VIRGINITY REVISITED:

CONFIGURATIONS OF THE UNPOSSESSED BODY

 PHOENIX

Journal of the Classical Association of Canada

Revue de la Société canadienne des études classiques
Supplementary Volume XLIV / Studies in Gender Volume I

Studies in Gender
Editors
Alison Keith Univeristy of Toronto
Ingrid Holmberg University of Victoria
EDITED BY BONNIE M AC LACHLAN AND
JUDITH FLETCHER

Virginity Revisited:
Configurations of the
Unpossessed Body

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
 www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9013-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Virginity revisited : configurations of the unpossessed body / edited

by Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher.

(Phoenix. Supplementary volumes. Studies in gender)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9013-3
ISBN-10: 0-8020-9013-3

1. Virginity – Social aspects. I. MacLachlan, Bonnie, 1944–

II. Fletcher, Judith III. Series: Phoenix. Supplementary volume
(Toronto, Ont.) Studies in Gender

BL325.V55V57 2007 306.73c2 C2006-904477-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing

program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing
activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP)
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Jenny Franchot
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

Contributors ix

Introduction 3
bonnie m ac lachlan
1. The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 13
eleanor irwin
2. The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 24
judith fletcher
3. The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 40
ann ellis hanson
4. Why Were the Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and
the Safety of the Roman State 66
holt n. parker
5. ‘Only Virgins Can Give Birth to Christ’: The Virgin Mary and the
Problem of Female Authority in Late Antiquity 100
kate cooper
6. Virgo Fortis: Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint in Medieval Art 116
ilse friesen
7. Amplification of the Virgin: Play and Empowerment in
Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 128
jenifer sutherland
 viii Contents

8. Christ from the Head of Jupiter: An Epistemological Note on

Huet’s Treatment of the Virgin Birth 149
thomas lennon
9. ‘Sew and snip, and patch together a genius’:
Quilting a Virginal Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 156
anne geddes bailey

Works Cited 177

Index 197
 CONTRIBUTORS

Anne Geddes Bailey is External Relations Coordinator in the Faculty of

Arts at the University of Alberta. Her research specialty is contemporary
and postmodern Canadian fiction. She is the author of Timothy Findley and
the Aesthetics of Fascism and co-editor of Paying Attention: Critical Essays
on Timothy Findley.

Kate Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Early Christianity and Director of the

Centre for Late Antiquity at the University of Manchester. Her current
research focuses on gender and the family during the Christianization of the
Roman Empire and post-Roman period. She is the author of The Virgin and
the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity and co-editor, with Julia
Hillner, of Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in a Christian Capital: Rome,
350–750 (forthcoming).

Judith Fletcher is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Classical Studies,

and Women’s Studies Coordinator at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her re-
search interests include the representation of women’s speech in Greek
drama. She has published articles on Greek tragedy and comedy, epic poetry,
and the theme of the Underworld in contemporary fiction. She is co-editor,
with Alan Sommerstein, of Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (forthcoming).

Ilse Friesen is Professor Emerita of Art History at Wilfrid Laurier Univer-

sity. Her publications include The Female Crucifix: Images of St Wilgefortis
since the Middle Ages; Albrecht Dürer: 114 Famous Prints: Woodcuts and
Copper Engravings in the Graphic Collection of the Monastery of Stams,
Tyrol; and Earth, Hell and Heaven in the Art of William Kurelek.
 x Contributors

Ann Ellis Hanson is the author of some one hundred articles in the field of
papyrology and of Greek and Roman medicine. She was a MacArthur fellow
from 1992 to 1997. She currently teaches in the Classics Department of Yale
University and is working on an edition of the gynecological treatises of the
Hippocratic Corpus for the Loeb Classical Library.

Eleanor Irwin was a member of the Division of Humanities, University of

Toronto at Scarborough, for thirty-three years (1968–2001). She is author
of Greek Colour Terminology. Her interest in virginity developed from
teaching courses on classical mythology and women in the ancient Greek
and Roman world. In retirement she tends plants, both literal and literary,
teaches occasional courses, and considers how the decision not to marry may
have contributed to the scholarly success of women classicists such as Sarah
Fielding, Kathleen Freeman, and Queen Elizabeth I.

Thomas Lennon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western

Ontario. His area of specialization is the history of early modern philosophy.
He has published half a dozen books and scores of articles dealing in particu-
lar with such figures as Descartes, Malebranche, Bayle, Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume.

Bonnie MacLachlan is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical

Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She specializes in Greek lyric
poetry and in ancient religion. She is the author of The Age of Grace: Charis
in Early Greek Poetry and co-editor, with Robert Wallace, of Harmonia
Mundi.

Holt N. Parker is a Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. He

applies anthropological, literary, linguistic, and historical theory to the study
of ancient texts, working in the area of gender studies, ancient religion,
Augustan poetry, Roman comedy, and ancient medicine.

Jenifer Sutherland has a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the
University of Toronto. She is presently teaching at Branksome Hall in
Toronto and writing about the medieval institution of confession and the
modern institution of psychoanalysis.
VIRGINITY REVISITED
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
bonnie m ac lachlan

Comus, in Milton’s poem of the same name, attempts to persuade the Lady
to forfeit her virginity. His rhetoric is summarily dismissed by her, and she
responds with serious high praise of the ‘doctrine’ of virginity:

Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend

The sublime notion, and high mystery,
That must be utter’d to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of Virginity. Comus 784–7

As a doctrine, virginity has been a cultural artifact. For much of human

history, it has been held in high esteem for young women approaching
marriage: virginity has been an essential quality for determining their mar-
ket value. Once virginity was lost, a nubile woman’s worth was greatly
diminished. All this has changed recently, of course, but the sexual permis-
siveness that many North American youth have enjoyed in the last three or
four decades is now being challenged by other young people who are re-
claiming the value of sexual renunciation. ‘Athletes for Abstinence,’ ‘True
Love Waits,’ and new age monasticism are attracting growing numbers of
adherents. Space has even been found for women wishing to regain lost
virginity. Elizabeth Abbott, in A History of Celibacy (1999), describes the
movement known as ‘BAVAM!’ (Born Again Virgins of America). Self-
identifying as ‘recovering sluts,’ these women have mounted a much-visited
website, publish a newsletter, and sell T-shirts. The movement was founded
by a twenty-five-year old landscape gardener who is, as Abbot reports,
dedicated to restoring the moral fibre that she believes America was built
upon. If people reassert power over their bodies and gain self-respect, she
contends, they will thereby be freed to show real respect for others.
 4 Bonnie MacLachlan

Despite cultural variations in the understanding of virginity, it is clear

that in all cases virginity is closely allied with power. Consider, for example,
the ius primae noctis, which ensured submission of the bride and her family
to the lord of the manor, the priest, and so on who assumed this right. But
what if virginity is retained? Mastery over one’s passions, praised by Aristotle
as autarkeia and practised by the Born Again Virgins of America, offers
enhanced self-esteem. When others – would-be seducers like Comus, or
parents eager to marry off a daughter – are thwarted in their aims by a
woman zealously guarding her virginity, there ensues a power struggle for
control of the woman’s body. This in turn becomes symbolic of something
much bigger. Narratives of the Christian martyrs are full of such power
struggles; the virgin martyr’s body becomes the site for a political contest
between the fledgling church and Roman imperial power.
Autonomy and the power that accompanied virginity had potential of
another sort. Remaining ‘intact’ before engaging in sexual activity reserved
the full force of erotic energy for this anticipated event. This is the program
for ‘True Love Waits.’ The same understanding of the force of reserved
energy lay behind an ancient Greek festival in honour of Hera, wife of Zeus.
During an annual festival at Nauplion, Hera’s virginity was restored by the
bathing of her statue in the spring known as Kanathos, ensuring renewed
potency in the sexual encounter between the primary divine couple.
Similar ritual or mythical accounts from ancient Greece suggest that not
only Hera, but Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, and even Demeter participated
in a process which they shared with other Indo-European goddesses and
heroines, replenishing the reservoir of their power because they possessed
the ability to return to the state of being sexually intact – to revisit virginity.
Mythical examples from other Indo-European traditions have been com-
piled by M.R. Dexter;1 among these females is Madhavi, a heroine in the
Indic epic Mahabharata. Madhavi marries three kings in succession, bearing
a son to each then recovering her virginity and her potency as bride. The
Scandinavian goddess Gefjon bears several sons for her giant husband but
remains a virgin. Inheriting the powers of these women is of course the
mother of Christ, Mary, ever Virgin.
Dexter distinguishes two types of potency released from the energy
reservoir of the virgin female: the type that is outwardly directed, serving
men in a patriarchy, and that which is retained in the female, leaving her
independent of male control. The link between virginity and power was the
topic of a conference held at the University of Western Ontario in Novem-
ber 1998. The object of the conference was to study various ways in which
the choice of sexual renunciation, particularly when made by women, con-
 Introduction 5

ferred autonomy and power on themselves and on others. This book consists
of revised versions of some of these papers, along with others inspired by the
conference. They span nearly four millennia, from Bronze Age Greece to the
twentieth century.
The celibate choice was made by independent women such as Elizabeth I
or Joan of Arc, who repudiated liaisons with men, preferring the power
released by personal independence. In the recent movie Elizabeth (1998),
directed by Shekhar Kapur, the young Tudor queen is shown bedding her
lover but later opting to reclaim her independence. In the film she recon-
structs her identity as a virgin, modelling herself after the Virgin Mary, and
in so doing capitalizes upon both Mary’s maternal authority and her virginal
autonomy. Elizabeth’s sixteenth-century public recognized the potential of a
woman’s youthful and celibate body to be invested with political power.
Portraits of her, painted during her lifetime, took pains to portray her as a
nubile but chaste young girl even when she was sixty years old.
At the centre of the attention paid to Mary, the most famous virgin in the
European tradition, is an arresting paradox – postpartum virginity. Since the
fourth century, the veneration of the Virgin Mary has focused on her ability,
like Madhavi or Gefjon, to be a virgin mother. This veneration was founded
upon a belief in Mary’s own untainted birth from the womb of Anna,
together with lifelong virginity, guaranteeing her independence from con-
taminated mortals. Mary neither carried forward original sin nor engaged in
the sinful activity of having sex with a man. As an iconographic motif, the
image of Mary standing on a globe that rests upon a serpent has conveyed to
the Christian world the unambiguous association of power – temporal and
spiritual – with virginity. Early defenders of Mary’s sexual purity had to
struggle to accommodate references in the Gospels to Jesus’s brothers and
sisters. Keeping intact the virginal body of Mary was vital for the survival of
the Christian cult, which was anxious to negotiate space in the Roman
Empire. The connection between female chastity and the success of an
institution would have been understood by every Roman: the very survival
of Rome and its empire was predicated upon the virginity of its Vestal
priestesses, the subject of Holt Parker’s essay in this volume.
In late antiquity until the early modern period the figure of the Virgin
Mother Mary served as a social icon. Onto her pure and ‘closed’ body a
variety of projections could be cast by different historical, social, and gendered
constituencies, including ascetics and householders, intellectuals and mys-
tics, civic and church leaders, and the ordinary man and woman. Kate Cooper
of Manchester University, one of the two keynote speakers at the conference
in 1998, has written extensively in recent years about virgins and the Virgin
 6 Bonnie MacLachlan

Mary as social icons in the early centuries of the Christian church. In this
volume she provides a compelling example of women in late antiquity
making creative use of the power of virginity as a symbol that would meet
their own social ends. While previous studies of early Christian virgins have
tended to focus upon virginal women as pawns in a game played by men –
often bishops – Cooper argues that we need to learn to read for the signs of
women’s own agency in the game of forging a sexual identity.
During the fourth and fifth centuries CE the cult of Mary developed into
one of the main axes of Christian devotion, not least because from dynasty
to dynasty the women of the reigning Roman imperial family, and later
barbarian abbesses and queens, saw in Mary an image of female authority –
both maternal and vulnerable – with which they could claim identity. That
the Virgin Mother was a figure of paradox meant that she was in some ways
difficult and elusive as an object of imitatio and identification, but at the
same time it added enormously to her power, in the eyes both of her
imitators and of their audiences.
The flexibility of this construct of Mary meant that men too could benefit
from her as an icon. The contemplation of her images in the medieval period
actually became a means of liberating human potential for both men and
women. An example of this is the thirteenth-century Franciscan Walter of
Wimborne, who composed Marie Carmina, a poetic reflection upon the
Virgin. Jenifer Sutherland’s essay explores the empowerment described by
Wimborne in light of Piaget’s work on the importance to ego development
of a child’s imaginative play with dolls. The Virgin functioned for him as a
kind of soul-doll, representing in turn sister, daughter, mother, beloved, and
dominatrix, permitting Wimborne to explore and ultimately to gain control
over a range of potential life experiences. Mary’s virginal body presented
itself to him – like those of the sexually chaste prophetesses of the Greek and
Roman world – as a direct conduit to divinity.
Men could also reflect upon Mary’s virginity at an intellectual level,
taking advantage of its flexible parameters. A debate between two theologi-
cal perceptions of her perpetual virginity is the subject of Tom Lennon’s
paper. From the work of the seventeenth-century thinker Pierre-Daniel
Huet, who launched a vigorous epistemological attack against Cartesianism,
Lennon exposes a contemporary debate in France over the evidence for
Mary’s virgin birth: was there evidence for her physical virginity, or was the
truth claim based on something else? Physical evidence is set against dogma,
traditional belief. For Huet, Mary’s virginity is a fiat, the result of public
conviction, of assigning to her the social category of the virginal state, and
the status of this conferral is elevated to theological proof.
It is not without some degree of irony that the foundation of the venera-
 Introduction 7

tion of Mary as Virgin Mother derives from the Septuagint translation of

the Hebrew almah as parthenos, ‘virgin.’ The text in question is the proph-
ecy found in Isaiah 7.14, that an almah would conceive and bear a son and
call his name Immanuel. The Greek parthenos rendered by the Septuagint
does not cover the entire range of meanings of the Hebrew word; almah
(‘young woman’) could refer equally to young widows, concubines, or pros-
titutes. Although the range of meanings for parthenos was more restricted,
it was still a term with much more elasticity than the English ‘virgin.’
Parthenos was a term applied usually to an unmarried young woman, but on
occasion it could denote a young mother, as has been pointed out by Giulia
Sissa2 and by Ann Hanson in this volume and elsewhere.3 In a similar vein,
Dexter contributes the detail that the Scandinavian Gefjon remained a maer
(Old Norse for ‘unmarried maiden’) while bearing sons. Almah, parthenos,
maer, the Latin virgo, and even the English ‘virgin’ (applied to Mary and
Elizabeth I, for example) denote not a physical state but a social one, a
relational one, one that evokes the qualities of social autonomy and potency.
Virginity as a socially constructed category is treated historically by
Eleanor Irwin and Ann Hanson in their essays. Irwin attempts to historicize
the construction of the divine virgins of the Greek pantheon – Artemis,
Athena, Hestia, and Hecate – situating the independence they enjoyed as a
consequence of their virginity in patriarchal Athens. Ann Hanson’s approach
is also a historical one, working with Greek and Roman medical texts. She
focuses on the liminal position of the virginal young woman: neither child
nor woman, the parthenos is poised on the edge, preparing to make the
transition from one social category to the other. Failing to do this, not to
engage in married sexual activity, was to refuse to make the transition.
According to most of the medical writers, remaining physically and socially
intact beyond menarche was dangerous: it set the young girl up for various
pathologies and death.
The wide-ranging belief that there is particular potency residing on the
margins of the familiar has been the subject of several studies; perhaps best
known is Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger.4 This power is experienced as a
threat to the social order, but when harnessed by ritual or physical interven-
tion it can be converted for the common good. Virginal young women, on
the margins between childhood and womanhood, carried this power. Judith
Fletcher, in her study of the gendered discourse of virgin choruses in the
tragedies of Aeschylus, illustrates just how they were feared and despised
because their bodies were charged with an energy that was disruptive,
destructive. Their speech is politically charged, and the potentially danger-
ous voices of the virgin choruses in Seven against Thebes, Suppliant Women,
and Eumenides are modified in order for the young women to direct their
 8 Bonnie MacLachlan

powers for the civic good. The transgressive nature of women with ambigu-
ous sexual status was admired by Athenians when contained, and feared
when not.
The Vestal Virgins were women whose bodies were consecrated to the
Roman state. Taking a vow of chastity for the duration of their service from
childhood until late adulthood, they reserved their fecundity for the welfare
of Rome. (This is consistent with Dexter’s identification of the reservoir of
energy in the virginal female that could serve patriarchy.) If accused of
violating her vow of chastity, the Vestal became a social pariah and was
buried alive. She was interred within the walls of the city, however, so that
she could continue to release her powers as a scapegoat, a pharmakos. Like
the energy in the voices of virgin choruses on the tragic stage, the autonomy
of the Vestals – conferred by their virginity – meant that their bodies could
serve the state as saviours; their destructive potential could be converted to
good through ritual means. Holt Parker’s essay in this volume explores this
potential, reading the ‘fallen’ Vestal not only as pharmakos but also as
prodigium and devotio. Parker draws his analysis from the anthropology of
magic.
Although a social category, virginity’s physicality could not be ignored. In
a young woman the virginal body was sexually charged but resistant. This
resistance itself accounts for her attractiveness to men, for whom possession
of the intact woman becomes a quest. In Greek myths this was true both for
Artemis and the nymphs who followed her in the wild; it was also true for
the ‘cool’ virgin Athena and even the stay-at-home Hestia. In the case of
these mythical virgins male desire was satisfied by divine rape. The desire to
possess the virgin is the subject of Anne Bailey’s chapter on the Canadian
historical novel Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. The reader of this story,
like the novel’s doctor/investigator Simon Jordan, is attracted to the figure
of Grace Marks and wants to ‘know’ her sexual status. Ultimately, Grace
keeps to herself her inner core, remaining tantalizingly untouchable, un-
knowable, virginally intact.
Jenny Franchot, in whose memory this book is dedicated, presented a
keynote address at the conference in October 1998, less than a week before
her untimely death. Her paper grew out of her work on the nineteenth-
century Protestant fascination with the celibates of the Roman church.5
Cloistered convents in the nineteenth century gave rise to suspicion about
the interior life of nuns. The secrecy of their life, together with their refusal
to engage in the economy of marriage and reproduction, created anxiety and
rage in outsiders. This ‘radical aloneness,’ a resistance to being exteriorized
and known, provoked outrage. Convents found themselves besieged by
ransacking Protestant mobs. Nuns who emerged from the cloisters were
 Introduction 9

stoned; the Ursuline convent just outside Boston was burned to the ground
and graves in the convent cemetery were opened to examine the bodily
remains. The unknowable, unpossessed bodies of the women behind the
walls were forced into the open to reveal – unlike Grace Marks in Alias
Grace – their secrets.
In her conference presentation, Jenny Franchot reviewed the Protestant
exposé of the activities of nuns in the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Montreal,
recorded in a book written by a woman called Maria Monk in 1836, the same
year the Ursuline convent in Boston was burned.6 The book claimed that via
underground tunnels connecting the Hôtel-Dieu convent to a neighbouring
monastic community, priests and nuns violated their vows of chastity. Babies
who were born to the women were thrown into lime pits, Monk claimed.
Monk depicted herself on the cover of her book as a nun, holding a baby,
attesting to the fascination of her reading public with what they chose to
abhor, the cloistered body, here – once again unlike Grace Marks – with its
secret ‘exposed.’
When the celibate choice is successful in fending off male sexual interven-
tion, traditional gendered expectations no longer apply. Among the virginal
goddesses of the Greek pantheon, Athena as sexually independent was free
to embody the city of Athens. Since birth she wore the armour that signalled
this identity, a protected and protecting figure. (These ideas are explored in
detail in Eleanor Irwin’s essay.) Her masculine attire did not prevent Athena
from participating in activities routinely assigned to women, activities
such as wool-working and weaving; her androgyny was central to her
performance. This was true for the Vestal Virgins, a Roman incarnation of
many of the features of Athena. As Holt Parker makes clear in his paper,
the Vestals were robed as married women, tended the hearth like daugh-
ters in a Roman household, but enjoyed the legal status of males. Their
freedom from possession by fathers or husbands liberated them from the
conduct expected of married women, and – like Athena – they were thus
enabled to represent the state itself. This same exemption applied to the
maiden choruses in Aeschylus’s tragedies, as Judith Fletcher points out:
acting for the good of the city, they shed their roles as women and spoke in
public like men.
Gender transformation and transvestism fill the tales of the early Chris-
tian martyrs. Young women, rejecting the role of bride and mother, dis-
guised themselves as men to facilitate their mobility in the Roman world, or
were actually physically masculinized in the process of engaging in an
independent life that professed a direct connection to divinity.7 Social an-
drogyny in the Roman Christian world may be accounted for by the pervad-
ing practice of asceticism, which permitted women to sidestep their obliga-
 10 Bonnie MacLachlan

