school way [chuckles] to hide out and be a virgin in their hometown.

  You really wonder, too, what happened for enslaved women who sometimes went into monasteries with the women who owned them. So there are folks of all different statuses joining virginal lifestyles at different points. Sources mention this quite a few times. And if somebody who owned other people decided to become something like a nun, they would sometimes take servants and slaves with them. And they were supposed to then live in a more or less equal level together in that new life and community. So you gotta wonder, like, how did that go? [laughs] Did it work out pretty well?

  Emily: Yeah, or did they want to go?

  Julie: Yes. Because a lot of times they don't even have the choice, it sounds like, to begin with.

  You mentioned some particular saints or figures, leaders. I was thinking of how interesting and powerful the stories are of somebody like Thecla, somebody like Macrina.

  In Thecla’s story, she's this high-class, engaged young woman who hears the apostle Paul preaching the Christian Gospel. And his version of the gospel in this story has very pro-celibacy overtones. She ends up breaking off her engagement. She goes off to join Paul in his missionary travels. She fends off a sexual assailant. She baptizes herself when she thinks she's about to get executed. And after all these different adventures, she ends up pretty much becoming an apostle herself. She has a whole teaching and preaching career, and is trying to distribute resources from the wealthy to the needy.

  Paul seems okay with this role for her. He even kind of commissions it. And you see virginity becoming a way for Thecla to do all of the kinds of things that Paul was doing. So that's a great example of the kind of opportunities and empowerment that virginity might mean.

  Macrina organizes a celibate religious community, sort of an early version of a monastery—where you have joint worship, a lot of time for prayer, for study, a lot of kinds of manual labor across all social classes, and ways of serving the local community like taking in or caring for abandoned kids and people who are starving. Macrina becomes this huge inspiration to her siblings, including Basil and Gregory, who become famous bishops and theologians.

  And in the biography we have of her written by her brother Gregory of Nyssa it's really fascinating to see how he views the empowerment that virginity brings for her or the special status that brings for her. There's a part near the beginning where he says, “I'm not even sure we should call her a woman who so surpassed her nature.” And it sounds at first like he's saying she wasn't really a woman; she's an honorary man. But he's probably promoting her from human being to angelic being. The text talks about these heavenly sorts of qualities of this community that she's a part of. So she had a really big impact in her own time. And by early Christian logic, Macrina was choosing the most powerful, liberating life that a person could.

  There are some later stories too, where famous figures can escape danger or pursue their calling by living not as women in ordinary society, but as eunuchs in male monasteries. Virginity could be very heavily gendered, but it could apparently sometimes let people abandon gender.

  A lot of us who do feminist scholarship with early Christian sources have ended up emphasizing that most texts keep a lot of limits for women in place. Or continue to commodify women just in a new way. Or expect virgins to do a good job of being modest and womanly enough as virgins.

  But those same sources still celebrate kinds of social freedom and status that celibacy made possible. And actual women may have found space through virginity for what they wanted to do and who they wanted to be.

  Rebekah: So we've talked about virginity as a physical thing to be determined and as a religious concept. But in some cultures, virginity was also a life stage. In the ancient Greek Hippocratic corpus, virginity or virginhood was seen as a dangerous liminal stage: parthenoi (virgins) waiting to become a gynai (or women). As Abby Lind Walker has analyzed, these texts caution against the dangerous afflictions that could come upon young virgins. Parthenoi were prone to daimonicattacks and would shiver and get fevers, hallucinate, and have erotic desires for death. In particular, these texts claimed young girls would be tempted to fling their bodies about the room, throw themselves in wells, and even hang themselves. The only cure for this malady of virginhood, according to [the] Hippocratic doctor, was marriage and childbirth, “to make the body no longer a virgin one.”[13] So what was it about this liminal stage that was so threatening?

  Julie: Yeah. As you said, Hippocratic medical texts give an interesting window onto the liminality of being a virgin. Those are from Greek contexts a few centuries BCE, and they tend to make reproduction central to women's health. They describe bodies going through a lot of changes to get from childhood to reproductive womanhood. Becoming a woman instead of a virgin is a gradual process, where starting periods and starting to have sex and babies, loosens up compact materials in the body and opens up veins and pathways in the body so that fluids can move more freely and women can healthfully do this reproductive work that they're socially expected to.

  From a Hippocratic perspective, virgins are in a precarious life stage because they're only partway into these changes. Things are out of balance in their bodies. Fluids like blood can build up and put pressure on their organs instead of getting used for pregnancy.

