By Kathleen Coyne Kelly
This e-book demanding situations the idea that woman virginity may be reliably and unambiguously outlined, demonstrated and confirmed. Kelly analyses numerous medieval Western eu texts - together with scientific treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historic and criminal files. the focus 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 during which checking out virginity is a subject matter. acting Virginity and checking out Chastity within the center a long time offers a compelling and provocative research of the parodox of physically and religious integrity as either presence and shortage.
Read Online or Download Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages PDF
Similar ancient & medieval literature books
The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides
Ovid's Heroides, a listing of letters by means of ladies who've been abandoned, has too usually been tested as basically a lament. In a brand new departure, this publication portrays the ladies of the Heroides as a neighborhood of authors. Combining shut readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with severe tools, the publication argues that the issues of similarity among the various letters of the Heroides, so frequently derided through glossy critics, symbolize an excellent exploitation of intratextuality, during which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously models herself as an alluding writer inspired by way of what she has learn in the Heroides.
Technopaignia Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung (Mnemosyne Supplements)
Technopaignia is the 1st finished assortment and scholarly research of a corpus of literary phenomena whose particularity is composed within the inventive play with formal good points (acrostics, anagrams, palindromes and so forth. ). The examine either discusses every one phenomenon individually as part of the heritage of historic literature and touches upon extra primary questions on the perception of language, the interplay of literary creation and reception, the relation of literary and non-literary types of writing, the character of paintings and so on.
Fiction on the Fringe: Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age
This choice of essays bargains a entire exam of texts that routinely were excluded from the most corpus of the traditional Greek novel and restrained to the margins of the style, akin to the "Life of Aesop", the "Life of Alexander the Great", and the "Acts of the Christian Martyrs".
Anthology of classical myth : primary sources in translation
This quantity is designed as a significant other to the normal undergraduate mythology textbooks or, while assigned along the relevant Greek and Roman works, as a source-based substitute to these textbooks. as well as the full texts of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod's Theogony, this assortment offers beneficiant choices from over 50 texts composed among the Archaic Age and the fourth century A.
- Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information
- The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy
- The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Vol 1: Greek Literature
- Philoponus: Against Proclus on the Eternity of the World 1-5
- Hardship and happiness
Additional resources for Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages
Sample text
99 Thus virginity is produced and maintained in a discursive space that takes precedence over the actual physical space that it may be said to occupy. The interest of patristic writers in maintaining such a distinction between the discursive “body” and the physical body is made particularly clear in their critique of the physical examination as a way to ascertain virginity. 101 Cyprian (d. 258) may have been the first to undermine explicitly the veracity of medical wisdom in order to establish the primacy of spiritual integrity over the merely physical.
Ambrose is sympathetic to her position, averring that her enemies, moved by envy, slander her. 105 Moreover, the presence of a midwife at the house of a consecrated virgin is capable of broadcasting another message altogether to her neighbors: that the young woman might be in childbirth. ” The virgin is not “weighed on her own scales”; she is judged according to the standards that Ambrose and others were attempting to work out in their many treatises on virginity. Jerome, for example, describes such standards in his letter addressed to the matron Laeta, in which he lays out a program of education Hymenologies 35 for her daughter Paula.
17 In fact, the rabbis of the Talmud, though they believed that female virginity was valuable and, in general, verifiable, never maintained that the “proofs” of bodily virginity were infallible. ” The two women were placed upon a cask of wine. 18 Elsewhere, in the same tractate, in speaking to an indignant husband who had failed to find evidence of his wife’s virginity, Rabbi Gamaliel suggests: “perhaps you moved aside”; that is, had coitus without causing the woman to bleed. The Rabbi goes on to develop an elaborate metaphor of the vagina as a barred door, telling the story of a certain man who “came to his house and found the door locked.