tion to become mothers and transmit property, since there was less demand
for producing heirs. Instead, they were able to present themselves as inde-
pendent agents. The practice of ignoring these traditional constraints placed
upon women was fuelled by the narratives found in the Apocryphal Acts, in
which virginal heroines – like those of the ancient Greek romances – became
the object of both male and female devotion. Both sexes when reading these
early Christian narratives identified with the nubile but independent hero-
ines, who were fiercely loyal not to their families but to apostolic authority.
For men, erotic desire was transformed into spiritual constancy, akin to the
heroines’ attachment to the male apostles. For women readers the identifica-
tion was more direct. The popularity of the vitae of these ascetic women is
reflected in the fact that four such lives were copied on vellum by a seventh-
century scribe who, short of writing material, created a palimpsest, scraping
a copy of the Gospel in order to give priority to these stories.8
Even in the medieval period, stories of the masculinized Christian virgin
continued to flourish. Effeminate portraits of the crucified Christ opened the
door for the legend of the bearded female saint Wilgefortis, whose name is
quite likely an adaptation of Virgo fortis, ‘powerful Virgin.’ Ilse Friesen’s
essay on Wilgefortis demonstrates the deep and complex implications of
gender ambiguity contained in the body of the virgin. The virgin’s body did
not make the progression towards full femininity as defined by her society,
but the arresting of this development released new powers. Wilgefortis for
the English became Saint Uncumber, patron of women wishing to become
‘unencumbered’ by oppressive husbands. She was also called upon to assist
with afflictions that ranged from sexual dilemmas and infertility to warfare
and floods.
The story of Joan of Arc, one of the best-known virgins in European
history, is not represented in this volume. Nonetheless, her narrative is
woven through most of the aspects of virginity treated in the essays. Joan
was born in a rural French village at Domremy in Champagne in 1412. In
the wars fought between the Duke of Burgundy and the French King
Charles, Domremy remained loyal to Charles, and Joan the warrior champi-
oned Charles’s cause, although she was ultimately betrayed by him. Joan’s
biography and the legends that grew from it exemplify elements from the
cultural construction of virginity with which we are now familiar. Joan was
uneducated and illiterate, but witnesses at her rehabilitation trial, twenty
years after her death, testified to her piety and skill at sewing and spinning.
Textile working has long been an index of chastity. Roman tombstones
honouring good wives bore the inscription lanam fecit, domum servavit
(‘she made the wool, she preserved the home’). Jules Bastien-LePage painted
Joan of Arc (1879) as a simple peasant girl looking off into the distance, her
 Introduction 11

distaff behind her. Overhead float images of Joan in armour and two angels,
harbingers of her future sainthood. This can be compared with Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary (1849), which depicts the young
Mary working at her embroidery. Both Joan and Mary Virgin can be com-
pared with the Greek goddess Athena, virgin warrior and patron of weaving
and other feminine handicrafts.
Like Athena, Joan of Arc was an armed warrior. As Marina Warner has
pointed out in her study of Joan ,9 one of the aspects of her behaviour that
upset her inquisitors most deeply was her self-representation as an an-
drogyne, insisting upon wearing men’s clothing, which she declared had
been prescribed by St Michael in a vision. This was an outward sign of her
violation of the norm. In other ways, too, her body did not conform. She was
said not to menstruate, a condition perhaps incurred by her fasting. Her
amenorrhea contributed, in popular belief, to her exceptional strength. By
renouncing sex she released inner force. Her flesh did not acquire the spongy
softness of the mature woman, and she, like the Greek parthenos who
resisted the taming brought about by sexual activity, remained in a perma-
nently liminal stage. She chose for herself the title ‘La Pucelle,’ a word with
many of the same connotations as parthenos.
Joan’s body was, like that of Grace Marks or the Ursulines, an enigma. Her
refusal to enter full womanhood led to doubts about her natural gender.
After her death, her body was removed from the funeral pyre partly con-
sumed by the flames and displayed to her doubters. When they were satis-
fied that she was indeed female, her body was returned to be burned com-
pletely. Her suit of armour, however, would remain the physical symbol of
her privacy concealed. The armour had been presented to Joan by the
Dauphin himself, made to fit her small form and decorated, apparently, with
roses and floral motifs. She wore it constantly, even when sleeping, and it
became the perfect emblem of the sealed virginal body, emblem of the
inviolability of France. It has never been found. Like Grace Marks’s secret, it
remains unknowable but invites revisiting.

NOTES

1 Dexter (1985, 57–74).

2 Sissa (1990a, 78–83, 87, 91; 1990b, 340–3).
3 Hanson (1990) 309–38.
4 Douglas (1966).
5 Franchot (1994).
6 Monk (1836).
 12 Bonnie MacLachlan

7 A parallel for this overriding of gendered differences by religious activity may be

found in early bisexual gods of fertility and power, such as Aphroditos
(transgendered Aphrodite) of Cyprus, whose worshippers cross-dressed while
sacrificing (Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.8.1–3).
8 Salisbury (1991, 6–7).
9 Warner (1981, 140–8, 157–8).
 1
The Invention of Virginity on Olympus
eleanor irwin

It goes without saying that the Greek gods and goddesses were social
constructions. They arose from a social reality initially embedded in the
Greek Bronze Age, and their characteristics were modified and adapted
somewhat to suit the needs of later historical periods. They were, in other
words, invented. To some degree their portraits mirrored the lives of Greek
men and women, but in certain other ways their narratives sketch some
dramatic departures from what we know of the everyday life of the Greeks.
We can only conjecture why this was so, assuming that these divine con-
structs arose in order to accommodate some deeply held beliefs and concerns
of the people: by exploring the dissonance between the patterns of Greek
human and divine life we are rewarded with some important insights into
the Greek conceptual framework.1 One of these departures involves god-
desses who remain eternally virgin, who refuse to make the transition from
parthenos to gynê, from nubile young woman to the woman with sexual
experience.
At the outset of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 5 (7–33) we learn that
three of the Olympian goddesses took no pleasure in the ‘works of
Aphrodite’ and requested from Zeus the right to remain virginal: Athena
preferred the pleasure to be found in warfare and craft; for Artemis it was
the bow and hunting, and the dances and songs of her women followers;
Hestia, despite the suits of Poseidon and Apollo, firmly resisted them and
swore a great oath before Zeus that she would live forever virgin and
become celibate guardian of the hearth fires of home and city. As virgins
these immortals enjoyed a unique autonomy granted by their unmarried
status, an independence that was denied to Greek women, who were per-
petually under the guardianship of their kyrios. The specific strength of
these immortal virgins in fact resided in their refusal to relinquish
 14 Eleanor Irwin

partheneia, the ephemeral state between childhood and motherhood expe-

rienced by all young women. This was a time of life that was filled with
potency derived from a reservoir of as-yet-unreleased generative energy, a
transitional phase in the life pattern of a mortal woman that was a time of
crisis, when she exerted an attractive yet threatening wildness.2 Mortal
virgins therefore had to move beyond partheneia to transmute and shape its
wild energy into the requirements of wifehood and motherhood.3 But for
goddesses virginity could be permanent or even (in the case of Hera, dis-
cussed below) renewable. Translated into a permanent state, partheneia
became a source of eternal and unyielding power.
The Olympian family was no less patriarchal than Greek families of the
historical period. Why did Greeks ‘invent’ a divine social construct that
permitted certain females such a degree of independence from male would-
be suitors? Why did their life stories differ markedly from others in the
divine family – goddesses as well as gods – who were sexually active and
reproductive? The answer lies in the fact that this family was headed by an
immortal patriarch who did not wish to be replaced. Athena, Artemis, and
Hestia did not pose the risk that would be presented by divine motherhood.
This particular configuration of the divine family of the Greeks included
another powerful virgin, Hecate, sometimes conflated with Artemis. Hecate’s
unique relationship to Zeus is the result of her history: she was a goddess
from the generation prior to the Olympians, the Titans, and retained honours
that pre-dated Zeus. Hesiod honours her with the (so-called) ‘Hymn to
Hecate’ in the Theogony (411–52), reflecting her unique power and au-
tonomy within the patriarchal family. Hecate mediated between regimes –
Olympian and Titan – but also between mortal and divine spheres.4 She
possessed the liminal qualities of the virgin – not those belonging to the
transition from childhood to womanhood, but rather to two successive
generations of gods. Zeus chose not to arrange a marriage for her, for by the
logic of the succession myth she would give birth to a son who would
overthrow him. Instead, she functioned as a daughter who could transmit
the family legacy from one generation to another. Hesiod describes her as
mounogenês (‘only child,’ 426), suggesting that she is to be thought of as an
epikleros, one of those brotherless women who become the carrier of a
family’s wealth and estate.5 But while it was required of the mortal epikleros
that she marry and produce an heir, Hecate transmitted to Zeus the heritage
of the Titans and in return received honours from Zeus ‘beyond all others’
(412). Precisely because she remained unmarried she continued to carry this
balance of privileges.6
Greek virginity by definition excluded sexual submission to a male. The
divine virgin remained adamatos, ‘untamed’ or ‘unsubdued’ in the fullest
 The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 15

sense of the word. No husband controlled her, nor did she submit to the
power of Aphrodite. The Greeks, who equated masculine sexuality with
social dominance, also found it difficult to accept the inverse situation in
which goddesses were active lovers.7 If a goddess took a mortal lover she
distorted the social order, for she would automatically become the dominant
partner in the relationship. Virgin goddesses had no interest in exerting
their powers in this way. Instead, the Greeks made them interact with mortal
men in a kourotrophic capacity: rather than functioning as sexual partners,
they became nurturing guardians of young men approaching adulthood or
protectors of male heroes. Athena, for instance, functioned as just such a
kourotrophos. Her tutelage benefited Athens, and she assumed responsibil-
ity for the nurturing of the autochthonous ancestor of the Athenians,
Erichthonius.8 Her relationship with Heracles and Odysseus contained no
hint that they were sexually attracted to her nor she to them, and her
micromanaging of their careers was not the result of maternal inclinations;
the heroes survived and prospered because their tutelary deity had access to
a storehouse of energy provided by her special status and nature, for which
her virginity was essential. A Celtic tale provides some insight here: the
Welsh Warrior King Math retained his martial powers by resting his feet in
the lap of a virgin between battles. As long as his female footstool retained
her virginity, Math was able to draw upon her special powers, to renew his
strength, but should the woman become sexually active he was obliged to
find another virgin or lose his kingdom.9
Virgin Artemis was a powerful kourotrophic divinity.10 Her fierce attach-
ment to Hippolytus is but one example, although his refusal to renounce
virginity served as a reminder that only the immortals could remain celibate
with impunity.11 She was also a kourotrophic figure for Athenian ephebes:
adolescent males were inducted into the rights of citizenship by swearing an
oath in her sanctuary. She was the protecting deity in rituals involving
parthenoi, at Brauron for instance. With parthenoi (historical and mythical)
she was rigorous in demanding virginity in her followers. When Callisto
became pregnant by Zeus, the goddess’s anger was ferocious.12 Pausanias
(7.19.2–5) gives us an account of a priestess of Artemis Triclaria in Achaia
named Comaetho, who loved one Melanippus. Unable to obtain permission
from their parents to marry, the couple used the sanctuary of Artemis as a
bridal chamber. Artemis sent disease and death upon the inhabitants of the
region until Apollo commanded that the lovers be sacrificed to Artemis; an
Achaean sacrifice was reenacted annually requiring for it the most beautiful
young man and woman. In Cyrene, Greek women about to marry were
obliged to engage in a prenuptial rite of appeasement to Artemis for the loss
of their virginity.13
 16 Eleanor Irwin

The ferocity of Artemis, virgin and patron of virgins, arose from her
refusal to submit to the same mature sexual identity required of a human
female. Resistance added value to human virgins before they married, how-
ever; this was the furthest apple on the highest branch of the apple tree,
according to Sappho (105aV), a prize worth defending and fighting for. And
patriarchal society would have it so, for girls before their marriage: a sexu-
ally reticent girl possessed the feminine virtues of sophrosyne, self-control,
so important in a patrilineal inheritance system in which a man needed to
know that he was the father of his heirs. The powerful virgin protected her
valuable potential fecundity. The desirable and athletic young woman
Atalanta, a denizen of the wild like Artemis, resisted her suitors by defeating
them in foot races until one of them dropped a golden apple – symbolic of
sexuality – in her path (Hesiod, fr. 72–6M-W). Io tried to resist the advances
of Zeus by running through Europe, Asia, and Africa. Ovid gives us other –
more successful – accounts of a virgin’s refusal with Daphne, who (with the
help of her father) protected her virginity by turning into the laurel tree, and
Syrinx, who resisted the libidinous god Apollo by becoming water reeds.14
Ovid exploits the fact that the virgins’ resistance added to their erotic charm.
The same qualities were found in another Greek invention, the Amazons,who
figured prominently in Greek males’ fantasies, to judge from their frequent
representation in public and private art. The famous vase of Exekias depicts
Achilles falling in love with the dying Amazon queen, Penthesileia, at the
very moment he penetrated her with both his sword and his gaze. Amazons,
archetypal figures who resisted sexual control by men, existed permanently
in the liminal state of partheneia. Inverting the conventional role of married
women, they lived outside, riding horses and carrying bows and arrows, and
making war like men. By refusing to come inside and accept the traditional
role of wives and mothers they created a separate society, a gynecocracy
where patrilineal succession had no place or meaning. As warriors and
hunters they combined the masculine traits of Artemis and Athena, who
were likewise unconstrained by marriage. But unlike those immortals they
were ultimately vanquished by men.
That there was an erotic charge to the nubile but sexually inactive parthenos
is clear from stories of abduction of these young girls while they were
performing rituals in honour of the virgin goddess overseeing their
partheneia. Pausanias gives many such accounts, such as the occasion on
which the Messenians abducted Spartan maidens dancing in honour of
Artemis (4.16.9). Processions like that of kanephoroi honouring Athena
were for the Greeks occasions that ill concealed the tension between the felt
need to conceal the parthenos from male view and predation and the desire
to display her potential fecundity.15 There were mythical counterparts to
 The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 17

this: Oreithyia, kanephoros at the Panathenaia, was abducted by Boreas (the

North Wind) and taken from Athens to Thrace.16 That the most erotically
charged moments for parthenoi should occur during rituals for virgin god-
desses betrays a belief in the heightened power of sexual energy when it is
withheld.
The goddesses themselves manifested an erotic magnetism. Mythical
narratives of both Artemis and Athena recount their being the object of a
voyeuristic male gaze, which was repelled with brutal finality. It is important
to remember that for the Greeks looking was a physical act in which rays of
light emanated from the eyes of the beholder.17 To look was to take a
dominant, active role; to be looked at connotated passivity. Both virgin
goddesses subverted the passive role of females as the conventional object of
the gaze. One of the signs of their power to do this was the Gorgon, the
apotropaic female head entwined with snakes that had the power to turn
men to stone: vase paintings depicted Artemis with the Gorgon and Athena
wearing the Gorgon on her aegis. But these two goddesses took other
measures to repel the male gaze: when Actaeon looked upon Artemis as she
bathed he was turned into a passive quarry by this Potnia Thêrôn, Mistress
of the Animals. Becoming a stag, he was attacked by his own hounds.18 In a
similar fashion Athena did not tolerate the inadvertent gaze of Teiresias,
who was struck with blindness for viewing her at her bath.19
Despite their erotic attractiveness to men, divine and mortal parthenoi
displayed a kind of dynamic androgyny. A Greek parthenos did not assume
her gendered identity until marriage: like the Amazons, she existed outside
boundaries confining women and exhibited both male and female features.
In the same way, the virgin goddesses – eternal parthenoi – partook of the
gendered expectations of both males and females. Artemis Potnia Theron
mediated between the masculine pursuit of hunting and the more feminine
nurture of wild animals. The number of dedications of clothing at her cult
site in Brauron attests to an association between the goddess and weaving,
the definitive feminine occupation.20 The warrior goddess Athena, born
from her father’s head in full armour, also presided over weaving, as Athena
Ergane.21 The androgyny of both goddesses was consistent with the idea of
the virgin as pre-gendered, a belief not confined to the Greeks and one based
upon the notion that the sexual identity of a young, unmarried woman was
not yet fixed.22 Greek and Roman medical writers described the flesh of the
unpenetrated female body as dense and hard – that is, more like a man’s –
and not yet having the porous consistency of that of a sexually active
woman. This physiological theory finds its ritual corollary in the athletic
competitions in honour of Hera, the Heraia. Girls participating in the foot
races wore a masculine exomis, which has been connected to the ritual
 18 Eleanor Irwin

transvestism associated with puberty rites.23 Even more dramatic is evidence

found of a cult of Artemis which, according to Hesychius, required girls to
don the phallus.24 The juxtaposition of innocent girlhood and such overt
symbols of masculinity is not as odd as it first seems: the Greek imagination
focused upon the parthenos as an incipient gyne, or woman, by recognizing
in her an unformed being whose potential fecundity could take a variety of
shapes until it was fixed in its final feminine form.
In preparation for her transition from parthenos to gyne the young Greek
woman undertook a ritual bath. Water is routinely found in cultic contexts
and combines the somewhat paradoxical features of purity and fertility –
entirely appropriate for a girl who was nubile but sexually inexperienced.
Statues of virgin goddesses were regularly bathed in the ritual known as the
Plynteria.25 This would have had a practical function, particularly for those
statues placed outdoors. But the Plynteria was also connected with renewing
the energy to be found in the partheneia of the goddesses, the energy of
their fecundity withheld. In Athens the Plynteria involved bathing the
ancient olive-wood statue of Athena Polias, along with her peplos, and this
was done with a cache of vessels with ‘breast-like protrusions,’ betraying the
connection between the ritual act and fertility.26 After the Plynteria women
anointed and dressed the statue in a manner reminiscent of activities of the
Sumerian goddess Inanna or her Mesopotamian successors, whose bathing
and elaborate dressing in robes of power was a prelude to a hieros gamos, the
sacred marriage of goddess and consort that would ensure the fertility and
prosperity of the city.27 This may explain the curious phenomenon reported
by Pausanias whereby Hera, Greek goddess of marriage and wife of Zeus,
bathed annually, and in so doing – as the Argives believed – ‘recovered her
partheneia’ (2.38.2).28 Recovering their virginity would permit the god-
desses to bring fresh sexual vitality to lovemaking but would also renew in
them the power and independence of the parthenos.29
The association of water with fertility and virginity is ancient, rich, com-
plex, and widespread, extending from the third millennium in Mesopotamia
to sites of veneration of the Virgin Mary such as Lourdes, with the healing
powers located in its holy waters. Mary is associated with springs and wells
throughout Europe. Throughout Britain the custom of well-dressing persists
in honour of such virgin saints as St Brigid. For the Greeks the Danaids,
perpetual virgins, were also associated with Argive springs and wells.30 The
apparent paradox of water as both virginally pure and fecund is strikingly
presented in Euripides’ Helen, which begins with a description of the fertile
Nile’s ‘beautiful virgin streams’ (kalliparthenoi rhoai, 1).
The Greek virgin goddesses were, like their Mesopotamian forebears,
connected with natural and human fertility. Although not a birth mother,
 The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 19

Athena was sometimes depicted as an adoring parent of Erichthonius. In

pottery of the Classical period she adopts a maternal pose with the birth of
Erichthonius, in contrast with her martial demeanour during this event in
earlier representations.31 Such portraits encapsulate the fertile potential of
the virgin, even one as manly as Athena. Noel Robertson has suggested that
she originally had strong connections to agriculture, with her festivals being
organized around the grain cycle. That the Athenian women honoured her
together with Demeter in the Skira, or Threshing Festival, lends support to
Robertson’s speculation that she had her origins as a fertility goddess.32 The
fertile potential of Athena’s chastity can be seen in her gift to Athens, the
olive tree: olive oil, bestowed upon victors in her Panathenaic games, was a
major contribution to the prosperity of her city and hints at her virgin
fecundity. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides there is an alliance between Athena and
the fertility deities, the Eumenides, who ‘have no allegiance to another
household and thus provide without reservation the fertility of Athens.’33
The virginity of Athena, like that of the Eumenides, guarantees that she will
never withdraw her generative powers from Athens. Athenian citizens ex-
hibited an extreme anxiety about the potential disloyalty of young women
who must exchange their natal household for another at marriage. Athena’s
loyalty to her city, however, would be assured by her virginity, validating her
own decision to remain adamatos. Her inviolable body, clothed in armour
since birth, repelled enemy attacks as fiercely as she guarded her chastity.34
Athena and Artemis as nurturing divinities were both connected with
childbirth: Artemis is better known in this capacity; she is midwife at the
birth of her brother Apollo and in cult was the recipient of votive gifts from
women anticipating or experiencing childbirth, but there is also a tradition
in which Athena brings Artemis into the world (Aelius Aristides 37.18). The
principal birth goddess is Eileithuia (frequently associated with Artemis but
also with Hera); it is no surprise that she was unmarried. The connection
between virginity and midwifery is well attested in antiquity. The legend of
the first Athenian midwife Agnodike, recorded by Hyginus, exerted an
influence on the history of midwifery and the medical profession until the
nineteenth century.35 The power of a virgin midwife to ensure safe delivery
was reflected in the early Christian period with the biography of his sister
Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa, who recounts how the appearance of the
virgin Thecla (devotee of the apostle Paul) mitigated his mother’s labour
pangs.36 While tomb inscriptions attest to the fact that many midwives
throughout history were wives and mothers themselves, the traditional
concept of the chaste midwife testifies once again to the nurturing power of
the virgin.
The centre of the Greek household and family life was the hearth. The
 20 Eleanor Irwin

third of the goddesses petitioning for and receiving virginity as a special

honour in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite was Hestia, who stood for the
sanctity of the household and was held in the highest regard by mortals:

Father Zeus gave her a high honour instead of marriage,

and she sits in the midst of the house and has the richest portion.
In all the temples of the deities she has a share of honour
and among all mortals she is first of deities. (29–32)

The hearth was appropriately embodied by a virgin goddess. Hesiod

comments on the need to keep the hearth ritually pure by avoiding polluting
it with sexual intercourse (Op. 733). Furthermore, the hearth was ‘contained’
within the walls of the house as a parthenos was contained within the house
under the protection of her family. Marriage for a Greek girl meant a change
from her father’s hearth to her husband’s, and this mobility was considered
destabilizing for both bride and the groom’s family. Hestia, like the Eumenides
and Athena for Athens, acted as a counterweight to this threat, sexually
inactive hence anchored and protective. The domestic cult had its parallels in
the public cult celebrated where the hearth of the city was symbolically
located. The hearth represented not only stability but security:37 Hestia
embodied this security by remaining virgin, her body having been neither
penetrated by a male partner nor opened by giving birth.38 As a goddess
whose sacred space had not been invaded, she could be asked to protect the
house and city where her hearth was established.39 So powerful was the
resistant and tutelary power of Hestia that even a foreign suppliant could
seek refuge at the hearth rather than an altar.
Although Hestia was a colourless figure in Greek mythology – in essence
little more than a personification – she nonetheless exemplified all the
attributes of the divine virgin. As the focal point of the household she was
connected with the prosperity of the family; she is another example of the
‘virgin powerhouse’ who could transmit fecundity to those within her sphere
of influence. Athena’s virginity was metonymic for her loyalty to the state,
while Hestia’s virginity symbolized loyalty to the household. The inherent
semiotic value of an unmarried daughter in an aristocratic family was
recognized in the late Roman period and was naturally absorbed by adher-
ents of the early Christian church as an important choice for women when
the primary loyalty shifted from family to cult.
Concerned to perpetuate a patriarchal system, the Greeks nonetheless
invented female divinities who would be able to direct for human benefit the
special energy available to them as parthenoi. But with this permanent
virginal status came autonomy and agency that contrasted with the perma-
 The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 21

nent infantilization of Greek girls and women. These Olympians were never
inclined to submit to Eros, unlike human parthenoi, who were consistently
presented as lustful and unrestrained. This immunity signifies a mastery of
self,40 a quality very much admired by the ancient Greeks, and one which
reassuringly suggests that the virgin goddesses could not be swayed from
their protective vigilance by any force.

NOTES

1 For discussions of this dissonance see Blundell (1995, 25–46) and Loraux (1992,
19–25).
2 On these features of the Greek parthenos see the article by Ann Hanson in this
volume.
3 Those mortals who failed to make the transition were represented in myth as
sacrificial virgins, achieving marriage in death. Iphigeneia is but one of many
examples (Lyons 1997, 98–9, 137–9).
4 Hecate’s influence was extensive: as Clay (1984, 33) observes, the beneficence
she granted to mortal activities of various kinds was contingent upon her
‘willingness’ (conveyed elsewhere by the Greek word heketi).
5 Arthur (1982) 75.
6 Later writers reflect the fact that Hecate’s autonomy and power led to the con-
struction of her as a goddess of witchcraft, a baleful and unconstrained chthonic
force who undermines male potency.
7 For a study of this see Stehle (1990). Goddesses who took mortal lovers also
distorted the gender hierarchy. Aphrodite’s congress with Anchises, for example,
is a source of anxiety and embarrassment for both goddess and mortal (Homeric
Hymn to Aphrodite 5.180–90, 247–55), as is that between Calypso and Odysseus
(Od. 5.118–44).
8 The sexual misadventure with Hephaestus that led to the birth of Erichthonius
was an isolated phenomenon; it did not involve sexual activity on Athena’s part
nor any continuing relationship with the god. On her ‘maternal’ relationship
with Erichthonius see below.
9 For the story and an analysis of it see Dexter (1985, 66).
10 For a study of the cults of Artemis Kourotrophos and other nursing divinities
see Price (1978).
11 The story of their problematic relationship is told in Euripides’ Hippolytus.
12 Apollodorus (Lib. 3.8.2) gives us the traditional account in which Callisto,
turned into a bear by Zeus in order to make love with her and escape the notice
of Hera, was shot down because she did not preserve her partheneia.
13 The requirement is preserved in the Sacred Laws of Cyrene: ‘a bride must go
 22 Eleanor Irwin

down to the nymphaeum to Artemis, whenever she wishes at the Artemesia,

but the sooner the better. Any woman who does not go down shall sacrifice in
addition what is necessary for young women. If she has not gone down, she will
purify the shrine and sacrifice in addition a full-grown animal as penalty.’ (SEG
9.72.16).
14 Io, Met. 1.784–953; Daphne, Met. 1.628–783; Syrinx, Met. 1.954–97.
15 On this, see Scodel (1996, 113–14).
16 The details of the abduction, and the various sources that report this, are pro-
vided by Robertson (1996, 58–9).
17 Alcmaeon of Croton (late sixth century BCE) is the first Greek whose theory of
vision has survived (fr. 14A5 DK = Theophrastus de Sensu 25), arguing that the
eyes see through a fiery fluid surrounding them. Empedocles fr. 21B 84 DK =
Arist. De Sensu 2.437b23 claimed that fire within the eye sent forth a ray that
beamed upon its object.
18 The Ovidian account is found in Metamorphoses 3.163–317.
19 Callimachus, Hymn to Athena 51–136.
20 Dillon (2002) 19–23. Weaving, a principal activity of Greek wives from the
Bronze Age to the Classical period, carried associations of both chastity
(sophrosyne) and deception, cunning.
21 Athena, self-proclaimed exponent of wit and cunning (Od. 13. 296–9), was the
appropriate patron of weaving. This craft was an important component of her
Athenian cult: selected young girls, the arrephoroi, helped to set up the special
loom for weaving the goddess’s peplos for her Panathenaic festival. This was an
important aspect of the training for their roles as adult women in a ritual that
socialized them, and by proxy all Athenian girls.
22 Compare, for example, the German assignment of the neuter gender to ‘das
Mädchen.’
23 On this see Serwint (1993).
24 s.v. ‘lomboi.’ Burkert (1985, 151, with n. 21).
25 The practice was widespread; a discussion is found in Dillon (2002, 132–6); for
various locations in which the statue of Athena was ritually cleansed see
Robertson (1996, 48–52).
26 Robertson (1996, 34).
27 Penglase (1994, 90). On the sacred marriage ritual, see Kramer (1969) and
Avagianou (1991).
28 It is perhaps worth mentioning here that there is a convent today on the spot
traditionally assigned to Hera’s bath.
29 In the case of Hera, although Zeus was the supreme god on Olympus, she
managed to sidestep his authority more than once (e.g., the famous episode in
Iliad 14.152–360, but also 15.18–33; 19.98–110). On the annual washing of
Hera’s statue at her great sanctuary on Samos see Dillon (2002, 135).
 The Invention of Virginity on Olympus 23

30 Their fierce and murderous resistance to marriage posed a threat to the natural
order, however, and for their crimes they were condemned in the Underworld to
transport water in sieves, an appropriate symbol of fertility squandered.
31 Reeder (1995, 259–60), who discusses a kylix of the Kodros painter (440–430
BCE) on which Gaia emerges from the earth and presents the baby to Athena,
gazing into his eyes ‘like an affectionate young mother.’
32 Robertson (1996, 52–6).
33 Tyrrell (1984, 123) is commenting here on the relationship between Athena and
the Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Cf. Fletcher in this volume.
34 Her armour was the outward sign of her ability to control access to her body
and an apt metaphor for her virginity. Cf. the introductory remarks in this
volume on Joan of Arc.
35 Hyginus, Fabula 274, King (1998, 181–5).
36 Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Macrinae 2 (PG 46.961).
37 The stability represented by Hestia was assured by her remaining fixed at the
hearth, by her immobility. Vernant (1983) studied this feature as the counter-
poise of the mobility of Hermes, in an analysis of space and movement in
ancient Greece reflected in Greek religion.
38 As a female who was never to know sexual experience with a man, Hestia
resembles the parthenos, widely understood metaphorically as a container. See
Lissarrague (1995, 91–100). For the parthenos like a jar with a closed mouth cf.
Sissa (1990a, 138–44, 147–56).
39 Hestia’s counterpart in the Roman world was Vesta, and the virginal body of
her Vestals was essential for the welfare of the state. See Staples (1998, 129–30)
and Parker’s essay in this volume.
40 Compare with this Foucault’s study of sexual activity in the Greek novel, where
he examines in the protagonists the connection between self-mastery and
virginity and writes: ‘virginity is not simply abstention as a preliminary to
sexual practice. It is a choice, a style of life, a lofty form of existence that the
hero chooses out of the regard that he has for himself’ (1986, 230).
 2
The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus
judith fletcher

‘Thundered voiced’ Aeschylus, as his fellow citizen Aristophanes called him,

produced dramas reverberating with clamorous, elemental violence. Often
this sound and fury emanate from confrontations between male and female
forces, battles of the sexes which characterize and symbolize not only the
universal forces of the human psyche, but also the conventions and struc-
tures of Aeschylus’s own society, democratic Athens. Although his tragedies
(with the exception of The Persians) are set in the legendary past, they
nevertheless address political and social concerns of the poet’s own day:
Aeschylus shaped his mythical female characters from a contemporary ma-
trix. His portrait of the husband-killing Clytemnestra, for instance, supports
the idea that women should not aspire to political power. Her daughter
Electra behaves more appropriately by supporting the interests of her father
and brother, and by staying out of public view.
Yet Aeschylus’s most powerful and volatile females are not the famous,
high-born women of ancient saga, but rather that often nameless and sup-
posedly marginal group, the chorus. Five of his seven surviving tragedies
feature female choruses; three of these represent virgins. Aeschylus’s virgin
choruses conform to societal expectations regarding the behaviour of young
women, although they operate not in an intimate domestic space (like the
female choruses of Sophocles and Euripides), but right in the centre of the
public world of men. They negotiate with kings and princes, they move freely
in the civic world, and they are, in all cases, a force to be reckoned with.
In the following discussion I examine three of Aeschylus’s virgin cho-
ruses: the ‘suppliant band of maidens’ who form the chorus of Seven against
Thebes; the Danaids, collective central character of Suppliant Women; and
the Erinyes, chorus of Eumenides. This third virgin chorus is, unlike the
Theban girls and Danaids, neither mortal nor adolescent; Apollo, however,
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 25

refers to them as ‘disgusting maidens (kataptustoi korai) old women who are
eternally children, with whom neither god, nor man, nor beast has inter-
course.’1 In a sense they take the concept of virginity to its furthest limits.
Given that mortality is not a criterion for ‘virginity,’ the Oceanids, chorus
of Prometheus Bound, might offer themselves for examination. Chaste as
they might be, they differ from these other three choruses because they are
not in a city, or polis, but occupy an uncivilized tract of land beyond Greece.
This is, as we shall see, a significant distinction: the virgin or parthenos has
an important role to play in the civic life of Greece; indeed her status is
defined by state-authorized rituals including initiatory rites and marriage. I
would like to examine how Aeschylean drama represents this unique rela-
tionship between the virgin and the state. What happens when the virgin is
integrated into the political, public world of the city? The Seven, Suppliant
Women, and Eumenides occur within a civic context; each virgin chorus is
assimilated into the polis in a way that might recall some of the actual cultic
and legal processes associated with the passage to womanhood in Athens,
where the dramas were performed. I suggest that the transitional period in a
young girl’s life when she leaves the protective environment of childhood
and assumes a new role as an adult is the paradigm which informs the
behaviour of these three virgin choruses. They represent a temporary period
of wildness in a young woman’s coming of age, and they are possessed of a
remarkable potency which must be incorporated within the state if the state
is to survive.
Before we proceed we need to consider what the social construct ‘virgin’
or parthenos signified to the ancient Greeks. Childhood in general, both for
males and females, was considered to be a state of wildness, although we hear
much more about the bestial nature of young females. Greek poetry, myth,
and ritual treat the parthenos as an untamed and hence unsocialized female.
In general an unwed female is adamatos, ‘untamed’; while to marry or even
seduce a young girl is to damazein, ‘tame,’ her.2 The lyric poet Anacreon
teases a young woman by likening her to a ‘Thracian filly’ who has not yet
tasted the bit (PMG, 335). Myths which feature women transformed into
animals, for example Callisto, are usually specific to young women on the
threshold of sexual maturity.3 Girls’ puberty rituals suggest a similar corre-
lation between beast and maiden. In a puberty rite at Brauron selected
Athenian girls emulated bears, and in Thessaly girls played the part of deer
or fawns.
Life before man is idyllic for the virgin, if we are to believe our sources.
Anacreon’s Thracian girlfriend frolics in innocent pleasure beside her mother;
Sophocles’ Deianeira, wife of Heracles, envies the chorus of Trachinian
maidens their peaceful existence (Tr. 144–5), but such a life is only tempo-
 26 Judith Fletcher

rary. When the parthenos becomes nubile she can turn nasty or even sui-
cidal; the final stage of virginity, right before marriage and integration into
society, is a dangerous period, it seems. The virgin is a powerful creature, full
of a latent fecundity and incipient sexuality which cause problems unless
properly channelled. The myth of the Danaids, who kill their husbands
rather than consummate their marriages, illustrates the dangerous potential
of the virgin; both Plutarch (Mor. 249) and the Hippocratic corpus record
stories of virgins hanging themselves.4
But these are exceptional cases which suggest how turbulent the transi-
tion from childhood to womanhood can be. Greek religion institutionalized
the passage into adulthood with rituals such as the Arkteia, which acknowl-
edged the feral nature of young females who ‘danced the Bear’ and incorpo-
rated at least a token group of them into the state by means of public
processions featuring maiden choruses, or various cultic functions such as
carrying the basket of first fruits at the Panathenaia (as Kanephoroi), or
weaving Athena’s new peplos (as Arrephoroi).5 There was even a temple to
Artemis Brauronia, who presided over the virgins’ transition, on the Athe-
nian Acropolis. Because she would bear citizen children, the virgin was an
essential component of the city-state; she was a valuable commodity, an
agalma, a treasure displayed by her family in assorted public venues.6 But
even after marriage she retained her status as a minor with no voice in the
legislature or judiciary and constantly under the economic guardianship of
an adult male, her kyrios.7 The most salient exception to the list of disabili-
ties suffered by the Athenian woman, and one pertinent to this discussion,
was her participation in the religion of the state, especially her role as cultic
functionary or celebrant. Even so, women’s involvement in civic cult had to
be authorized at some level by men such as a priest or archon.
Simply put, the parthenos required someone to help her fit into civilized
life; she would be too powerful and disruptive a force if left to her own
devices. The necessity of male intervention in the life of the virgin, or at least
the virgin about to pass into womanhood, is an idea which runs through
Greek thought. Plutarch tells how a group of suicidally inclined Milesian
virgins were prevented from hanging themselves by a quick-witted man.
Various medical texts represent different forms of hysteria in virgins, where
the prescribed solution is cohabitation with a man or pregnancy. In mythol-
ogy, the raging daughters of Proeteus, the Proetides, are cured of their
madness by Melampos, who subsequently marries one of them (Hesiod fr.
37.10). Io, afflicted by a version of ‘mad cow disease,’ runs in a frenzy across
three continents (Supp. 541–85) until she is finally restored to her human
form and calmed by the touch of Zeus, who impregnates her.
In Greek myth and medicine sexual intercourse was supposed to be an
effective remedy against virginal bedlam, but it was not simply sexual
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 27

inexperience which defined virginity for the Greeks.8 Virginity was a social
status: a parthenos was an unwed girl; marriage and childbirth were defini-
tive events in her gradual transition to womanhood. In other words a young
girl became a member of society through marriage or cohabitation, and thus
by assuming her position in society, insignificant as it may seem to us, she
exchanged nature for culture, or childhood for adulthood. The acceptance of
masculine control signified the maiden’s entry into adult life. The legal and
economic reality of the kyrios, or ‘guardian,’ is replicated in the cultic
practice of the male choregos: a chorus leader would preside over public
choral performances9 where nubile girls would be displayed, perhaps to
prospective husbands.
It is this pattern, I suggest, which informs Aeschylus’s articulation of the
virgin persona in his choruses. All three virgin choruses are situated in the
polis or at its borders. All are represented as chaotic and threatening to the
polis but eventually are accepted into the city-state to become an organized
and coherent unit capable of bestowing great benefits on the state. Thus
Aeschylus characterizes his maiden choruses in a manner consonant with
the social construction of virginity in fifth-century Greece.
In particular it is the language of these three Aeschylean choruses which is
initially troublesome. The undisciplined language of the virgin choruses is
consistent with the representation of women’s communication in Greek
drama generally. Women like Clytemnestra, who speak in public and with-
out the authorization of men, are represented as a public menace. In the
following discussion I examine how the chaotic and potentially dangerous
discourse of Aeschylus’s virgin choruses conforms to this stereotype. From
there I explore the politics of communication, specifically how the disorderly
voice of the chorus is modified in order for it to become part of the civic
voice. This taming of the chorus’s speech is performed by civic entities –
Eteocles, king of Thebes, Pelasgos, king of Argos, and Athena, the polis
incarnate. The newly domesticated chorus receives specific instructions on
how to communicate within a civic context. As a result, the chorus’s lan-
guage is no longer threatening but becomes beneficent; the women offer
prayers, an appropriate genre for women’s public discourse, on behalf of the
city in all three plays.10 In the case of Aeschylus’s choruses this approved
discourse takes the form of a prayer; the puissant energy of the virgin is thus
directed into an appropriate and useful form of communication within a
civic space.