  So a famous quote from one treatise that you're kind of alluding to here is, “If they get pregnant, they will get well.” Scholars can give a lot of different sociological explanations, I think, for why virginity is a threatening stage that needs careful management for something like classical Greek thinkers. A lot of times the explanations focus on the drive to manage big transitions in life, to define roles in society. It's really just one kind of liminality that ancient societies made a big deal about.

  And two more scholars who have done major work on Greek social and medical ideas about virgins are Giulia Sissa[14] and Helen King.[15]

  Emily: In our last minutes I'd love to think through connections between these ancient practices and ideas and today's world. Because it's not just women today who are concerned with how their body’s culturally perceived, right, women of the past also did. But today, for instance, some choose to undergo cosmetic surgery to recreate the feeling or perception of freshness. I think you put it “virgin territory.” We’ve also seen an increase of women in the Middle East seeking hymen reconstruction surgeries in preparation for getting engaged, to sort of allow a synthesis of cultural and new practices.[16]

  But we see similar patterns in the ancient Mediterranean, where recipes advertised an ability to recreate or mimic virginity.[17] So what are some of these other connections between ancient conceptualizations of virginity and modern ones?

  Julie: Those late ancient recipes are a great place to start. They are so interesting! These ingredients that were used in such recipes probably would dry out and tighten up vaginal tissue. That is something that could apparently be done for multiple purposes, though. So one of the recipes is actually labeled as something to help people conceive, which is pretty surprising. Another says that it's for a woman who has been forced. And it doesn't say who she would want to reassure about her status; maybe it's just herself.

  Most of them say, “using the recipe is going to make a woman like a virgin or like a virgin during sex.”So apparently she or her partner would want this.

  That is the thing that's most similar, I think, to the kinds of products on the market today. It's bizarre how similar some present-day re-virginizing products are to the ancient ones. And a little bit creepy that they share this idea that virginal vaginas have extra desirable qualities.

  The surgeries that get requested—which do in fact get requested all around the globe from medical practitioners for things like hymen restoration—these kinds of requests get made for a whole variety of purposes too. There are journal articles you can find about medical ethics, where doctors try to weigh the reasons for and against saying yes when patients ask for a hymen reconstruction.

  You might think that religious leaders and feminist scholars would not be fans of this kind of medical surgery that doesn't seem very necessary or seems like it could be kind of deceptive. But there have been, in fact, a lot of feminist thinkers and religious leaders speaking in favor of it too.

  The whole industry that you mentioned as well of cosmetic genital surgeries is really interesting and perhaps more closely related to the re-virginizing creams. There are women who do not need to re-virginize vaginas for the sake of safety or family honor or marriage or job prospects who might still feel the need to make their vagina and labia look more like a young girl’s instead of a mature woman’s. So this has been quite a trend over recent decades that can also—perhaps in ways a little bit like what happened in late antiquity—set up some kinds of odd ideals and pressures that can affect relationships and self-perception for girls and women, including trans folks today too.

  Another really direct connection between the ancient developments and today is virginity testing—virginity testing by genital exam, usually using either the condition of the hymen or the tension of the introitus, the opening to the vagina. These kinds of tests have also been happening all around the globe in recent decades. They are, again, increasingly said by medical experts not to work, not to make sense to do. Hymen tissue is very unpredictable. It can go at an unexpected time. It can stay at an unexpected time. And tissue quality and muscle tension can vary a lot. So there's a lot more emphasis in health sciences now on  getting away from these kinds of practices like testing virginity.

  There are objections by human rights advocates, and increasing amounts of legislation around the world. There was a 2018 World Health Organization recommendation to ban all kinds of virginity testing, noting that even well-intentioned uses of it, like forensically in cases of sexual violence, can still be really problematic or harmful. Some places classify it even as torture or as rape. So this is the sort of direction things are starting to move in terms of global and public health.

  But the purposes for testing virginity have been really varied across different countries and cultures. And there are some places where it's been tied to preserving a sense of traditional culture and a community-centered worldview in places that have been under colonial pressures for a long time. Sometimes it's tied in with HIV prevention. Sometimes it reflects pushback about trends toward women being seen as sex objects.

  With the increasing amounts of objections to and legislation against virginity testing, it seems likely to decline as a practice, but there are so many different purposes for it that it's actually hard to predict what the future will be.

  Some of the other connections between the ancient concepts and today can be seen in the, certainly in Christian religious circles, ways that people now will take some of the rich theological thinking and devotional sense of being an early Christian virgin and even extend it to be something recoverable, something available to more people across society, which is really interesting. This happens in Muslim circles as well, and in some other places.

  There's a lot of attempts today to argue from the body in simplistic ways for political purposes. And a big moral of the story of studying early Christian virginity and ancient virginity more broadly, is that we don't just observe the bodies that we have. We learn from our cultures how to see them and then how to draw connections from them for other purposes. That can really change the way that we think of the role of biology in arguments today.

  Looking at ancient definitions of virginity and how varied they are and how much change and combination they undergo in late antiquity makes you think really differently about what virginity hasbeen, what it can be for people today.

  And looking around today, there are studies and pop culture things that show the ways virginity already is getting redefined. That it's a concept that can serve new purposes for different groups than it used to, for different people than it did before. People can queer it. People can rethink it and use it in playful or profound ways. That might seem new, but it's really part of this longer tradition of virginity always being a really flexible, varied concept that serves a bunch of different functions.

  Virginity is a concept that seems not to be going away as societies enter the twenty-first century. But what it is, it turns out, has always been multiple meanings, flexible, usable for a lot of different purposes. And whether it sticks around a long time as a concept or not, it seems like the possibilities are endless.

  [music interlude]

  Emily: To whom does a woman’s virginity belong?[18] In the royal courts of Europe, the answer was clear: it belonged to her husband and to the kingdom. In 1609 in England, Lady Frances Howard had to pass a virginity test administered by a group of women and midwives to get divorced.[19] Even as late as 1981, leading up to her marriage to Prince Charles, Lady Diana Spencer’s uncle made a public statement promising her virginity: “Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible bride for Prince Charles at the moment …Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover.”[20]

  Rebekah: To some, virginity belongs to the government. In the late 1970s, certain women immigrating from south Asia to Britain to marry British men were required to undergo hymen examinations.[21] In March 2011, seventeen Egyptian women protesting the interim [Egyptian] government were forcibly detained, beaten, and subjected to vaginal exams. The official who ordered the quote-unquote “tests” claimed bewilderingly, “The procedure was done to protect the girls from rape and to protect the soldiers and officers from rape allegations.”[22] Among other problems, the invasive procedures discouraged other women from raising their voices against the government.

  Emily: To others, virginity belongs to God. Many American evangelical women grew up in the purity culture. They were warned to guard the gates, as it were—be it through purity pledges and purity rings, circulating stories valorizing virgins and belittling those who were sexually active. Their bodies were supposed to be temples of the Holy Spirit.  Youth group pastors glued colored papers together then tore them apart to show the soul-coupling that accompanied sex. Girls were told it was their fault if any boys succumbed to their lure outside of marriage.

  Rebekah: To others, virginity belongs to the family. Confirming virginity through blood-stained sheets from the wedding night is still cultural practice in some parts of the globe like [the country of] Georgia, Tonga, and Kiribati.[23]

  Emily: To still others, virginity belongs to the public. Tabloid magazines publish pieces speculating on when and with whom celebrities lost their virginity—as if that information was owed anyone but themselves.[24]

  Rebekah: Like most things, when imposed by someone else virginity can become a method of control. But as a personal choice, as it was for Thecla and Macrina, it might bring empowerment. Young people in North America are having sex later and less frequently, according to recent studies.[25] Some women today choose to hold off on sex. To prioritize their education or career. To find a more stable romantic partner to raise children with.[26] To avoid the physical pain.[27] To honor religious commitments. Or for their own personal reasons.

  Emily: So to whom does a woman’s virginity belong? To herself and nobody else.

  [podcast theme music plays over the outro]

  Emily: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.

  This podcast is written and produced and edited by us, Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.

  This podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.

  Rebekah: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before. And don’t forget:

  Both: Women were there!

  [Podcast theme music wraps up]

  [1] For instance: “Cherry Falls,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th,” and “Halloween.”

  [2] Giulia Sissa, “The hymen is a problem, still. Virginity, Imperforation, and Contraception, from Greece to Rome,” Eugesta 3 (2013), 73–86. At p. 86: In ancient Greece, “A parthenos is a woman whose marital status (non-married) is patent, but whose required sexual condition (unless she becomes pregnant, and until pregnancy becomes evident) remains uncertain.”

  [3] Sissa, “The hymen is a problem,” 78–79. See also Pseudo-Theocritus, Oaristys, 65.

  [4] Watson also points out that the virgo was a “social rather than biological term” (Patricia Watson, “Puella and Virgo,” Glotta 61, no. 1/2 [1983]: 119–43.).

  [5] Watson, “Puella and virgo,” 122.