Seven against Thebes

Seven against Thebes is the final, and only surviving, play of a trilogy which
follows the afflictions of Oedipus, his father, and sons. It dramatizes the
 28 Judith Fletcher

course of an ancient familial curse about to close in on Eteocles, king of

Thebes. After the exile of Oedipus, his sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, had
agreed to rule Thebes in alternating years. When Eteocles refused to give up
the throne at the end of his first year Polyneices mustered an army of Argive
supporters to enforce his claim. The seven chieftains are at the gates of
Thebes when the tragedy opens. The Seven would be a static play – a
messenger reports the invasion; Eteocles arms himself and departs for battle;
the messenger relates the mutual fratricides at the gates of Thebes – were it
not for the chorus of Theban virgins. They impart a sense of the turmoil and
cacophony of war; they fill the play with motion, tension, and noise; and
they mirror the discord outside the gates within the city. They are an unruly
group whose behaviour contributes in a very large way to the themes and
symbolism of the play. When Eteocles scolds them it is as if he were
attempting to suppress his own fears. On the other hand, their virginity is a
perfect symbol for the sanctity of the innermost part of the city where the
drama takes place, while their fear of rape corresponds on a personal level to
the public violation of the citadel.11
The chorus sings a terrified prayer as they enter and appeal to the gods for
protection. As the young women clutch at the statues of the gods, their
prayers are chaotic and punctuated with fearful interjections and phatic
utterances: ‘Oa, Ioh, Ee, ee, ee, ee.’ This undisciplined form of supplication is
of no benefit to Thebes and in fact may intensify the panic of its citizens –
such are the sentiments of Eteocles. He sternly rebukes the maidens for
‘howling’ (186). Lakazein is the word he uses, a term often employed for
animals barking or yowling. This is a wild, chaotic, even animalistic pack of
women who are unable to communicate in a rational and civilized manner.
Eteocles’ desperate attempts to quell them testify to their enormous power.
This first episode focuses on his repeated attempts to silence the chorus;
there are no other characters present, and the exchange between king and
chorus is the only real agon or ‘contest’ enacted in the play itself. The king
worries about how the young women might influence the rest of his city, so
he berates and threatens them with harsh punishment unless they obey him
immediately.12 Although Eteocles tries to remove the women from the
public space and insists that they retreat indoors, which is where the Athe-
nians felt all women belonged, the chorus maidens ignore the command;
they remain where they stand in the public venue and continue to voice
their anxiety. Of course the young women will have to remain outside and in
view of the audience to fulfill their function as a tragic chorus, but their
debate with Eteocles exploits this technical necessity to draw attention to
their continued presence in the civic space. The first episode is devoted to this
negotiation between the chorus, who continue their fearful outbursts and
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 29

terrified prayers, and Eteocles, who perseveres in his attempt to impose

silence and submission. He is especially concerned about how the virgins are
praying. The tension increases as the agitated maidens disregard Eteocles’
threats and commands, and Eteocles continues to demand silence. Eventu-
ally, however, the ‘chorus’ leader gives in to the king’s control: ‘I am silent’
(263), she finally says on behalf of the chorus. This protracted contest has
focused on the issue of speech, particularly prayer, as Eteocles attempts to
restrain the young women’s speech. When the chorus does finally agree to
be silent, Eteocles instructs them in their supplication. He recommends that
they ‘make a better prayer, that the gods be our allies’ and that they ‘sing
with good heart the sacred victory chant, the customary Greek song of
sacrifice’ (266–70). Eteocles is not trying to silence the women permanently
but rather to channel the energy of their supplication into a more favourable
form of appeal. His efforts to control the discourse of the women actually
reflect his attempts to gain some control over the escalating crisis of his city,
and his own doomed life.
It would seem, then, that the relationship between Eteocles and the chorus
is analogous to a genuine cultural institution: Eteocles functions as the
choregos, who organizes and instructs maiden choruses in Greek ritual. We
know this kind of relationship existed in ancient Greek society partly be-
cause fragments of maiden songs composed by the lyric poets Alcman and
Pindar survive. In his important study of this institution Claude Calame
discusses the roles of the choregos or the director of the chorus. Calame is
not discussing tragic choruses, but the role of the choregos as the director of
young women who sang and danced in civic ceremonies throughout Greece.
The ancient lexicographer Hesychius gives several definitions of the term
choregos, including the person, either male or female, who sets the chorus
going, who gives the signal for the dances or the songs to begin. Apollo, for
instance, is often depicted as the leader of the chorus of the Graces. The
semantic range of the term covers three components: organizing, beginning,
and conducting.13
Considered in this context, Eteocles acts as a marshalling force, a choregos,
for the maidens: specifically he tells them how to sing, how to arrange their
prayers. And the chorus does need organizing. To judge from the excited
metre of their lyrics, they probably would have poured into the theatre in
scattered disarray. At some point in their showdown with Eteocles they must
fall into the rank-and-file position of the typical tragic chorus; thus the
organizing force of Eteocles is expressed spatially. When the king leaves the
acting space the maidens continue to be afraid, but they are now in the
prescribed formation of the tragic chorus.
It could be argued that the chorus has hardly settled down after Eteocles
 30 Judith Fletcher

leaves, since their next song, the first stasimon, is a fantasy of a raped and
pillaged city. The chorus is certainly still very much afraid, but the young
women no longer blurt out their disjointed prayers. While their first song
had a very disturbed structure, once they accept Eteocles’ advice their ode is
far more harmonious and coherent in terms of metre and content.14 At any
rate, they do not seem to disturb Eteocles, who returns to give the messenger
his orders for the forthcoming battle. The chorus is now a much more
composed group and more disciplined in its language as Eteocles’ instruc-
tions take effect. The central section of the play consists of six paired
speeches in which the messenger describes the shields of the attacking
Argive captains and Eteocles assigns a corresponding Theban warrior to each
of the seven gates. The seventh warrior is his brother Polyneices, whom
Eteocles will fight (and eventually kill and be killed by) at the seventh gate.
The chorus is present throughout this important strategy session, and after
each set of speeches they sing a short choral verse which complies with
Eteocles’ earlier request for auspicious prayer. The first verse, for example,
is a prayer that the gods give victory (417–21). In the remaining lyrics
they wish for their enemy’s destruction (e.g., 452–6) and pray for success
(481–5). This is precisely the manner of speech which Eteocles prescribed
for them, although his own speech becomes increasingly dangerous and
out of bounds.
For the remainder of the play the chorus is sober and self-controlled – so
much so that some scholars have suggested that they actually change charac-
ter (and masks) from innocent maidens to wise counsellors, an unprec-
edented occurrence in Greek tragedy.15 Yet this is not a different chorus, but
a civilized chorus which has evolved from the chaos of the early part of the
play to the structured and coherent odes and prayers in the remainder of the
play until the death of Eteocles. The choral ode after Eteocles leaves to meet
his brother at the seventh gate of Thebes is an authoritative and precise
narrative of the house of the Labdacids, a far cry from earlier inchoate
utterances. Now the women demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the family’s
history and a prophetic understanding of how Oedipus’s curse will manifest
itself in the mutual fratricide that is indeed occurring even as the chorus
women describe it. The chorus has developed from a group of distressed
maidens whose words were inappropriate for a public venue to a controlled
group which offers prayers for the city’s safety and is able to place the action
of the drama in the pattern of Theban history. Interestingly, as their linguis-
tic competence grows it seems to parallel the actualization of Oedipus’s curse
against his sons. As William Scott points out, ‘Eteocles’ action of calming the
women and seeking to organize the war effort is in fact fulfilling [his father’s
curse] by trapping himself in his own war plans.’16 Needless to say, the
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 31

evolution of the chorus is not the central concern of this drama, although, as
I argue, it does help to delineate the activity of the curse by providing us
with an authoritative and focused narrator.17

The Suppliant Women

The chorus of Seven against Thebes is but one example of what are arguably
the most invasive and threatening choral groups in Greek tragedy. Virgins
are powerful young women with a great potential for disruption, but when
they do agree to operate within cultural boundaries they can offer great
benefits for the state. The chorus of Danaids in The Suppliant Women, like
the Theban women, display a tendency towards irrational behaviour. This
play was probably first in a trilogy dealing with the myth of the Danaids,
fifty descendants of Io and Zeus who were forced to marry their cousins, the
sons of Aegyptos. When the action begins, they are arriving at the city of
Argos, having fled with their father, Danaos, from Egypt. They enter the
drama in an orderly manner because they are under his supervision; Danaos
instructs them how to speak correctly and tells them exactly when and what
to sing. In the eyes of the Athenian audience he is their legal guardian or
kyrios, but in a performance context he is their choregos. With a few notable
exceptions he authorizes practically every song that they sing, usually by
telling them to sing or pray, or comments on the nature of their language in
some way. In the first episode Danaos coaches his daughters on verbal
decorum in preparation for their meeting with the Argives: he advises them
to speak with self-restraint and modesty, for, as he says, ‘it is not seemly for
inferiors to be bold in speech’ (203). The correct use of language is the
strongest theme in this scene and is a major preoccupation of Danaos, whose
concern for the propriety of his daughters’ speech is, we soon discover,
entirely justified.
The Danaids have come to petition the city for refuge by exploiting an
ancestral link with the Argives through Io, but the business of supplication is
stressful and complex. The Danaids need to negotiate with King Pelasgos,
who has serious misgivings about including the young women within the
protective scope of the polis. The threat posed by the Danaids’ potency arises
from their nascent sexuality: to accept responsibility for this group of fertile
young women is to risk war with their impassioned pursuers. In their
meeting with the Argives the women display the contradictory features of
their virgin personality; commentators for the play aptly describe the chorus
as ‘pathetic, sinister, docile, pertinacious, hysterical, euphoric,’ but above all
independent in thought and action.18 It is important to recognize that the
young women negotiate on their own behalf in a highly charged political
 32 Judith Fletcher

situation. They are effective agents in securing a position for themselves

within the city, although their methods of persuasion are anything but
conciliatory. Several times Pelasgos chides them for their unruly and impo-
lite speech. In their attempt to coerce the king into granting them sanctuary
the maidens even threaten to hang themselves on Argive altars – typical
virgin behaviour. It is the threat of moral pollution, miasma, which finally
persuades Pelasgos to argue their case before the assembly; he dispatches
Danaos to the city and then sends the daughters to a nearby public grove,
where he bids them pray to the local gods for what they desire (520–1). He
thus takes over the role of choregos, instructing the chorus of virgins in their
hymns, in a public venue. The symmetrically structured first stasimon, one
of three choral prayers in this play, ensues. In it the chorus sing the story of
Io and beseech Zeus to protect them. The beautiful ring composition of this
coherent narrative reflects the regulating force of Pelasgos on the maidens.
What happens to the language of the Danaids when they are not under
the protective control of Pelasgos or Danaos? As the chorus await the return
of the king and their father, the Aegyptids’ herald arrives, intent on leading
the maidens away. Unfortunately, this passage is deeply corrupt, and there is
great uncertainty over the number of characters involved or even the distri-
bution of lines.19 Nonetheless, it is obvious that once the enemy herald
approaches, the Danaids are no longer capable of coherent song. They blurt
out inarticulate expressions of terror – phatic utterances such as ‘aiai, aiai,
oioi, oioi, ototototoi, ma Ga ma Ga’ and so forth. Without the tutelage of
their protectors, and in the presence of an uncivilized and threatening male,
the maidens are unable to speak lucidly. The herald remonstrates with them
for crying and howling (lakaze, the same word Eteocles used for the yelps of
the Theban virgins), but unlike Eteocles he is incapable of controlling the
young women’s outbursts. Not just any man can rein in such a powerful
group of women. The herald is a specimen of utter barbarity who rejects
Greek gods (891), attempts to abduct virgins in spite of their father’s prohi-
bitions, and, as Pelasgos will point out, does not know how to be a guest
(917), a serious transgression in the eyes of the Greeks. Such an uncultured,
barbarian lout could not possibly act as a choregos. When Pelasgos comes to
the rescue, the Danaids regain their composure and, at the bidding of their
father, make a prayer of benediction for Argos which Danaos approves: ‘I
praise these seemly prayers, dear girls’ (710). Since they have been admitted
to the state as new citizens, their prayers for the prosperity of Argos are
reminiscent of the contributions of the young woman who replenishes the
citizenry by parenting new citizens. The transfer of custody over the maid-
ens resembles marriage negotiations, while it simultaneously seems to refer
to the bestowal of new citizenship rights.20
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 33

Of course, in the subsequent lost dramas the Danaids are somehow com-
pelled to marry the Aegyptids, and all but one will murder their new
husbands. That exceptional Danaid, Hypermnestra, will make the transition
to adulthood successfully and eventually found an Argive dynasty which
will include Heracles. Since all but a few fragments of the remainder of the
trilogy are lost, very little can be said about how Aeschylus presented this
story, but as we have seen, the first tragedy has the virgins securely installed
in the civic space of Argos.
As I have attempted to demonstrate, the characterization of both these
Aeschylean choruses accords with popular conceptions of virgins as power-
ful but wild creatures. In both cases the young women’s speech is at some
point out of control when not governed by a civic authority figure. And in
both dramas the most significant form of discourse is prayer. The civic
figures tell the chorus how to pray, petitioning for benedictions for the city.
The virgins then become part of the civic structure in a process which
recognizes the great potential of their public voice while seeking to regulate
it in a way that uses it to maximum advantage.

The Eumenides

The final play of Aeschylus’s great trilogy the Oresteia shows how the
young son of Agamemnon, Orestes, flees from Delphi to Athens to seek
purification and exoneration for killing his mother, whom he killed to
avenge his father. He is pursued by the avenging spirits, the Furies or
Erinyes of his mother, Clytemnestra, whose ghost urges them to hunt her
son like a wild animal. The Erinyes comprise the chorus and, like the Danaids
and the chorus of the The Suppliant Women, this group is a major player in
the tragedy. The Erinyes are far more dangerous than the two human virgin
choruses. While the Danaids and Theban virgins feared the violent potential
of male sexuality, the Erinyes fear another type of masculine power, namely
assimilation and domination by the patriarchal order of the Olympian gods
(‘the younger gods,’ 162, 778–9). The Erinyes are devoted to the interests of
blood-kin (and hence oppose the matricide) and do not recognize the bonds
of marriage; in their opinion Orestes committed a far greater crime in killing
his mother than she did in killing his father.21 They belong to the old pre-
Olympian order of gods, chthonic powers (connected with the earth), and
there is something strikingly primitive about their behaviour. The first
noises that they make are not music at all but inarticulate groans and grunts:
‘mu, mu ... oh, oh’ etc.; Clytemnestra’s ghost declares ‘you bark (klangaineis)
like a dog’ (131).22 And while the howls of the human virgin choruses in
the other two plays obliquely suggest their feral nature, the Erinyes are
 34 Judith Fletcher

obviously like a pack of animals, like dogs pursuing a deer, as they them-
selves put it (246). Furthermore, they do not appear initially in the rank and
file of the regular tragic chorus, but probably arrive in the theatre at random,
like the Theban virgin chorus.23
Here is a female chorus that functions without the control of men, and it
is a very menacing group of women indeed. Aeschylus underscores their
great power by having them enter, unconventionally, through the skene
building, which represented the temple of Apollo at Delphi. There are appar-
ently no limits on their mobility, and in their pursuit of Orestes to Athens
they actually leave the orchestra, another bold violation of convention. They
have no choregos, no tutelary figure to instruct them in their singing. They
themselves decide to become a chorus: ‘Come let us form a chorus,’ they say
at the beginning of the first stasimon (308). In this ode the Erinyes sing their
binding song, a verbal enchantment meant to imprison Orestes, as they
encircle their victim. Such magical incantation is a form of speech tradition-
ally associated with women and one that they can use to exercise control
over men.24
In this case the Erinyes fail to detain Orestes with their spell. The virgin
monsters are still an extreme exponent of the dangers of unsupervised
female speech, however. They follow their quarry right to the civic heart of
Athens, where they participate in a forensic debate; indeed, they come very
close to arguing successfully for their claim on Orestes (since the trial results
in a tie vote). Considering that this is the chorus (whom we expect to be
somewhat subsidiary to the action), they are remarkably voluble, mobile,
and active. They actually identify themselves as Arai, ‘Curses,’ and after the
acquittal of Orestes they threaten to curse Athens.25 Their language is at
least as problematic as that of the terrified Theban women, or the truculent
Danaids whose threat of suicide bespeaks pollution.
The ultimate taming of the Furies occurs in the very public milieu of the
Areopagus. Another virgin, Athena, in voting for and representing the male
principle, channels the Erinyes’ power, and through the agency of her per-
suasion the daughters of Night take their place within the Athenian patriar-
chy. We might expect Athena to try persuading the Erinyes to leave Athens
after Orestes returns to Argos, but instead she convinces them to assume the
role of protectors of Athens, which will incorporate their force.26 The debate
between Athena and the chorus corresponds to similar contests between
Eteocles and Pelasgos and their respective choruses. In all three plays the
language of the chorus threatens the stability of the polis. In the Eumenides,
despite Athena’s insistence that they will not be dishonoured, the Erinyes
repeatedly threaten to curse Attica with venom, disease, and death, which
they can apparently accomplish with a word.27 Athena continues to offer
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 35

them the power to grant wealth and fecundity to the land and households of
her city; the chorus leader is at last persuaded and asks, ‘What do you bid me
to invoke upon this land?’ (902). In essence the chorus has put its voice
under the control of a more rational force, a choregos. A masculine virgin,
Athena, asks that they grant the city fecundity and protection, and in
accordance with her wishes the chorus sings a hymn of benediction for
Athens. Although it has taken most of the play for this to happen, the debate
between Athena and the chorus follows the same principle that we have
already seen in Seven against Thebes and The Suppliant Women: a civic
figure directs the volatile potential of the virgin voice into a format that is
beneficial to the polis.
The trilogy ends with the chorus being escorted to their new homes in a
torchlight parade, a ritual that looks very much like a marriage procession.
But the newly installed Semnai Theai, or ‘Venerable Goddesses,’ as they are
now called, will retain their virginity, for this is where their power resides. In
her examination of the roles of these spirits, Sarah Iles Johnston describes
Aeschylus’s version of the Erinyes as ‘eternal virgins, divine paradigms of
the girls whose transitions they could thwart if they wished.’28 In addition to
their many functions they are ‘transitional’ goddesses who preside over
young women in their safe passage to womanhood. Thus the land of Attica
subsumes the power of these virgins who will never marry and who will
forever be childless (paides apaides, 1034). With some degree of irony,
however, a type of marriage has occurred between these fatherless children
of the goddess Night, who champion the cause of maternity and blood
kinship, and the motherless child of Zeus, who ‘approves the male in all
things, except in marriage’ (737).
As these three tragic dramas illustrate, Aeschylus used the passage from
wildness to civilization, an idea inherent in coming-of-age rituals, as a model
for the behaviour of his virgin choruses. He depicts the remarkable power of
the virginal voice as a chaotic, untamed clamour which threatens the equilib-
rium of the state. This power is diverted by a civic figure who virtually
‘tames’ the chorus and guides it toward a propitious function. Laura McClure
has argued that Greek tragedy represents women’s ‘vital role in perpetuat-
ing the values and ideals of the community by reaffirming the social and
religious roles of men and women.’ She has also pointed out that ‘choruses
of girls and women ... suggest the existence of women’s public and authori-
tative speech in ancient Greece.’29 As she so rightfully acknowledges, ancient
Athens did recognize the power of the female voice.
It is interesting that Aeschylus sets his virgin choruses in a civic drama,
especially when we consider the female choruses of Sophocles or Euripides.
These women seldom have such stressful relationships with male characters.
 36 Judith Fletcher

There is a definite civic flavour to all three of these Aeschylean tragedies; some
scholars have gone so far as to suggest that the plays could be an allegory for
the installation of new citizens in the polis.30 The prenuptial wildness of
virgins as perceived by the Greeks was a stage in their movement towards
marriage, and marriage was their ‘civic duty.’ Ancient Greek society recog-
nized the enormous power of the virgin and needed to enclose and tap into her
budding fertility. The alternatives would be societies like the mythical Ama-
zons, who lived on the edges of civilization, perpetual virgins who even
stormed the Athenian citadel, according to legend. In the Greek imagination
powerful and threatening young women could live outside the confines of the
city. Although we encounter the occasional man in Greek literature who wishes
he could live in a world without women, the mythopoeic mind prefers to
harness female power, most potent in the virgin.

NOTES

1 Eu. 68. As Alan Sommerstein (1989) 95 comments, ‘nothing qualifies the

Erinyes to be called korai except their virginity.’
2 The fourth-century BC philosopher and historian Xenophon (Oec.7.5) makes
his character Ischomachos use the term to explain how he instructed his young
wife in the niceties of civilized life. Cf. Calame (1997) 239, n. 123: ‘In a female
context, the metaphor of domestication refers both to a girl’s education and to
her marriage.’
3 If we accept J.E. Robson’s suggestion in (1997) 80–2, even mythical victims of
bestial rape, such as Europa, who was abducted by Zeus disguised as a bull,
testify to the feral nature of young women, who can turn their admirers into
beasts as well; Robson argues that gods turn themselves into beasts to match
young girls’ feral nature.
4 The Hippocratic corpus represents various forms of hysteria in young women
and reports that ‘virgins who do not take a husband at the appropriate time for
marriage experience visions and suicidal impulses’ (Hippocrates, On Virgins
8.466–70). Seaford (1988, 119) remarks: ‘The ritually expressed reluctance of
the girl to pass from the parental to the marital home is widely attested as a
traditional feature of Greek marriage.’ See especially Ann Hanson’s essay in
this volume.
5 See Sourvinou-Inwood (1988) and Dowden (1989).
6 Ruth Scodel (1996, 111–12) remarks on how the tragedians represent virgins as
luxury goods, similar to a fine peplos or statue. Most representative of this
concept is Agamemnon’s description of Iphigenia as ‘the ornament of my
house’ (Ag. 208).
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 37

7 On the role of the kyrios (‘guardian’ or ‘master’) see Just (1989, 26–30).
Although much has been written about the restrictions imposed on ancient
Greek women in public life, the fact remains that Athenian women of citizen
parentage enjoyed certain rights and privileges which set them apart from
metics (resident aliens) and slaves. See Schaps (1998, 161–88). Citizen women
were an almost indefinable, yet crucial, part of the state. They were legal
entities who could testify in court, make public prayers, and bestow citizenship.
The paradox of course is that women were not full-fledged members of the state
and were always seen as being somehow incompetent. Roger Just sums up this
incongruity: ‘By their very nature women belonged as a whole to the disor-
dered and irrational side of life. Their integration into society was, as it were,
artificial – the result of their subjugation and domestication by men. Left to
themselves, women would be both ignorant of and incapable of conforming to
society’s demands.’ Just (1989, 26–30).
8 The state of partheneia does not simply end with intercourse or even childbirth,
as Sissa (1990a, 76–7) argues, since numerous children in Greek mythology are
described as parthenios, ‘born of a virgin.’
9 A ‘well attested model’ which was a ‘microcosm of the social hierarchy’ accord-
ing to Jennifer Larson (1995, 33). As Larson reminds us, there are no instances
of male choruses guided by a female choregos. I am not suggesting that only
men are leaders of women’s choruses, of course. There is evidence that older
women (perhaps like Sappho) taught young girls to sing and dance.
10 The pattern which I identify is compatible with the observations of Laura
McClure (1999), who notices that classical Greek drama represents women’s
speech as subversive or pernicious unless it is directed into socially prescribed
formats. Also Josine H. Blok (2001).
11 Thalmann (1978, 102) observes that ‘they embody much that is fragile and
precious in the city’s life.’ See Holt Parker’s similar remarks on Vestal Virgins
in this volume.
12 Eteocles’ invective against the chorus has provoked various scholarly responses.
Solmsen (1937) finds Eteocles’ policing of the chorus to be a necessary correc-
tive to their dangerous outbursts. Caldwell (1973) suggests that Eteocles, son
of Oedipus, hates all women because of his dysfunctional family background.
Stehle (2005) focuses on the performative effects of his language, through
which the curse is manifested.
13 Calame (1997, 43–9).
14 Scott (1984, 160–1).
15 Solmsen (1937, 201) argues that since the chorus give advice to Eteocles and call
him teknon, ‘child,’ at 686, they must now be wearing different masks, a rather
improbable suggestion which Brown (1977, 316) counters by pointing out this
is merely a term of affection.
 38 Judith Fletcher

16 Scott (1984, 162). Cf. Eva Stehle (2005), who analyses how the curse of Oedipus
is manifested in Eteocles’ language. As the chorus gain control of themselves,
and eventually accomplish a proper prayer, Eteocles loses control of language.
17 Let us remember too that Thebes is one of the most crisis-ridden cities in Greek
myth and that this is the final installment in a trilogy detailing its history.
And finally, there are doubts about the authenticity of the extant ending, an
extensive lamentation which introduces Antigone and her sister. Assuming that
the ending is genuine, I would suggest that the chorus has now taken on a
stereotypical adult feminine role as mourners. That their lamentation is perhaps
excessive and somewhat disordered may be attributed to the fact that their
choregos no longer lives.
18 Friis-Johansen and Whittle (1980, 39).
19 The text does not designate any change of singers in the lyric portions, but as
Friis-Johansen and Whittle (1980, 172) point out, the Danaids could not sing
verses 836–42, 847–53, and 859–65. The scene might have more force with a
secondary chorus of Egyptian henchmen here, but their presence or absence
does not substantially affect my arguments.
20 See Zeitlin (1992, 203–52) for parallels between virgins and suppliants.
21 They are ‘[d]aughters who will not leave the self-contained family unit in its
simplest form.’ Johnston (1999, 255).
22 117–29 are rare examples of stage directions or parepigraphai in the manu-
script. On the sounds made by the Erinyes see McClure (1999, 107–8).
23 Texts of Greek tragedy do not usually print stage directions (although see n. 22
above), so it is difficult to know exactly how or when the Erinyes make their
entrance. Sommerstein (1989) 93 suggests that they are presented sleeping
around Orestes on the ekkyklema, which is wheeled out of the building repre-
senting the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Unfortunately we have no conclusive
evidence that the ekkyklema was in use at this time. The most conservative
reconstruction would have the chorus entering through the side entrance of the
theatre (the parodos) after the ghost of Clytemnestra has awakened them. In
any staging, however, the chorus members’ entrances must be sporadic, since it
appears that they are waking up in fits and starts. So Clytemnestra’s ghost says
to them, ‘get up, and you and you’ (140).
24 McClure (1999, 65–7, 80–92, 108).
25 Prins (1991) suggests that they are the incarnations of speech acts.
26 Sommerstein (1989, 239–40).
27 ‘[T]he Erinyes’ blighting poison is here, it would seem, conceived as being
contained in the bitter words they are uttering.’ Sommerstein (1989, 247).
28 Johnston (1999, 253).
29 McClure (1999, 55).
 The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus 39

30 Podlecki (1972, 201) notes similarities between the Erinyes and Danaids in that
both groups are received into the polis as neopolitai (‘new citizens’). Bakewell
(1997, 208–28) suggests that the Argive reception of the Danaids reflects con-
temporary Athenian policy towards metics, or resident aliens.
 3
The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness
and Health
ann ellis hanson

Medical writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, composing their anonymous

treatises in the fifth and early fourth centuries BC, situated the parthenos at
the brink of a perilous transition from child to adult.1 No English word
overlaps well with Greek parthenos, although we approximate it with the
translations ‘young girl,’ ‘virgin,’ ‘maiden.’ The body of the parthenos was
no longer that of the genderless child, such as she had inhabited it from
birth, nor was her body yet able to function like that of a fully mature
woman (gyne). As wife, mother, and mistress of her husband’s household,
the gyne birthed the offspring that perpetuated family and community into
a new generation, and the legitimacy and gender of her children were of
intense interest to the family and to the citizen body of her community.2
While modern Western society emphasizes the menopausal changes that
take place in the woman’s body at the close of her decades of fertility, Greek
society of the Classical period problematized menarche and the beginning of
a female’s fertile life, marking the transition with elaborate rituals.3 Most
Hippocratics shared their society’s preoccupations, including these first
changes in the female body, endowing them with medical seriousness. The
embryological treatises expected the female fetus to develop more slowly
than the male in the space of the womb, but the author of Eight Months’
Child claimed in addition that daughters reached puberty and a prudent
maturity more quickly than sons and grew old more rapidly due to the
weakness of their female bodies and their manner of living (7.450L).4

Genderless Child, Fertile Wife, and Parthenos in Between

Although gender difference was marked in some Hippocratic descriptions of

fetal development and birthing, once the baby was born medical writers of
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 41

the Corpus spoke of ‘children’ (paides, paidia), paying scant attention to

whether the child was a boy or a girl. The Hippocratic author of the em-
bryological treatise Nature of the Child described the child’s body as
compact and firm because the inner passageways which led from diverse
parts to the organs of generation were narrow, constricted, and blocked up.
This was, for him, the reason why boys did not secrete sperm and girls did
not menstruate:

Children’s interior passageways5 are narrow and filled up, and this prevents generat-
ing seed6 from passing through them, so that a stimulating irritation does not occur
in the same way [as in adults]. As a result, fluids in the body are never sufficiently
agitated for generating seed to separate out. Nor do menses flow for parthenoi while
they are young for this same reason. (NC 2.2–3, 7.472L)

Because the bodies of children appeared similar, Hippocratics expected

them to suffer the same sicknesses in similar fashion. The children growing
up in a town with northward exposure and waters hard, cold, and indigest-
ible were likely to suffer from dropsy and pass through puberty later than
those in a more beneficent climate (AWP 4, 1.78LCL). The author of Epi-
demics I described the fevers prevalent during an unusually damp year on
the island of Thasos and noted that children were the ones who died – ‘those
recently weaned, older ones eight and ten years old, and however many were
still prepubescent’ (I 10, 1.162LCL). Children were also alike in that impor-
tant bodily changes hovered on the horizon for them as they grew older.7
The most famous Hippocratic collection of short, pithy utterances of medical
wisdom, Aphorisms, claimed that maladies either ceased with puberty, or, if
they did not, they then became chronic (III 28, 4.132LCL), and that children
who suffered from seizures could also anticipate alterations in their disease
at this time (V 7, 4.158LCL). While the Hippocratic gaze sometimes fastened
upon children, noting how their bodies responded to specific diseases or
environmental conditions, Hippocratics never approached the more elabo-
rate pediatrics that survive from Roman times,8 and their attention was
more often focused on adults.
Throughout antiquity medical writers tended to give fourteen years as
the age of puberty, no doubt fastening upon ‘twice seven years’ as particu-
larly plausible because of their culture’s long-lived preference for multiples
of seven when applying periodicity to human life.9 As the boy and girl grew
in stature and their bodies increased in size, their inner passageways ex-
panded, making a path for generating seed to reach the organs of generation.
Now there was space in which the potent fluid was agitated, heated, and set
in motion; once delivered to the uterus, the seed of generation from both
 42 Ann Ellis Hanson

partners combined, solidified because of the warmth, and a new life began
within the body of the now mature female. Secondary sexual characteristics
were outwardly visible, while the expansion of the inner passageways was
hidden from view, and the medical writer of Nature of the Child emphasized
swelling of breasts, growth of pubic hair, in addition to the production of
menses and seed. Growth of hair on the young man’s chin signalled that his
generating seed, drawn from all parts of the body and flowing down from
head to penis, was now sufficient to nourish this outcropping of hair, much
as rain nourished plants in earth.10 Hormonal explanations for the appear-
ance of secondary sexual characteristics lay several millennia in the future,
yet this Hippocratic’s invoking of connected interior passageways provided
him with mechanical explanations for the phenomena of puberty that occur
simultaneously in widely separated parts of the body.
Once childhood was left behind, the social lives of girls and boys within
the family and the city-state of the Classical period in Greece differed as
markedly as the medical construction Hippocratics gave their bodies. Body
growth alone accounted for maturation in boys, but girls required further
opening and widening for them to process the additional fluids that exited
the mature female as menses, milk, and postpartum flows. Only intercourse
and pregnancy completed the transformation of the girl-child’s body to that
of a mature woman. The gynecological treatises of the Corpus occasionally
referred to old virgins, grouping them with young widows, both of whom
were expected to be unhealthy.11 While the youngest parthenos was the
young girl for whom the menses did not yet flow, the age of the oldest
parthenos in the case histories of Epidemics was twenty years (Epid. V 50,
7.190LCL). This pretty daughter of Nerius, as the medical writer described
her, died nine days after she was struck on the forehead by a friend while
playing. In all likelihood she had begun to menstruate, since nothing is
mentioned to the contrary, and the medical writer would surely have consid-
ered amenorrhea medically significant to her case history if she had not. She
was, of course, unmarried.
The Hippocratic author of Nature of the Child placed his discussion of the
second widening brought about by pregnancy and childbirth at the begin-
ning of the gynecological treatise Diseases of Women I, to which he contrib-
uted many sections.12 Once again mechanical paradigms played a conspicu-
ous role in his discussion. Mature female flesh must become porous and the
mature female body equipped with empty spaces in order for the woman to
manage successfully the menses and other fluids that accumulated within
her prior to their evacuation, and her uterus required room for expansion so
as to accommodate a fetus:
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 43

I say that a woman who is childless suffers more intensely and more readily from
menstruation than one who has given birth: for when she gives birth, her interior
passageways become more receptive to menstrual blood. The lochial flow makes
them receptive, even if only some of her body is broken down.13 In particular, the
passageways near the belly and the breasts are broken down; in addition, the rest of
the body is usually broken down. I have explained how this happens in my Nature of
the Child in Childbirth: when the body is broken down, it is inevitable that the
passageways are more open and more receptive to menstrual blood. The uterus is also
more open – as, for example, when the child has moved through it and has caused
pressure and pain. (DW I 1.1–4, 8.10L)

The parthenos was poised between child and woman, her body moving
ever closer to that of the sexually mature gyne. Diseases of Women I
explained the anatomical and physiological changes occasioned by birthing
and by the menses, postpartum flows, and the milk that exited the body of
the mother. These fluids persuaded Hippocratics and later medical writers
that inner female nature was moister than male nature, and in order to
manage these flows successfully in full maturity, the body of a parthenos
had to be broken down and opened up. Menarche showed that the interior
changes had commenced, but further widening and straightening came only
with the penetration of intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth when the
infant struggled to free itself from the confining membranes of the womb
and thrashed its way outward, accomplishing its own birth.14 The rambunc-
tious baby spread the bones of the pelvic region apart and widened the path
to the outside, while the subsequent movement of fluids within the mother’s
body – lochial flows and milk – completed the breaking down of her compact
and genderless flesh. Thus opened up and broken down, the now feminized
body better managed the surplus fluids that for Hippocratics characterized a
wife and mother. While Hippocratics admitted that the birth of a first infant
might be difficult, they assured the uniparous that subsequent births would
proceed more easily.15 She who had birthed many children, the multiparous,
was in their view the one who had transformed from young girl to produc-
tive wife and mother, the healthiest of women.
Hippocratics considered reproductive activities essential to female health
once the transformations of puberty had begun, and their exhortations to
intercourse and childbearing as salubrious continued throughout the woman’s
fertile life. Male seed, the liquid of choice, moistened the womb and kept it
from drying out, contracting overmuch, and turning toward moist organs,
such as the liver or lungs; without this moisture, maladies such as womb
displacement and chronic amenorrhea caused her considerable distress. In-
 44 Ann Ellis Hanson

tercourse heated her blood, rendering it more fluid and better able to find its
proper path of downward descent in monthly purgings. Vigorous menstrua-
tion was healthful, but amenorrhea fatal after six months (DW I 2.12–18,
8.16–18L). In short, as the author of Nature of the Child put it, ‘If they have
intercourse with men their health is better than if they do not’ (NC 4.3,
7.476L). The therapeutic treatises of gynecology noted that uterine suffoca-
tion, caused by the movement of the uterus to moist areas elsewhere in the
body and resulting in blocked passageways, ‘happened especially to old
parthenoi and widows too young in their widowhood, and it often happened
to barren women and to those who were sterile after menopause’ (DW II
127, 8.274L). The close join between woman’s reproductive activities and
female health was everywhere apparent, and refrains such as ‘if she becomes
pregnant she will be healthy’ and ‘persuade the parthenos to sleep with a
husband’ resonated through Hippocratic gynecology.16

Hippocratic Therapy and Theory of the Parthenos:

Superfetation 34 and Diseases of Young Girls

Healers inhabited the Greek world for centuries prior to the Hippocratic
development, and Machaon and Podalirius, sons of Asclepius, had according
to Homer accompanied the Greek forces to Troy, medicating battlefield
wounds of the heroes. The poet of the Odyssey, with his far greater interest
in the social mores of the home and family, portrayed Nausicaa, the young
daughter of King Alcinous, as preoccupied with finding a proper suitor for
eventual marriage as she set out with her maids and young friends to wash
the family’s laundry in Odyssey VI. Her preoccupation coloured the entirety
of the interaction between her and Odysseus, and the delicacy with which
Odysseus responded to the nubile princess underscored the fact that she was
not only of royal blood but also at that liminal state between childhood and
female maturity. Even before Nausicaa encountered the shipwrecked Odysseus
on the shore, his clothing lost and only branches to cover his nakedness,
Athena, disguised as Nausicaa’s young friend, the daughter of Dymas, ob-
served to her, ‘You will soon be a parthenos no longer’ (VI 33). The Homeric
line may have influenced the thoughts about partheneia expressed by the
archaic Greek poetess Sappho (fl. ca. 600 BC), for surviving fragments of her
poems contain a number of references to parthenoi and partheneia, the
abstract quality of being a parthenos. In some instances the context seemed
to be a wedding and the parthenos, a bride accompanied by an attendant
chorus of singing parthenoi.17 Sappho’s emphasis in such instances was on
the sexual innocence of the parthenos and her chorus, for at a certain point
in the joining of bride and groom the accompanying maidens were sent
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 45

away (Frag. 27.10V). One fragment, cited by a certain Chrysippus18 for its
use of negatives, emphasized more general qualities of the parthenos – her
youth and lack of worldly experiences:

I do not imagine that any parthenos

who has looked on the light of the sun will have
such [poetic?] skill at any time in the future (Frag. 56V).19

Demetrius of Phaleron, Peripatetic philosopher, rhetorician, and politician

(b. ca. 350 BC), also quoted Sappho in his On Style because of the elegant
repetition of the abstract in the first line, adding that the two lines repre-
sented a dialogue between bride (nymphe) and partheneia personified:

‘Partheneia, partheneia, where have you gone, deserting me?’

‘Never again shall I come to you: never again shall I come’ (Frag. 114V).

Despite textual uncertainties in the second line, it seems to me that

Sappho was here lamenting both the specific loss of sexual innocence as well
as youth more generally, with all its attendant carefree pleasures.20 Two
relatively recent English translations divide in their response to Sappho’s
abstract partheneia, with one choosing ‘virginity,’ the other ‘childhood.’21
The parthenos must become a gyne, speeding along in a transition that
writers of the Hippocratic Corpus later facilitated through their medical
interventions. For poetess and medical writers alike, partheneia was a tem-
porary state: it could not and never did return once the parthenos became a
gyne, properly married off to a husband as wife and mother.
The Hippocratics of the fifth and fourth centuries BC were fashioning a
more sophisticated medical discourse – one that explained how ailments
disrupted inner mechanical processes and how the cures they recommended
rectified, or at least ameliorated, malfunctions. They were also expanding
Greek medical horizons to embrace the anatomy and physiology of the
female body, and the same author in the gynecological collection Diseases of
Women I quoted above thought it necessary to stress how his own punctili-
ousness in the treatment of female patients saved women’s lives: ‘the healing
of the diseases of women differs greatly from the healing of men’s diseases’
(62.6, 8.126L). At several points in the text this same Hippocratic writer
noted mistakes of other healers who endangered their female patients be-
cause they attempted to heal them in ways appropriate for the male body,
but not for the female.22 The writer’s careful concern in such matters counted
for something in the struggle to save women’s lives.
Hippocratic anatomy and physiology gave medical meaning to the social
 46 Ann Ellis Hanson

role of the Greek woman in the Classical period as wife and mother of
children. The precise chronology of Hippocratic treatises remains problem-
atic, and definitive criteria for assigning specific dates to individual works
are lacking, despite the general consensus that most works in the Corpus
were composed in the latter decades of the fifth century and the early
decades of the fourth. Nonetheless, special attention to the parthenos in
sickness and health gives every indication of being one of the later develop-
ments within Hippocratic gynecology, an appendage to their concern for the
gyne. Puberty was a time to expect changes, physical as well as social, and
the medical implications for Hippocratics lay in facilitating these transfor-
mations for the parthenos, underscoring the notion that the metamorphosis
from genderless child to fertile woman was simple only when the transition
was effected speedily. The healthy young girl soon became pregnant and
birthed babies, hopefully male, while delays in her transition brought physi-
cal illness and mental aberrations. One of the demonstrably later treatises in
the Hippocratic gynecologies, Superfetation, described the maladies that
afflicted young girls as the time for menarche approached, together with the
therapies for medicating these:

Whenever menarche23 does not take place for a parthenos, she is dominated by bile
and feverish; she suffers pain; she is thirsty and hungry, she vomits; she is mad and
then again becomes sane. (Superfet. 34.1, 8.504L)24

Some of the therapies prescribed specifically aimed at diminishing the

menstrual blood trapped within her body: ‘Put warmed sheepskins on her
belly and ... have her fast as much as possible.’ The warmed sheepskins
caused sweating, a recognized Hippocratic means for evacuating fluid resi-
dues through the skin; fasting prevented her from producing additional
blood out of the food she was ingesting. The physician also advised vaginal
fumigations, a common therapeutic procedure endorsed by most medical
writers throughout antiquity.25 While neither the fumigation itself, nor its
ingredients, appear unusual, the means to deliver the fumes into the womb
of the parthenos are unparalleled elsewhere, for he ordered her to sit over a
long-necked jar such that the neck extended into her uterus. This Hippo-
cratic apparently intended that the jar’s neck simulate the first penetration
of intercourse and simultaneously bring on the menarche that would allevi-
ate her suffering. In common with his Hippocratic fellows, he identified the
bleeding that accompanied defloration with menstrual blood.26
The anatomy and physiology of the parthenos were elaborated in a single
Hippocratic work, Diseases of Young Girls, which, as we have it in the
earliest Greek manuscripts, is less than fifty lines long. The Hippocratic
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 47

author of the embryological Nature of the Child, portions of the gynecologi-

cal Diseases of Women I, and a treatise of general medicine known as
Diseases IV, identified works from his own hand through cross-references
from one treatise to the next.27 At Diseases of Women I 2.31 (8.22L) he
made reference to his discussion in Diseases of Young Girls claiming to have
discussed there how retained menstrual blood at times exited the body of the
parthenos more readily through her anus than her vagina. Nothing in the
short treatise we have, however, made any mention of this phenomenon.28
Thus, either this short Hippocratic treatise on the parthenos is but a frag-
ment of a once longer work by the author of Nature of the Child, Diseases
IV, and portions of Diseases of Women I, or a second, early medical writer
also composed a work dealing with diseases of young girls.
The treatise we have did describe a malady that afflicted the parthenos at
the time menses were to appear for the first time. The young girl’s senses
were deranged because the blood that accumulated in her uterus flowed out
and moved upward in her body, ‘for,’ as the author observed, ‘the blood has
yet to find its proper path of exit.’ It journeyed upward in her body, not
down and out, wreaking havoc, particularly at the centre section of her body
and the diaphragm, the area in which this Hippocratic and many others
located the organs of sensation and cognition. The misdirected blood clogged
passageways for breath; it putrefied and numbed her intelligence in the same
way as sitting still for too long and having all the blood in one’s thighs and
legs run down to one’s feet made the feet numb. In the author’s analogy, the
young girl’s mind was as useless for thinking as were one’s feet for walking,
once they had gone to sleep:

[The blood that gathered in the feet], however, goes back up very swiftly ... whenever
one stands in cold water and soaks the area above the ankles. This latter numbness is
easy to manage, for the blood flows back again speedily because of the straightness of
the vessels [in the legs], and the place in the body is not a crucial one. But blood flows
back slowly from the heart and the diaphragm, because the veins here proceed
crosswise and the place is critical for both mental aberration and madness. When
these parts themselves are filled, a chill with fever rises up. (8.466–8L)

The parthenos thus afflicted saw visions, and these persuaded her that
death was a good thing. The author knew of many young girls who had
hanged themselves, or others who had thrown themselves down wells, ‘more
women than men, for female nature is weaker and more troublesome.’ Not
only did this Hippocratic writer deny the medical efficacy of religious rituals
performed in the young girl’s behalf, but he closed by urging marriage and
pregnancy upon her as soon as possible:
 48 Ann Ellis Hanson

When the female is recovering her senses, the women dedicate to Artemis many
things, especially expensive female clothing, at the orders of the goddess’s priests.
But the women are being deceived. Release from this comes whenever there is no
impediment for the flowing out of the blood. I urge, then, that whenever young girls
suffer this kind of malady they should marry as quickly as possible. If they become
pregnant, they become healthy. If not, either at the same moment as puberty, or a
little later, she will be caught by this sickness, if not by another one. Among those
women who have regular intercourse with a man, the barren suffer these things.
(8.468–70L)

The medical writer did not explain the ‘impediment’ that was preventing
the onset of menstruation, but it was clearly not the hymen of modern
anatomy. Hippocratics did not practise systematic dissection, and many of
their notions about the anatomy, physiology, and nosology of the uterus
were little more than elaborations on popular traditions about the body.
Even the sophisticated Greek anatomists of later centuries failed to isolate
the hymen as a specific bodily part in young girls.29 I have argued elsewhere
that this Hippocratic’s ‘impediment’ was a fantasy membrane, thought to lie
at the mouth of the uterus – deep within, unseen and unseeable. Positing
such a membrane not only explained why menstrual blood, accumulating
prior to menarche, did not flow out, but also why first coitus was prophylac-
tic for the parthenos, especially in cases in which the menses had not yet
appeared spontaneously.30 Hippocratics saw the uterus as an up-turned jar,
its bottom on top and its mouth at the bottom, turned in a downward
direction.31 The uterine mouth in the mature woman learned to purse its lips
and close when its contents were to be retained but to open the lips again at
the proper time in order to release what was within. Thus, in conception the
mouth of the uterus closed to retain male seed and in gestation to hold in the
menses, for the latter were nourishment for the developing fetus; in child-
birth the mouth was forced open by the strenuous movements of the child.
It also opened monthly for the release of the menses, but closed thereafter.
Tales contemporary with Hippocratics and also from later times suggested
that even as the lower neck of the parthenos widened after first penetration,
so too did her upper neck and her voice deepened.32
Hippocratic therapy and theory viewed the transition from genderless
child to wife and mother as particularly dangerous when the process did not
progress as anticipated. Delays, whether real or imagined, made space for
medical interventions that aimed to bring about release of the menstrual
blood unable to find its proper path of exit. If the blood should remain
trapped within, Hippocratics expected both physical symptoms and mental
derangement to ensue. While the consequences of amenorrhea were dire for
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 49

all fertile women, said to be fatal after the sixth month in the gyne, the
situation was particularly acute for the parthenos because her flesh was still
firm and her inner passageways not fully opened. There was little or no
empty space in which blood might lodge harmlessly, even for a short time,
and any accumulation was likely to cause crowding and result in overheat-
ing. Genderlessness characterized the body of the Hippocratic parthenos
until growth initiated the series of changes that irreversibly transformed her
masculine body into one with wide interior passageways and porous flesh.
Virginity was physical in the sense that the body of the parthenos was
different from other bodies, and it awaited the onset of the menses, inter-
course, pregnancy, and childbirth to complete the transformation. Given the
salubriousness Hippocratic theory and practice attached to intercourse, pre-
pubescent defloration seemed more healthful for the parthenos than a de-
layed onset of menstruation. The status of parthenos was temporary, and the
sooner she became a mother, the better.

Hippocratic Data on Parthenoi: Case Histories

A case history in Epidemics V was cited above for information it gave about
the medical writer’s attendance on the pretty daughter of Nerius, who died
on the ninth day after being struck on the forehead. Although this patient
was individualized in the sense that ‘daughter of Nerius’ was her name and
‘twenty years’ her age, the medical writer’s description of her fatal illness
seems laced with current theory about the virginal body. Case histories
recorded the progress of an illness, but commonalities among the symptoms
recorded for the young girls the doctors were attending suggest that this
cadre of writers in the Epidemics tradition shared unenunciated assumptions
about the parthenos that shaped what they were observing and determined
the symptoms they recorded as worthy of note.33 They did not interpret
what they observed, but in what follows I borrow Hippocratic theory on the
parthenos, explicit in Diseases of Young Girls and echoed in Superfetation
34, to flesh out these case histories.
In addition to noting that the daughter of Nerius was a parthenos, the
author of Epidemics V mentioned that she was immediately blind and
breathless after receiving the blow to her forehead and that high fever seized
her as soon as she got home. Early on there was redness about her face; on
the seventh day of her illness the foul-smelling, reddish pus that exited
through her ear brought some relief, and she seemed better. But afterward
the high fever returned, and she became depressed and speechless, with
spasmodic trembling, paralysis of the tongue, and a fixed eye close to the
time of her death. The medical writer was apparently assuming that men-
 50 Ann Ellis Hanson

strual blood was present in her body, perhaps dislodged from her uterus by
the blow. Some displaced blood headed upward immediately, causing her to
gasp for breath and hampering her sight; her flushed face and high fever
were symptomatic of the blood’s continued presence in her head. Blood
exited from her ear in the pus that was reddish and putrefied by the seventh
day of her illness. What did not depart then remained within, impeding the
functioning of her tongue and eye as her end drew near. The pretty daughter
of Nerius died without completing the transition to wife and mother.
The author of Diseases of Women I related high fevers directly to the
accumulation of blood in the gyne – ‘her body becomes full of blood unless
some flows off, [and] she experiences pain when her flesh is full and heated’
(I 1.15, 8.12L). The fevers said to afflict the parthenos in both Diseases of
Young Girls and Superfetation 34 were also caused by accumulation of
blood, although rather than localized in spongy flesh, as was the case in the
mature woman, blood moved wherever it could discover any space at all.
Even a small amount speedily resulted in fever, because of the cramped
conditions within. The breathlessness the daughter of Nerius exhibited
marked the presence of displaced menses in passageways at the centre of her
body; her depression was caused by the blood’s putrefaction; and her subse-
quent flushed face and malfunctions of sight and speech indicated that blood
eventually reached her head.34
The medical writer of Epidemics III 17 recorded his observations in case
histories about three young girls, all suffering from the high fever brought
on by accumulation of menstrual blood. One parthenos lived in Abdera, and
during the course of her illness she menstruated for the first time (case 7,
1.268LCL). Among the symptoms he thought worth recording about her
case were: persistent redness, nausea, insomnia, deafness, delirium, and a loss
of reason. A copious nosebleed brought some relief on the seventeenth day
of her illness, as did a slight one on the twentieth; she recovered completely
on the twenty-seventh day after copious sweating, although the pains in her
feet that commenced on the twentieth day persisted afterward. Her purging
through nosebleeds and the achievement of menarche were sufficient to
bring recovery, but it was not a complete purging, as the pain in her feet
continued, occasioned by blood left behind and trapped where the pain
was.35 The second parthenos lived in Larisa and recovered on the sixth day
the doctor was observing her (case 12, 1.276–8LCL). In addition to charting
the insomnia, copious watery stools, and thin, scant urine that plagued her
on the second to fourth days, she was also delirious during the fourth night.
On the sixth day her fever broke in the midst of a chill, followed by sweating
and the appearance of her menses for the first time. Her face was flushed
throughout her illness, her eyes ached, and her head felt heavy – again
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 51

suggesting that he thought menstrual blood was at first clogging her central
trunk in its journey upward but was subsequently lodged in her head prior
to finding the proper path for evacuation. The third parthenos attended by
this author, the daughter of Euryanax, had a sore near her anus that burst on
the sixth day, and on the day following she experienced a chill and sweating
(case 6, 1.228–30LCL). Her stools were small, her urine thin and scant. On
the tenth day, she again sweated copiously; but instead of recovery, delirium
followed, and some people said the trouble was due to the fact she had eaten
grapes. From then until her death some seven days later, she was plagued by
nausea, loss of appetite, and bouts of delirium. The medical writer noted that
a rash was present throughout her illness and her throat red and painful; she
was depressed and despaired of herself. Again, the anal suppuration, the
redness and rash, and mental aberrations were symptoms expected in a
parthenos, struggling to reach maturity.
All female patients caught in an epidemic of high fever on Thasos who
were attended by the author of Epidemics I survived in greater numbers
than did the males who became ill, provided the women experienced copious
bleeding, either as menses, nosebleed, or bloody stools (I 16 and 19, 1.170
and 174LCL). A parthenos among those who took sick, the daughter of
Daitharses, experienced both nosebleed and menarche at the same moment
and speedily recovered. These Hippocratics imagined that menstrual blood,
when trapped within the female, searched for and sometimes found alternate
paths of exit from her body. The gnomic Aphorisms put the matter into
concise form: ‘When menstruation is suppressed, a flow of blood from the
nose is good’ (V 33, 4.166LCL).36
Helen King has drawn attention to the case history of the daughter of
Leonidas in Epidemics VII, for at first glance it seemed to belie Hippocratic
confidence in the salubriousness of a nosebleed whenever menses were
suppressed:

In the case of the daughter of Leonidas her menses37 rushed forward, but they were
repulsed, and, repulsed, she bled from her nose. Having bled from the nose, a change
occurred. But the doctor did not understand, and the girl-child (pais) died. (Epid. VII
123, 7.414LCL)

King was surely right to argue that what the attending doctor did not
understand was the bodily state of this girl-child, for at any given point in
the transition to womanhood her passageways were not necessarily widened
sufficiently to convey menstrual blood through the central trunk, on to the
head, and out the nose in quantity adequate to save her life. Exterior signs of
growth perhaps deceived the doctor into thinking that full pubertal develop-
 52 Ann Ellis Hanson

ment was more advanced for the daughter of Leonidas than it actually was.
After all, the capacity of her interior to manage surplus blood and dissipate
noxious accumulations into fleshy areas for benign and temporary storage
determined survival, while the fact that her breasts were beginning to
develop only guaranteed that maturation was beginning and a first spongy
locus was starting to form. The changes within were unseen and unseeable,
and while the doctor misinterpreted the nosebleed as a positive sign for
recovery, he who reported the case did understand the additional complica-
tions the body of the parthenos presented. For a doctor dealing with a young
girl, confidence in the efficacy of a nosebleed was at times unjustified, and
the exit of insufficient quantities of blood signalled death, not recovery.
The medical writer of Epidemics II also reported on a parthenos not
further identified:

[Her] right arm and left leg were paralyzed after a brief cough, not worthy of
mention. She experienced no other change, neither in her face, nor her intelligence –
at least nothing conspicuously so. She began to improve about the twentieth day. It
happened that her menses burst forth38 for her then, and perhaps it was the first
time, for she was a parthenos. (2.8, 7.32LCL)

In common with the writers of Superfetation 34 and Diseases of Young

Girls, this medical writer anticipated that complications of difficult me-
narche would appear for this young girl. He inspected her face for visible
signs of menses striving to discover alternative paths of exit – redness, a
rash, impairment of tongue or eye – but none materialized. He anticipated
mental aberrations, should blood clog breathing spaces at the centre of her
body and putrefy. But again he waited in vain, and the young girl recovered
when menstruation came on spontaneously. Despite the fact that her cough
was brief and not worthy of mention, he nonetheless felt compelled to
mention it in conjunction with the paralysis in her right arm and left leg. My
guess here is that for this Hippocratic a cough operated in much the same
way as a sneeze, functioning as a means to shake the uterus.39 In this young
girl even a mild cough was sufficient to disperse accumulated blood from the
sensitive centre of her body to her extremities, a right arm and a left leg,
causing a relatively harmless and temporary paralysis only there. The dis-
placement prevented the menses within from disrupting the sensitive areas
of perception and cognition. This parthenos exhibited no symptoms in her
face because the blood did not rise to her head, nor did she become delirious,
mentally deranged, or depressed, as he feared. Rather, around the twentieth
day her menses burst forth, initiating for her the process of breaking down
her body.
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 53

Nearly six hundred years later Galen wrote commentaries to the Hippo-
cratic Epidemics I, II, III, and VI, and to Aphorisms, and, in common with
many other ancients and moderns, he interpreted Hippocratic case histories
according to the medicine he was currently practising. His was still a medical
system based on constitutive bodily humours, but many views he attributed
to ‘Hippocrates’40 were the result of his own reinterpretations. Galen did not
write a commentary to Epidemics VII and apparently did not comment on
the case of the daughter of Leonidas, but his comments on this latter young
girl in Epidemics II, now preserved only in Arabic translation, reveal the
extent to which he silently reworked outmoded Hippocratic views, such as
that which accorded the parthenos special bodily status.41 This young girl
had, in Galen’s view, clearly reached the age for marriage but had not yet
achieved menarche. As could be expected, he went on, she developed a cough,
as all women did, ‘both parthenos and wife,’ whenever menses were sup-
pressed, for excess fluids were prone to gather in the chest. He praised
Hippocrates’ correct choice of the word katarrhexis for the ‘breaking forth’
of the menses because it conveyed the sudden force with which blocked
menses usually appeared – ‘for both young girls of an age for marriage and
women already married.’ Galen thought the bodies of both the parthenos
and the mature woman functioned in approximately the same fashion as
regards suppressed menses. This is not to say that Galen was repeating the
errors of judgment committed by the doctor who attended the daughter of
Leonidas. Rather, Galen coupled ‘young girls’ and ‘married women’ twice in
his discussion of this case history because the anatomy and physiology of
the female body he endorsed was based on systematic dissection, and more
accurate knowledge about female insides had important consequences for the
women and young girls Greek doctors of the Roman period were treating.
The medical community of the fifth and fourth centuries BC in Greece
bound female health closely to the frequency and vigorousness of her
reproductive activities, and the Hippocratics’ efforts as doctors aimed at
speeding the transition of the parthenos from child to mother. By contrast,
the Greek doctors of the Roman period, building upon the anatomical
advances of Herophilus and others in Hellenistic Alexandria, decisively
separated female health from reproduction, a separation that had already
taken place for males in the dietetic treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus.42
This is not to say that societal pressures for early socialization of young girls
for marriage and motherhood had altered significantly in the nearly six
centuries since Hippocratics wrote. In both the Greek city-states and in
Rome of the Imperial period the patriarchal regime impelled all women who
were able to take up the wifely burdens of childbearing, and these were
considerable, given the high rate of infant mortality.43 Still, medical priori-
 54 Ann Ellis Hanson

ties had also expanded, and the Greek doctors at Rome paid considerably
more attention to the general health and well-being of female patients,
medicating the person in addition to the illness or conditions that came to
them because of their gender. Soranus’s Gynecology, in particular, discussed
menarche and defloration in ways that looked to the comfort of the parthenos
as she became an adult.

Soranus, Galen, and the Parthenos at Rome

Hippocratics characterized females by their medical Otherness, but medicine

was retreating from so stark a view of gender asymmetry already by the
middle of the third century BC in the face of Herophilus’s assimilative
interpretations of the female bodies he was dissecting in Alexandria during
the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC). His decision to employ
the same nomenclature for male and female generative parts underscored
similarity, not difference, as did his judgment that the uterus was made of
the same stuff as other parts of the body.44 Dissection demonstrated that
human bodies were demonstrably more alike on the inside than Hippocratics
supposed. Doctors even began to argue whether or not female ailments and
conditions required a separate medicine, although Soranus, living and prac-
tising at Rome in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian (AD 98–138), in the
course of writing his own gynecology, agreed with those who argued that
they did.45 At the same time, Soranus also claimed that women contracted
men’s diseases, such as satyriasis (unceasing desire for intercourse, and in
the male characterized by continous erection, but in the female by a clitoris
engorged with blood) and gonorrhea (in the ancient sense, a continual flow
of seed), and he introduced such discussions with ‘as in men, so also in
women.’ Hippocratics had vacillated on the question of woman’s innate heat,
but after Aristotle’s pronouncement at the end of the fourth century BC that
females were by nature colder than males, the woman’s coldness became
canonical.46 Galen, court doctor to the emperors from Marcus Aurelius to
Septimius Severus (ca. AD 161–213), constructed a gendered thought ex-
periment that likewise underscored similarity between male and female
bodies on the inside. He compared pulses, which were, in his view, deter-
mined by innate bodily heat and, perhaps surprisingly, decided that a specific
woman under certain conditions might have more innate heat and a stronger
pulse than a particular man:

[H]ave the woman dwell in Egypt, eat hot food, exercise strenuously; have the man
dwell in Pontus, eat cold food, pass the day indoors and idle. This woman’s pulse is
greater than that man’s! (Caus. puls. III 2, 9.109K).
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 55