  [6] For further reading see Robin Lorsch Wildfang, Rome's Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses In the Late Republic and Early Empire (London: Routledge, 2006). “As long as a Vestal had to remain a virgin, she could not marry. As long as she could not marry, she could not participate in, nor had she any means by which she could return to, the ordinary family and domestic cult structure of Rome, outside of which the rite of captio had placed her. Such a status, unique at Rome, would have made the Vestals the only Romans capable of devoting all of their religious energy to the state cult without also having to fulfill a role in, or risk being polluted by, the private cult of an individual family” (p. 52).

  [7] E.g., Roman Empire, Netflix series, 2016–2019; Domina, MGM+ original series, 2021–2023; and Rome, HBO series, 2005–2007.

  [8] Jerome, Ep. 22.15.

  [9] Vita Sanctae Macrinae 964M. Critical edition by Werner Jaeger, John P. Cavernos, and Virginia Woods Callahan, eds., Gregorii Nysseni Opera Ascetica (Leiden: Brill, 1952), pp. 374–375.

  [10] The Protevangelium of James, trans. George Themelis Zevos (London: T & T Clark, 2019), 88. Scholars and laity alike have often read this story in the Protevangelium of James as about testing Mary’s anatomical virginity—that is, confirming whether or not Mary had an intact hymen. Julia Kelto Lillis has challenged that reading, arguing that the episode is rather a confirmation of Mary’s reproductive virginity, virginity in a “puerperal” sense. As early Christian ideas of testing anatomical virginity developed during the third through fifth centuries, these were read back onto the earlier text. “Paradox in Partu: Verifying Virginity in the Protevangelium of James,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24, no. 1 (2016): 1—28.

  [11] Jerome Ep. 22, trans. W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W.G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.) Rev. and ed. for New Advent Kevin Knight..

  [12] Julia Kelto Lillis, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 36–41 and 45–57, specific citation at 50–51.

  [13] Abbe Lind Walker, Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ: The Virgin and the Otherworldly Bridegroom in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2017), 21–58, quote at p. 21.

  [14] E.g., Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  [15] E.g., Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (Routledge, 2009).

  [16] Sawitri Saharso, “Hymen ‘repair’: Views from feminists, medical professionals and the women involved in the middle east, North Africa and Europe,” Ethnicies 22, no. 2 (2022): 196-214; Helen Lewis, “The Cult of Virginity Just Won’t Let Go,” The Atlantic, September 16, 2021, accessed October 29, 2024; and Menna A. Farouk, “In conservative Egypt, women seek low-cost ways to 'prove' virginity,” Reuters, December 5, 2021, accessed October 29, 2024; Shahira Amin, “'Hymen reconstruction fatwa' stirs controversy in Egypt,” Al-Monitor, September 6, 2021, accessed October 29, 2024.

  [17] See Ann Ellis Hanson on recipes associated with Galen. “The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health,” in Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body, ed. Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 40-65

  [18] Julia Kelto Lillis broaches this question in her dissertation, asking, “to whom does her virginity belong, and whom does its loss affect?” (“Virgin Territory: Reconfiguring Female Virginity in Early Christianity,” PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2017, p. 62).

  [19] Sara D. Luttfring, “Bodily Narratives and the Politics of Virginity in ‘The Changeling’ and the Essex Divorce,” Renaissance Drama39 (2011): 97–128.

  [20] Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 138. As historian Deborah Cohen said, “What began as a concern about legitimacy acquired all sort of connotations tied to social purity. [...] Diana’s virginity became symbolic of the possibility of a return to an innocent past for everyone…” (Gregory Katz, “UK royal bride’s virginity no longer an issue,” The Washington Post, April 8, 2011, accessed October 17, 2024). See also Alexandra Beggs and Bruce Handy, “A Very Different Engagement: The Cult of Diana’s Virginity,” Vanity Fair, April 12, 20122, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [21] Alan Travis, “Virginity tests for immigrants 'reflected dark age prejudices' of 1970s Britain,” The Guardian, May 8, 2011, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [22] G. Willow Wilson, “From virginity test to power,” The Guardian, September 3, 2012, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [23] Alexandra Brewis, Lives on the Line: Women and Ecology on a Pacific Atoll (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), 28–31; and Nicola Heath, “The historic tradition of wedding night-virginity testing,” SBS [Special Broadcasting Services, Australia] January 15, 2018, updated January 16, 2018, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [24] E.g., Us Weekly Staff, “When Stars Lost Their Virginity: Megan Fox, Kim Kardashian, George Clooney and More,” Us Weekly, updated October 7, 2024, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [25] Emily Willingham, “People Have Been Having Less Sex—whether They’re Teenagers or 40-Somethings,” Scientific American,January 3, 2022, accessed October 17, 2024; Hannah Fry, “A ‘failure to launch’: Why young people are having less sex,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2023, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [26] Michelle Castillo, “Waiting longer to have sex tied to more wealth, education and relationship happiness,” CBS News, October 9, 2012, accessed October 17, 2024.