For Galen, environment, age, diet, and lifestyle were more important
determiners of sickness and health than gender difference.47 As a vigorous
dissector of animal bodies (pigs, oxen, pregnant goats, apes), Galen was
attracted to the similarities he saw on the inside and he provided consider-
able impetus to the notion that female organs of generation were analogous
to the male ones, albeit on the inside of the woman’s body.
Hippocratic confidence in the salubriousness of pregnancy for the parthenos
was countered by Soranus, who declared perpetual virginity healthful for
both males and females and repeated childbirth exhausting for the mother
(Gyn. I 30–3). He viewed menstruation as harmful, albeit the necessary
antecedent to pregnancy (Gyn. I 27–9). Amenorrhea was natural in young
girls and menopausal women and was likely to occur without consequence in
women of mannish appearance, in female athletes, and competitors in choral
singing, since these latter expended their surplus fluids on strenuous activi-
ties and had nothing left over for monthly purgings (Gyn. III 6–7). Should
they wish to conceive a child, however, Soranus advised those who were not
menstruating to convert to a more feminine way of life, as necessary precur-
sor to conception. He accepted the Roman view that ‘men married for the
sake of children and succession, and not for mere enjoyment’ but went on to
criticize the Roman habit of inquiring about the excellence of a prospective
bride’s lineage and fortune while, at the same time, neglecting to learn
whether she could conceive and bear a child (Gyn. I 34). He too relied on the
criteria of age and breast development to predict the approach of menarche
but urged that proper care of the young girl begin in the thirteenth year, so
as to encourage a spontaneous flow prior to defloration. This included walks,
passive exercises (such as riding in a chariot, swinging, and rocking), mas-
sage with rich oils, a daily bath, and diversions for her mind that would
promote relaxation in her body.48 When the menses were flowing for the
first time, he prescribed adequate rest, gentle but wholesome foods, and
vaginal suppositories soaked in warm oil (Gyn. I 26).
Soranus was firm in his belief that defloration should take place after
spontaneous menarche, repeating it several times, yet he still anticipated
that both events would take place about the fourteenth year, ‘for menses are
a definite sign that the uterus is able to fulfill its proper functions, one of
which ... is conception’ (Gyn. I 33). Precocious pregnancy in a womb too
small to carry its burden endangered the lives of both gravida and child.
Particularly at risk for premature conception, in his view, were parthenoi not
prudently brought up. Because they had not been taught proper control over
their appetites, novel pleasures and new experiences were enticing to them,
and they senselessly aroused premature desires in themselves with disas-
trous consequences. Soranus did not approve of abortion as means to hide an
 56 Ann Ellis Hanson

adulterous affair or preserve youthful beauty, but it was more than war-
ranted if the gravida’s uterus was too small and unable to accommodate a
growing fetus (Gyn. I 60). Although he seems not to have practised dissec-
tion, Soranus not only knew well the discoveries of earlier anatomists, but
was also a keen observer. Nonetheless, he too seemed not to know the
hymen of modern anatomy, declaring, ‘It is a mistake to suppose that a thin
membrane grows across the vagina and causes pain in defloration, or during
a violent outflow of blood at the menarche’ (Gyn. I 17).49 Such a membrane
was not found in dissection, nor, when Soranus himself inserted a probe into
the vagina of a parthenos, did he find that it met with resistance, but
penetrated deep within. He attributed the bleeding that accompanied deflo-
ration to the bursting of vessels in the vaginal wall that were holding the
vagina taut and narrow.
Galen wrote a treatise entitled Remedies Easily Prepared, but according to
Oribasius, court physician to the emperor Julian (AD 361–3), it was already
lost by his own day.50 At some point, probably subsequent to Oribasius,
three separate collections of recipes became attached to the Galenic corpus,
and although they circulated in Greek under the title Euporista, printed
editions of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries affixed Latin titles, such as
De remediis parabilibus libri III, on the mistaken assumption that this
actually was Galen’s Remedies Easily Prepared. The second book of the
treatise circulating under Galen’s name offered three recipes for vaginal
pessaries, all of which promised to make a gyne at least seem like a parthenos.51
The three recipes occurred in chapter 26 under the general heading ‘For
women’s diseases’; thirty-eight subheadings followed that ran the gamut
from aids to conception to recipes for dysmenorrhea and suppressing milk
when the infant was to be weaned. Subsection 12 bore the heading ‘So that a
woman who has been violated may appear a parthenos,’ and a prescription
followed containing plant substances (wood-cassia, dried roses, white pepper,
etc.) and oak galls, soaked for eight days in water, with ground rumex seeds
inserted as an afterthought. The other two recipes appeared in subsection 38
with the heading ‘So that the vagina does not become overly moist during
coitus,’ although this title was appropriate only for the first recipe that
extended the promise to prevent accumulation of moisture in the uterus for
the user’s entire lifetime. Six recipes in all are grouped under this last
heading, and the second and third boast that ‘she will be like a parthenos in
coitus’; the one that makes use of perfumed wool for the pessary suggested it
could be reused, if the woman so desired. The list of ingredients is short in
the latter pair, but oak galls are the principal ingredient in one, rumex seeds
in the other.52 These two ingredients contain tannins, particularly concen-
trated in the oak galls. Modern herbal medicine prescribes oak galls exter-
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 57

nally as a powerful astringent and styptic, while rumex also possesses

astringent and cleansing properties and is employed for chronic skin dis-
eases, as well as internal uses. Herbalists, for example, prescribe both for the
treatment of hemorrhoids.53
The families of Greek and Roman antiquity prized the parthenos-daugh-
ter, about to go forth as bride and representative of her family in another
man’s household.54 As Soranus suggested, it was her considerable youth and
careful upbringing that guarded her reputation and guaranteed her sexual
innocence. The prescriptions in the pseudo-Galenic Remedies Easily Pre-
pared would have temporarily dried and tightened up the vaginal wall
through their astringent properties, but their efficacy is perhaps of less
interest than the milieux in which they originated and the contexts in which
temporary simulation of virginity through medicaments seemed attractive
and perhaps even necessary. Recipes immediately following in chapter 27
made explicit claims to enhance or diminish sexual prowess, and these
perhaps suggest the prostitute community, the sex manual, and the like, as
sources of and consumers for virginity-simulating prescriptions. Still, there
is no way to know whether or not a Greek or Roman father from the
respectable classes, or the doctors he introduced into his household, sub-
jected a young daughter to such medicaments prior to her wedding night, if
there were doubts to forestall, gossip to quell.
What can be said is that recipes to simulate virginity had not previously
found a place among the written prescriptions of Greek medical writers that
have come down to us. Recipes promising to counterfeit a virginity lost did
appear in collections of recipes from late antiquity onward, perhaps reaching
their greatest number in the seventh book of the Compendium medicine of
Gilbertus Angelicus (d. ca. 1240). The fact that these same recipes were
excised from the translation of Gilbertus into the vernacular underscored
the fact that their content was yet controversial.55 In the three pseudo-
Galenic recipes from Remedies Easily Prepared, however, we are at, or near,
the beginning of the paper trail the recipes left behind them; the trail
stretched forward in time from pseudo-Galen and the fully Christianized
late Empire through the next millennium and beyond – but not backward to
the Rome of Galen’s day. At the least, it seems to me unlikely that Galen
would have been pleased to have such recipes circulating under his name.56

The medical writers of Greek and Roman antiquity afford us a glimpse of

the social world they serviced as medical professionals. The fact that they
lavished as much attention as they did on the parthenos and her transition
from genderless child and sexual innocent to wife and mother underscores
how important she was to family and society, valued for the fact that she
 58 Ann Ellis Hanson

produced the next generation of legitimate offspring. Menarche was probed

and problematized, not menopause, and, in striking contrast to contempo-
rary Western society, it was the beginning of the young girl’s fertile life that
drew medical attentions, not its passing. Young girls were early socialized to
the burdens of childbearing throughout the ancient Mediterranean world:
virtually all women married and the fertile bore babies year after year, since
nearly half of those born were likely to die before a fifth birthday. Nonethe-
less, the insistence of Hippocratic physicians in the fifth and early fourth
centuries BC that reproductive activities were essential for health in the
sexually mature woman was modified in succeeding centuries, as dissection
of human and animal bodies revealed how similar on the inside were males
and females. If intercourse and the ejection of seed were not thought salubri-
ous for the male, perhaps this was also true for the female, especially because
her body not only provided the locus in which the fetus developed, but her
body was also the nourisher of the fetus in utero and of the baby once born.
However much virginity, partheneia, was valued in the pagan family’s
nubile daughters, it was but a passing prelude to the adult responsibilities
thrust upon young girls with marriage. Men married for the sake of children
and succession.

Primary Sources

– Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum IX.72.16

Angelicus, Gilbertus. Compendium medicine. Lyon: Jacobus Sacconus 1510.
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Andernach 1821; 2nd reprint, Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Olms
1997. Greek with Latin tr.

Individual Treatises Cited from the Galenic Corpus

Caus. puls. III = Causes of pulses III (De causis pulsuum). 9.105–155K.
Comm. to Hipp. Epid. II = Commentary to Hippocrates’ Epidemics II.
Galeni In Hippocratis Epidemiarum Libros I et II (CMG V 10.1). E.
Wenkebach and F. Pfaff, eds, Leipzig and Berlin: Corpus medicorum
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Remed. II = Remedies Easily Prepared (De remediis parabilibus II).
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– Hippocrate. Robert Joly and Jacques Jouanna, eds, vols. I, II (in two parts);
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 59

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Aph. = Aphorisms I-VII (Aphorismi). 4.98–220LCL.
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462L.
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Hanson (1975) 567–84. English tr. (selection, mostly DW I).
DYG = Diseases of Young Girls (De virginum morbis). 8.466–470L.
Flemming and Hanson (1998) 248–52. Greek with English tr.
8mos. = Eight-months child (De octimestri puero) 7.436–60L.
Hippokrates. Über Achtmonatskinder (CMG I 2.1). Hermann
Grensemann, ed., Berlin: Corpus medicorum graecorum 1968. Greek
with German tr.
Epid. I–VII = Epidemics I–VII (De morbis popularibus). Epid. I and III,
1.146–286LCL; Epid II, IV, V–VII, 7LCL.
Jouanna (2000) 2–118 (Epid. V and VII). Greek with French tr.
NC = Nature of the Child (De natura pueri). 7.470–540L.
Modern editors, following Hippocratic manuscripts, divide the treatise
into two parts with separate titles, but consecutive numbering of the
chapters (Generation, chapters 1–12; Nature of the Child, chapters
13–31). NC is used here to refer to both parts of the treatise.
Joly (1970) 44–83. Greek with French tr.
Lonie (1981) 1–21. English tr. and commentary.
NW = Nature of Women (De natura muliebri). 7.312–430L.
Ippocrate. Natura della donna. Valeria Andò, ed. Milan: Rizzoli 2000.
Greek with Italian tr.
Reg. I = Regimen I (De diaeta). 4.224–294LCL.
 60 Ann Ellis Hanson

Superfet. = Superfetation (De superfetatione). 8.476–508L.

Hippokrates. Über Nachempfängnis, Geburtshilfe und
Schwangerschaftsleiden (CMG I 2.2). Cay Lienau, ed. Berlin: Corpus
medicorum graecorum 1973. Greek with German tr.
Nestorius, First Sermons (Loofs 1905).
Sappho. Sappho et Alcaeus. Eva-Marie Voigt, ed. (= V). Amsterdam:
Atenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep 1971.
David A. Campbell, ed. Sappho and Alcaeus. Cambridge MA and
London: Harvard University Press 1982. Greek Lyric I, 2–204LCL.
Soranus. Gynaeciorum libri IV, etc. (CMG IV). Johannes Ilberg, ed., Berlin:
Corpus medicorum graecorum 1927. Greek.
Soranos d’Éphèse. Maladies des Femmes I–IV. Paul Burguiére, Danielle
Gourevitch, and Yves Malinas, eds, Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1988–2000.
Greek text with French tr.
Soranus’ Gynecology. Owsei Temkin et al., eds. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press 1956. English tr. (based on Ilberg).

NOTES

1 Abbreviated terms are explained in the list of primary sources at the end of this
chapter. In the body and notes of this paper references are to volume and page
number in the Loeb Classical Library (= ‘LCL’), when available, and, when not,
to earlier editions from the nineteenth century: for the Hippocratic Corpus,
volume and page in the edition by Émile Littré (= ‘L’); for the Galenic Corpus,
volume and page in that by C.G. Kühn (= ‘K’).
2 Helen King has written extensively on the parthenos, beginning with King’s
unpublished 1985 PhD thesis at University College, London, and culminating
in her monograph Hippocrates’ Woman (1998), especially chapters 3, 4, and 10.
King (2004) carries her discussions of the diseases afflicting young girls into the
early modern period.
3 The bibliography on Greek rituals for young girls around the time of puberty
is large; for a reasonable summary, see, e.g., King (1998, 75–98); for medical
emphasis on menarche, not menopause, see Dean-Jones (1994, 105–7).
4 For Hippocratic views on the instability of female nature, not only as a fetus
in the womb, but also in full maturity, see Hanson (1992, 52–6). Hippocratics
considered a mature woman’s body more wet than that of a man, due to the
gender-specific fluids it produced, and this wetness (and weakness) is here
projected back to the female fetus in the womb.
5 Hippocratic physiology thought in terms of a system of conduits, or channels,
that conducted blood and other fluids about the body and into the major organs,
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 61

which were viewed as receptacles. Important passageways were called ‘roads’

(hodoi), and while the hodos between mouth and anus was common to all, the
hodos between nose and womb/vagina was fully operative only in the mature
woman. Smaller conduits were called phlebes, or phlebia, as here; although
phlebes and phlebia denoted ‘veins’ in later anatomical terminology, Hippocratics
did not distinguish arteries from veins, nor were they always careful to separate
nerves and tendons from blood vessels.
6 Hippocratics endorsed the notion that both parents produced ‘generating seed’
(gone), although the mother’s contribution to her offspring remained contro-
versial in the society at large; for the opinion that male seed was the sole source
of generation, see, for example, Apollo’s speech for the defence of Orestes in
Aeschylus, Eumenides 658–66 and Aristotle, Generation of Animals I 20, 727b
31–728a 21.
7 For similar statements by other Hippocratics, see also Epid. VI 1.4 (7.218LCL)
and D IV 54.3 (7.596L).
8 For Greek medical writers of pediatrics in the Roman period, see Hummel
(1999, 13–93).
9 For the age groups ‘prior to puberty’ and ‘from 14 to 42 years,’ or ‘from puberty
to 63 years,’ see Coan Prognoses 502 (5.700L).
10 NC 20.1–4 (7.506–8L).
11 E.g., DW II 127 (8.274L) and NW 3 (7.314L).
12 For DW I–III as the work of several authors, see Grensemann (1982, 1–10).
13 The Greek verb for ‘break down’ (katarrhegnunai) is also used by Greek
agricultural writers for the action of the plough as it broke up clods of earth
and readied soil for the sowing of seed; agricultural metaphors punctuated the
gynecological treatises of the Corpus – see Hanson (1992, 36–41). See also
below, n. 38.
14 That Hippocratic doctors, like the rest of their society, were unaware of uterine
contractions and the active role played by the uterus in bringing about a birth;
see Hanson (1999, 235–54) and (2004, 265–80).
15 The birthing of a male was considered the more salubrious for the mother;
see Hanson (1989, 48–9) and King (1998, 180).
16 For this advice to the gyne, DW I 37 (8.92L), 63, (8.130L); DW II 119 (8.260L),
121 (8.264L), 131 (8.280L), 134 (8.304L), 135 (8.308L), 162 (8.342L); and NW 2
(7.314L), 35 (7.378L). For this advice to the parthenos, DW II 127 (8.274L), NW
3 (7.316L), and DYG (8.468–70L, quoted below in the next section). Cf. also
Hanson (2000, 149–65).
17 E.g., Frags. 27V, 30V, 44V (marriage of Hector and Andromache).
18 Either a little-known first-century BC scholar and grammarian who com-
mented on Pindar, or the better-known third-century BC Stoic philosopher.
19 Translation by Campbell, Greek Lyric I, 1.99LCL.
 62 Ann Ellis Hanson

20 Cf. also Frag. 107V: ‘Do I still long for partheneia?’

21 For ‘virginity,’ see Campbell, Greek Lyric I, S Frag. 114 (1.139LCL), but ‘child-
hood’ in Groden (1966, 62).
22 E.g., DW I 2.26–9 (8.20L): ‘In some women, when accumulated menses are two
or three months old ... and they have fallen toward her side, they form into a
sort of tumor above the pubic area which is headless, large, and red ... Many
doctors have not recognized what kind of a thing this is and they cut it open;
they have accordingly brought their patients into danger ... The flesh has
soaked up blood because the mouth of the woman’s womb lies near her side ...
and it forms a projection because it is now full of blood. If the mouth of the
womb changes its position and extends down the vagina and if the menstrual
blood exits through the vagina, the protrusion which formed along the side
sometimes recedes.’
23 There is no single Greek term for ‘menarche’ – see King (1998, 60). Here, the
Greek word is ta horaia, ‘the things that occur at their due season,’ perhaps the
‘timelies.’ Cf. also below, n. 37.
24 Before prescribing medicaments, the author of Superfet. 34 also wrote: ‘Her
uterus is moving, and whenever it turns toward her innards, she vomits and is
feverish and out of her mind. When the uterus moves away, she is hungry,
thirsty, and very feverish.’ Although some scholars (including C. Lienau, an
editor of Superfet.) have assumed that the author was speaking about ‘uterine
suffocation,’ his language does not compel this interpretation, since nothing is
said about choking (pnix). Rather, the uterus moved toward inner organs (of
digestion) and the crowding its presence brought forced the young girl to
vomit; heat spread because the uterus’s movement released menstrual blood
into her body. Once the uterus moved away, her belly returned to normal, for
she became hungry and thirsty; her fever, however, increased, because the
blood was trapped, crowded in wherever there was a bit of space. The malady
described in the Hippocratic DYG (see below, this section) has also been inter-
preted as one of ‘uterine suffocation,’ but again this is by no means required by
the text – see King (1998, 79, 240–1), although she is tempted to see Superfet.
34 as involving suffocation, but not the DYG.
25 For uterine fumigations, see Hanson (1998a, 84–7).
26 For Hippocratic identification of the blood of defloration with menstrual blood,
see Dean-Jones (1994, 52).
27 At NC 4.3 and 15.6 (7.476L and 496L), the author appeals to his discussion of
the prophylactic benefits of menses and the dangers of amenorrhea and scanty
periods in DW I 2–4; at D IV 57.6 (7.612L), to his discussion of dropsy in
women in DW I 61; at DW I 1.3 (8.10L), to his discussion of childbirth in NC
30; at DW I 44 (8.102L) and DW I 73 (8.152-154 L), to his discussion of how
milk comes to the breasts in NC 21. In other words, his cross-references
elsewhere are accurate; see also Lonie (1981, 51–3).
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 63

28 Also unmentioned in DYG is this author’s reference to the parthenos at DW I

41.2 (8.98L), where he noted that she lived for a shorter time than did the
mature woman, should her menses, appearing for the first time, rise upward in
her body.
29 Evidence that Greeks and Romans were unaware that the hymen of modern
anatomy was the natural physical attribute of a parthenos is assembled by Sissa
(1990b, 339–61). As Sissa also pointed out, the unmarried young girl might bear
a child and still be labelled a parthenos and her child a parthenios.
30 The point is argued for more extensively in Hanson (1990, 324–30).
31 See, for example, Epid. VI 5.11 (7.258LCL) and King (1998, 34–7); for these
same notions in uterine amulets popular during the Roman period, see also
Hanson (1995, 281–99).
32 Ancient references in Armstrong and Hanson (1986, 97–100); see also Sappho,
Frag. 153V, where the parthenos was called ‘sweet-voiced.’
33 In his commentaries on the Hippocratic texts, Galen said that Epid. I and III
were prepared for publication by the great Hippocrates, but Epid. II, VI, and
perhaps IV, were notes the old man left behind at his death that were subse-
quently reworked by a son; V and VII were perhaps from the hand of a grand-
son – see Hanson (1998b, 28–35). There is little agreement as to the number of
authors involved in the Epidemics, although some books were much read in the
Roman period; see Smith (1979, 237–40), and, for a descriptive view of the
authors of Epidemics, see Smith’s Introduction to LCL 7. The case histories in
the present discussion derive from Epid. II, III, and VII, each from a different
one of Galen’s three groups, and it seems likely that different medical writers
produced them.
34 For the Hippocratic view which saw the head as an organ that, like the uterus,
attracted blood and other fluids because of its shape and similarity to cupping
instruments, see Anc. Med. 22 (1.58LCL).
35 Despite the straightness of the conduits for fluids in the legs, noted by the
author of the DYG, whatever was trapped in a toe, ‘not sufficient to receive the
sickness,’ could cause death, as was the case for Timenes’ niece in Epid. II 1.7
(7.24LCL). Cf. also the case history of Philistis, wife of Heraclides, in whom
trapped menses also resulted in fever and a flushed face (Epid. VII 120,
7.410LCL).
36 Cf. also Aph. V 32 (4.166LCL): ‘A menstrual flow cures a woman vomiting
blood.’
37 The Greek word for ‘menses’ in this instance of menarche was physis; see also
above, n. 23.
38 The Greek used the abstract noun katarrhexis, derived from the verb
katarrhegnunai, for which see above, n. 13.
39 For the gnomic statement, see Aph. V 35: ‘When a woman suffers from womby
diseases or difficult childbirth, sneezing is beneficial’ (4.166LCL). For sneezes in
 64 Ann Ellis Hanson