  [27] While frequency of reporting varies by country, estimates suggest between 1–7% of women worldwide suffer from vaginismus, a condition that makes penetrative sex painful, if not impossible (A. Laskowska and P. Gronowski,  “Vaginismus: An Overview,” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 19, Issue Supplement 2 [2022]: S228–S229; Tish Davidson and Margaret Alic, "Vaginismus," in The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, 6th ed., vol. 9, ed. Jacqueline L. Longe, 5365–5368 [Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2020], Gale eBooks, accessed October 17, 2024). Some communities report even higher prevalence. Surveys in Turkey, Ghana, and Iran found that 43%, 68%, and 27% of women reported sexual pain, respectively (Maria McEvoy, Rosaleen McElvaney, and Rita Glover, “Understanding Vaginismus: A Biopsychosocial Perspective,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 39, no. 3 [2021], 681). Adherence to religious orthodoxy and sexual conservatism is one of the commonly-reported causes for developing vaginismus (McEvoy, et. al., 685–687).

• Episode Sources

  • Amin, Shahira. “‘Hymen reconstruction fatwa’ stirs controversy in Egypt.”Al-Monitor. September 6, 2021. Accessed October 29, 2024.

  • Beggs, Alexandra, and Bruce Handy. “A Very Different Engagement: The Cult of Diana’s Virginity.”Vanity Fair. April 12, 2011. Accessed October 29, 2024.

  • Brewis, Alexandra. Lives on the Line: Women and Ecology on a Pacific Atoll. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996.

  • Brown, Tina. TheDiana Chronicles. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

  • Castillo, Michelle. “Waiting longer to have sex tied to more wealth, education and relationship happiness.”CBS News. October 9, 2012. Accessed October 17, 2024.

  • Davidson, Tish, and Margaret Alic. “Vaginismus.” Pp. 5365–5368 in The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. Sixth Edition. Volume 9. Edited by Jacqueline L. Longe. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2020 (Gale eBooks, accessed October 17, 2024).

  • Farouk, Menna A. “In conservative Egypt, women seek low-cost ways to 'prove' virginity.”Reuters. December 5, 2021. Accessed October 29, 2024.

  • Fry, Hannah. “A ‘failure to launch’: Why young people are having less sex.”Los Angeles Times. August 3, 2023. Accessed October 17, 2024.

  • Hanson, Ann Ellis. “The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health.” Pp. 40–65 in Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body. Edited by Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

  • Heath, Nicola. “The historic tradition of wedding night-virginity testing.”SBS [Special Broadcasting Services, Australia]. January 15, 2018, updated January 16, 2018. Accessed October 17, 2024.

  • Jerome. Epistula 22. Translated by W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W.G. Martley. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series. Volume 6, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

  • Jaeger, Werner, John P. Cavernos, and Virginia Woods Callahan, eds. Gregorii Nysseni Opera Ascetica. Leiden: Brill, 1952.

  • Katz, Gregory. “UK royal bride’s virginity no longer an issue.”The Washington Post. April 8, 2011. Accessed October 17, 2024.

  • Kelto Lillis, Julia. “Paradox in Partu: Verifying Virginity in the Protevangelium of James.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24, no. 1 (2016): 1–28.

  • ———. Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.Kelto Lillis, Julia. Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.

  • ———. “Virgin Territory: Reconfiguring Female Virginity in Early Christianity.” PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2017.

  • King, Helen. The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty. Routledge, 2009.

  • Laskowska, A., and P. Gronowski. “Vaginismus: An Overview.” The Journal of Sexual Medicine19, Issue Supplement 2 (2022): S228–S229.

  • Lewis, Helen. “The Cult of Virginity Just Won’t Let Go.”The Atlantic. September 16, 2021. Accessed October 29, 2024.

  • Luttfring, Sara D. “Bodily Narratives and the Politics of Virginity in ‘The Changeling’ and the Essex Divorce.”Renaissance Drama 39 (2011): 97–128.

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Cover Image:

Arguably

the most famous virgin in Western history, Mary the Mother of Jesus was the inspiration for countless works of art. In this Renaissance painting, the artist wraps her in a cloak embroidered with cherubim to signify her holy status, and he depicts her as youthful and serene—signals of her perpetual virginity, which the Catholic Church taught.

Image Credit: “Madonna and Child with Angels,” by Pietro di Domenico da Montepulciano. 1420 CE. Tempura painting on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1907, accession number 07.201. No copyright. OA public domain.

Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. The podcamusic is composed and produced by Moses Sun.

Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University

Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.