Hippocratic therapy for dystocia, intended to dislodge an infant experiencing

difficulties in effecting its own birthing, see DW I 68: ‘Offer [the parturient] a
sternutative: take hold of her nostrils, make her sneeze, and press her mouth
closed so that the sneeze will have maximum effect. One should also employ
shakings’ (8.142L).
40 For the most part, Galen referred to treatises in his copy of the Hippocratic
Corpus as by ‘Hippocrates’ and showed little interest in the ‘Hippocratic
Question’ (worrying about which treatises in the Corpus were by the great
Hippocrates), a question that occupied students of the Corpus until quite
recently: see Smith (1979, 31–44) and King (1998, 61–7).
41 For German translation of the Arabic, see Comm. to Hipp. Epid. II, 204
Wenkebach and Pfaff. Galen’s text of Hippocrates apparently also noted that a
paralysis in the extremities lacked the force of paralysis on the side of the
central trunk, and he also commented on this. Galen did not view the paralyzed
limbs as the site of misplaced menstrual blood dispersed by the cough, for his
sophisticated anatomy would have regarded such transfer impossible.
42 The Hippocratic conviction that a man’s regimen must be based on an aesthetic
balancing of intake of food and drink and the expenditure of the same in urine,
feces, sweat, etc., was well emphasized by Foucault (1985, 97–139).
43 For the mortality functions likely to have prevailed in the Roman Empire of
Galen’s time, see Bagnall and Frier (1994, 75–110) and Saller (1994, 12–42).
44 See von Staden (1989, 183–6 [Frag. 61] and 167–9, and also 365 [Frag. 193]),
who underscores the degree to which Herophilean anatomy demystified the
uterus.
45 Soranus recounted the debate at Gyn. III 1–5, and the list of doctors’ opinions
he quoted suggest that the debate was in full flower by the days of the
Alexandrian anatomists Herophilus and Erasistratus.
46 See Gyn. III 25, for satyriasis, and Gyn. III 45, for gonnorhea. For the Hippo-
cratic disagreement as to whether women were hotter or colder than men,
compare DW I 1.16, ‘a woman has hotter blood, and because of this she is hotter
than a man; yet if only the present surplus flows out, there is neither pain nor
heating of this blood’ (8.12L), with Reg. I 27, ‘females, inclining rather to water,
grow from the cold, wet, and soft among foods, drinks, and habits’ (4.264LCL).
For Aristotle’s pronouncement, see Generation of Animals I 19–20, 726b 31–
727a 4 and 728a 17–21.
47 For the ‘one-sex’ theory of the body, visible at times in Hippocratic gynecology,
but far more prominent from the Alexandrian anatomists onward into the early
modern period, see the summary in King (1998, 7–11).
48 As a doctor of the ‘Method,’ Soranus did not structure his medical thinking in
terms of inner bodily humours, but rather the bodily states (constricted,
 The Hippocratic Parthenos in Sickness and Health 65

relaxed, or mixed) common to all bodies; see Hanson and Green (1994,
988–1006).
49 Soranus was aware of the morbid condition atresia, in which a membrane
lacking perforation occluded the vagina and had to be excised (Gyn. III 9);
Hippocratics also seem to have recognized atresia (DW I 20, 8.58L, and DW III
223, 8.132L), on which passages, see Sissa (1990b, 354–7).
50 Oribasius, Ad Eunapium, preface 5, CMG VI 3, 317–18 Raeder. For the possibil-
ity that Galen’s own treatise has now been found in a Syriac version, see
Nutton (1995, 60).
51 Remed. II 26.12 (14.478K) and II 26.38 (14.485–6K).
52 In the first recipe: omphakitis, gall of the Quercus infectoria, and oxylapathon,
Rumex crispus; in the second, kekis, a general term for ‘oak gall,’ and, in the
third, again oxylapathon. See also Dioscorides, Materia medica II 114, for
lapathon, ‘also called oxylapathon ... [which] the Romans call rumex’; this plant
is illustrated on fol. 244 in the early sixth-century codex MS Vindob.Med.Gr. 1.
53 See Chevalier (1996, 126, 258, 302); Bown (1995, 338, 344). On oak galls, see
also Riddle (1992, 94–5).
54 Marriage contracts from the Roman province of Egypt occasionally mentioned
that the bride was a virgin (P.Stras. VIII 764.19, 109 ad; CPR I 30.15, 184 ad,
and Stud.Pal. XX 15.6, 190 ad), and so did a marriage contract from a Jewish
family in the newly constituted Roman province of Arabia (P.Bab. 18.4, 34,
128 ad). For abbreviations of papyrus editions, see Bagnall et al. (2001).
55 For the recipes to simulate virginity in the printed edition (11510), see Com-
pendium medicine fol. 300recto-a to fol. 302verso-a. I am indebted to Monica
Green for information about Gilbertus Anglicus.
56 For Galen’s complaints about treatises falsely circulating under his name, see
references in Hanson (1998b, 22–30).
 4
Why Were the Vestals Virgins? Or the
Chastity of Women and the Safety of the
Roman State
holt n. parker

[The Pontifex Maximus] was also the overseer of the holy virgins who are called
Vestals. For they ascribe to Numa also the dedication of the Vestal Virgins and
generally the care and worship of the inextinguishable fire which they guard, either
because he considered the nature of fire to be pure and uncorrupted and so entrusted
it to uncontaminated and undefiled bodies or else because he compared its fruitless-
ness and sterility to virginity. In fact, in all of Greece wherever there is an inextin-
guishable fire, as at Delphi and Athens, virgins do not have the care of it but women
who are beyond the age of marriage. (Plutarch, Numa 9.5)1

Plutarch seems puzzled. Why did the Vestals have to be virgins? The expla-
nations offered up until recently have tended to be, like Plutarch’s own,
unsatisfactory. The work of Mary Beard and Ariadne Staples’s recent From
Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins2 represent major advances in our under-
standing of the cult of the Vestals. I believe we can go even further. By
looking to analyses of similar symbolic structures in a variety of cultures,
especially in the area of witchcraft, and by drawing on the work of Maureen
J. Giovannini, René Girard, and Mary Douglas, we can offer not only an
explanation of the specific function of virginity in the cult but also at least a
partial solution to three other puzzles about the priestesses of Vesta. First,
what accounts for their unique legal status? Second, how can these women,
vital to the religious and magical functioning of the Roman state, be mur-
dered so routinely at moments of political crisis? Third, what accounts for
the odd details of those murders?
I also want to go beyond virginity to look at a wider symbolic role played
by women’s chastity. Feminine virtue was used in antiquity as a sign of the
moral health of the commonwealth as commonly as it is in some places
today.3 However, for Rome the connection was not merely a rhetorical
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 67

commonplace but a mythical and historical reality. There is a running theme4

wherein two specific charges of sexual impurity in women – violation of
virginity in the Vestals and adultery in wives – were made responsible for
danger to the state. This series of strange incidents, spanning a thousand
years of Roman history, reveals a world-view deeply rooted in sympathetic
magic, where women in their strictly limited societal roles embodied the
state, and where the inviolability and control of women were objectified as
the inviolability and control of the community.5

Previous Work

Most previous work on the Vestal Virgins has focused not on the function of
the cult but on its form. Apart from George Dumézil and a few others, little
effort has been directed at explaining the cult’s social functions and ideologi-
cal purposes.6 Instead, scholars have been absorbed in etymological specula-
tion about its putative origin in the domestic structures of the early kings of
Rome. Thus the question most often posed about the Vestals is whether they
reflected the daughters or the wives of a supposed original royal household.7
Three brief points should be made about what we may call the ‘paleonto-
logical’ approach to the study of religion. First, the preoccupation with
origins conceals a methodological bias. This search, though interesting in
itself, is firmly rooted in the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
In the sphere of ritual, that is, a rite is taken as primarily an amalgam of
earlier rites, while features that seem archaic are explained as ‘survivals’ of
an original structure. The nineteenth-century concern with evolution is
evident. Second, the search for origins or etymologies does not in itself
constitute an explanation of the god, myth, or ritual. The very fact of the
‘survival’ and the reasons for it must be explained. Projecting synchronic
facts back onto a diachronic axis simply shoves the explanation a step back.
Further, there is considerable range for error in the act of creating a historical
event or supposed circumstance out of each individual aspect of a ritual or
myth. In particular, this form of historicizing ignores the fact that a myth or
rite may not in fact reflect the ‘survival’ of anything but rather may be the
narrative or ritual recreation of what the culture assumes or wishes had
occurred.8 Third, the assumption that the origins of the cult must lie in
either the daughters of the kings or else their wives shows a desire for a
monolithic explanation for the features of the Vestals and obscures the fact
that the rituals and persons of the cult of Vesta, as in others, are
overdetermined and multivalent.
The emphasis on the putative origins of the cult has led to an obscuring of
the role of cult. Oddly enough, little emphasis had been placed on the fact that
 68 Holt N. Parker

the Vestals had to be intact virgins. The usual explanations were that their
pure state represented that of the original royal daughters who tended the
household fire before their marriage, or, among those who held that the Vestal
Virgins came from the king’s wife or wives, some kind of more generalized
sexual purity.9 The first is clearly inadequate. The emphasis of the sources and
the symbolism of the cult are not those of youth or girlish innocence but of
absolute physical virginity. Virginity as merely a characteristic of youth is
clearly inapplicable to Vestals, whose term of service, though beginning at ages
six to ten (Gell. 1.12.1), was thirty years and frequently lifelong (Dion. Hal.
1.76.3, 2.67.2). Beard rightly criticized the second explanation:

It is unacceptable special pleading to suggest that the virginity of the Vestal was
merely representative of a very generalized form of chastity, comparable to the
pudicitia of the Roman matron. Throughout all the ancient sources which deal with
the priesthood great stress is laid on the physical virginity of the women and their
total abstinence from sexual intercourse during their thirty years or more in the
college.10

It is true one needed to be sexually pure to perform many rites in both

Greek and Roman religion,11 but sexual purity and virginity are not identi-
cal, and Plutarch (Numa 9.5, quoted above) pointed out that virginity was
not everywhere required or indeed even the norm. So we may ask with
Plutarch, why virgins? If the Vestals represented the wives of the early
kings, why was not the pure flame in charge of virtuous matrons, univirae,
or widows? If the Vestals represented the original young (and hence vir-
ginal) daughters of the early kings of Rome tending the royal fire, why was
not the cult of Vesta confined to young girls?12 For an answer we must look
to the symbolic functions of the Vestal Virgins and of virginity itself.

The Virginity of the Vestals

Our understanding of the symbolic role of the Vestals was greatly advanced
by Mary Beard’s 1980 paper ‘The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins,’ in which
she carefully elucidated the fusion of aspects of the two categories of ‘virgin’
and ‘matron’ in the Vestals.13 More recently, Ariadne Staples’s From Good
Goddess to Vestal Virgins presented an insight fundamental to a correct
interpretation of their role and cult. In brief: the primary role of the Vestal
Virgin was to be an embodiment of the city and citizenry of Rome.14 I have
reached similar conclusions by a different route, that of cultural anthropol-
ogy. Staples’s work rightly returns our focus from putative origin to actual
function. This symbolic role of the absolute virginity of the Vestal Virgins
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 69

was the aspect to which the ancient texts gave the greatest prominence and
which they explicitly labelled the most important. Their embodiment of the
city of Rome is clear throughout the sources.
Whether or not the cult of Vesta originated in the household of the
Roman kings, one fact must be emphasized: from the beginning of the
historical record it was not a private but a public cult.15 The role of Vesta
herself in symbolizing Rome is abundantly clear. She was the hearth and
heart of Rome.16 She stood literally at the centre of the city and served to
bind the city together. The common hearth and the common wall together
signified the unity of Rome.17 The goddess’s official title was Vesta publica
populi Romani Quiritium.18 The historians appealed to Vesta to demon-
strate the impossibility of abandoning Rome.19 For the poets Vesta was the
metonym for Rome.20
Equally clear is the role of Vesta’s priestesses. The Vestals were ‘taken’ in a
complex ceremony, whose formula stressed their service to the Roman
people.21 The Vestals prayed for the people of Rome.22 Cicero ordained that
the Vestal Virgins guard the public hearth of the city.23 Their temple was
explicitly open to all by day, though shut to men at night.24 Their penus was
the storehouse of the state, holding not merely state documents, but also the
Palladium, the ‘guarantee of Roman power.’25 The Vestals tended the eternal
fire, whose extinction was not just unlucky, but a grave prodigy, specifically
said to presage the destruction of the city.26 Rome, said Horace, would stand
‘as long as the pontifex climbs the Capitoline beside the silent Virgin.’27
It is here that we can seek the symbolic function of the Vestal’s virginity.
Just as she embodied the city of Rome, so her unpenetrated body was a
metaphor for the unpenetrated walls of Rome. This is manifest from the
ancient sources. The powers of a Vestal were conterminous with the city
walls.28 Pliny the Elder (NH 28.13) stated: ‘We still believe that our Vestals
root to the spot fugitive slaves, if they have not yet left the city’ (cf. Dio
48.19.4). Their lives and deaths were bound by the limits of the city. Vestal
Virgins were given the honour of burial within the pomerium (Serv. Aen.
11.206), most strikingly even when they are buried alive after being convicted
of unchastity (see below). However, the Vestals’ virginity was more than
merely the symbol of the inviolability of Rome. It was also the guarantee. The
whole state depended on the state of being whole. The Vestals did not just hold
the repositories of the state; they were the repositories of the state.

Rome and Mediterranean Anthropology

The roles of women as symbolic counters in men’s codes of honour and the
special function of virginity within those codes have been a major concern in
 70 Holt N. Parker

what has come to be called ‘Mediterranean anthropology.’29 Maureen J.

Giovannini’s observations30 on the function of Woman as Sign in symboliz-
ing and mediating various aspects of the family can help us in understanding
this complex of contradictory ideas. Giovannini identified six archetypal
categories into which women were placed by the citizens of the Sicilian town
that she calls ‘Garre.’ At the centre is the pair of la Vergine (the Virgin) and
la Mamma (the Mother) representing woman in her two societally sanc-
tioned roles, unpenetrated and penetrated. Each has an anti-type: la Puttana
(the Whore) and la Madrigna (the Step- or Anti-mother). On the super-
natural level, just as la Madonna unites the beneficent aspects of woman, so
la Strega (the Witch) unites the figures of la Puttana and la Madrigna. The
honour of the family is synonymous with the chastity of its women, who,
because of their inherent vice of feminine sexual weakness, are in constant
danger of becoming whores and adulteresses.31 For la Vergine, Giovannini
notes:

Her physical intactness is also viewed as a sign that her family possesses the unity
and strength necessary to protect its patrimony ... As family member, la Vergine can
synecdochically (part for whole) convey the message that her family is a viable entity
with its boundaries intact ... la Vergine’s (and, as we shall later discover, la Puttana’s)
corporal being constitutes a kind of cognitive map for the family unit by concretely
representing the boundaries of this social group along with its internal unity.32

For ancient Rome, the cult of Vesta was the symbol for the unity of all
families. Hence Giovannini’s analysis applies not merely to the individual
units but to the Roman state as a collective. Mary Douglas’s remarks on the
use of the human body as a microcosm of the social order in various
societies, especially those with strong witchcraft beliefs, relate directly to the
symbolic value of the Vestal Virgin:

The group is likened to the human body; the orifices are to be carefully guarded to
prevent unlawful intrusions ... The most fundamental assumptions about the cos-
mos and man’s place in nature are coloured by the socially appropriate image of the
human body ... The idea of a cherished bodily form vulnerable to attack from
without tends to be transferred from one context to another. It can serve as a theory
of misfortune by pinning blame on hidden enemies of society; it can serve as a guide
to action, requiring the enemies to be unmasked and disabled ... Injustice can be
rectified merely by purging the system of internal traitors allied with outside
enemies ... Bodily symbolism in the witch fearing cosmology is endlessly rich and
varied, but always the emphasis is on valuing the boundaries, guarding the orifices,
avoiding improper mixtures.33
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 71

This same bodily symbolism, where the safety of the group is bound to
the bodily integrity of a chosen figure, is found in a number of cultures.
Turner, in a famous analysis, remarks on the Lunda-Ndembu of modern
Zambia:

The position of senior or paramount chief among the Ndembu, as in many other
African societies, is a paradoxical one, for he represents both the apex of the struc-
tured politico-legal hierarchy and the total community as an unstructured unit. He
is, symbolically, also the tribal territory itself and all its resources. Its fertility and
freedom from drought, famine, disease, and insect plagues are bound up with his
office, and with both his physical and moral condition.34

Magical Virginity

The Vestal was not merely a mode of representation. She was also a symbol
that could be manipulated. Archaic Roman religion was based on and steeped
in magical practice.35 By ‘magical practice’ I mean that technology of anal-
ogy as defined by Tambiah: ‘Magical acts ... constitute “performative” acts
by which a property is imperatively transferred to a recipient object or
person on an analogical basis.’36 Magic, since Frazer, has traditionally been
divided between the imitative and the contagious. In imitative magic the law
of similarity applies: ‘like produces like’; in contagious magic, the law of
contiguity applies: ‘objects which have been in contact, but since ceased to be
so, continue to act on each other at a distance.’37 The Vestal, who preserved
the inviolability of Rome by preserving the inviolability of her body, exem-
plifies both forms of magic and indeed shows their overlap and a certain
arbitrariness in the distinction. Imitative magic is perhaps better character-
ized as metaphoric (similia similibus): as she remained integra, so did the
city. The Vestal’s body served as the microcosm of the city.
Again, this is abundantly clear from the ancient sources. The Vestal must
be not merely a virgin but physically perfect in every respect. The potential
candidate was examined by the Pontifex Maximus to guarantee this. Both
parents must be living, and neither she nor her father emancipated, since
this would make her technically an orphan and hence imperfect.38 Her
parents’ marriage must have been perfect. Neither of them could be divorced
or ex-slaves or found to have engaged in negotia sordida. Should she even
fall sick, she must be removed from the aedes Vestae and cared for outside
the holy area by a married woman, but not a family member (Pliny 7.19.1).
Most important, as we have noted, her life and powers were circumscribed
by the walls of the city.
Contagious magic, on the other hand, is metonymic or synecdochic: ‘The
 72 Holt N. Parker

part is to the whole as the image is to the represented object.’39 The Vestal
represents not only the idealized role of Woman – a fusion of the archetypal
roles of la Vergine and la Mamma into the figure of la Madonna40 – but also
the citizen body as a whole.41 Many cities are symbolized by women. Ath-
ens, symbolized and guarded by the virgin goddess Athena, is an obvious
parallel but does not supply an explanation for the choice of a virgin female
to represent a citizen body composed of men and their dependents. Pomeroy
points towards an answer: ‘Since a virgin belongs to no man, she can
incarnate the collective, the city: she can belong to everyone.’42 This insight,
however, is incorrect in one important respect: an ordinary virgin in Roman
law does belong to a man – she belongs to her father. Accordingly, for a
virgin to incarnate the collective, she must be extraordinary. She must be
freed not only from her father but from all possible and catalogued forms of
familial tie.

Legal Status

In the past the legal status of the Vestal Virgin was not correctly conceptual-
ized, since it was approached almost entirely from a purely descriptive point
of view.43 Her unique legal status should be viewed less as a mark of respect
than as a magical function that made it possible for her to incarnate the
collective. Once the ritual and symbolic purpose of the laws is considered,
the legal status and consequences of that status become clear. Gardner
summarizes:

The oddities of her position seem rather to arise from her position as one in charge of
a worship central to the state and not belonging to any one family in the state. She
was taken out of her family, with certain legal consequences, but she did not cease to
be a woman.44

It is necessary to go further. She was taken out of her family and not
added to any other. Moreover, she was not just in charge of a worship central
to the state; she was also the embodiment of that state. She did not cease to
be a woman, but she ceased to be like any other woman.
Roman society was governed by a strict series of exogamic rules, and the
principle of Woman as Sign is more visible there than in many other
cultures.45 The exchange of women to seal interfamilial bonds and political
ties was a marked feature of Roman society.46 Thus if the Vestal Virgin were
to represent the society as a whole, she must be exterior to all families.
Because a basic principle of Roman law was that a woman always belonged
to someone, the procedure to free the Vestals from ownership was both
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 73

complex and comprehensive. The first step in the process was to exempt the
Vestal initiate from the power of her father (patria potestas). Since this was
normally accomplished by coemptio, a form of sale that merely placed her in
someone else’s power, she was specifically said not to have undergone eman-
cipation, which normally simply passed a woman into the tutela of her
nearest male relative. She was then freed from any form of tutela, but
uniquely without loss of status (capitis minutio) – that is, without falling
into the manus of any other man.47 Though she was under the formal
discipline of the Pontifex Maximus, who could scourge her for minor of-
fences, he exercised neither patria potestas nor tutela over her.48 Thus the
complex legal procedure prevented her from being an orphan while still
guaranteeing that legally and religiously she had no family. She was com-
pletely removed from her agnatic family and yet did not pass to the owner-
ship of any other family.
A Roman woman existed legally only in relation to a man.49 A woman’s
legal status was based entirely on this fact. The act of freeing a Vestal from
any man, so that she was free to incarnate all men, removed her from all
conventional classifications. Thus she was unmarried and so not a wife; a
virgin and so not a mother; she was outside patria potestas and so not
a daughter; she underwent no emancipatio, no coemptio, and so was not a
ward.50
This unique status entailed a number of consequences. Since she had no
family, she no longer inherited property; nor did she leave property to her
family if she died intestate. Rather than her property reverting to the gens,
as would be the case for an intestate woman freed by ordinary emancipation,
it reverted to the state, of which she was the embodiment.51 As a free agent,
she necessarily acquired the right to dispose of her property by will and the
right to be a witness.52 It is to this unique status that I would assign the ‘male
aspect’ that Beard and Dumézil have identified.53 Her ‘masculine’ rights and
privileges were side effects of the act of freeing her from all masculine
ownership and not necessarily constructs designed to increase the ambiguity
of her classification and thus further mark her out as sacred.54
The Vestal was thus the totem of Rome, and her sacred character derives
from her status as the embodiment of the clan.55 Her virginity is a type of
binding spell familiar from ritual observances in many cultures. A single
totemic item is invested with the safety of an individual or state. As long as it
remains unharmed, so does that which it signifies.56 For Rome there was
significantly the Palladium, which the Vestal Virgins guarded and with
which they were associated and identified as the ‘guarantee of Roman
power.’57
Thus, as long as the Vestal remained intact, so did Rome. This symbolic
 74 Holt N. Parker

function is explicitly stated. For example, a Vestal’s epitaph reads: ‘The

republic saw with good fortune day after day her exceptional discipline in
morals and most exact observance of the rituals.’58 Thus the Vestal Aemilia,
when the sacred fire went out, prayed to Vesta (Dion. Hal. 2.68.4): ‘If
anything unholy has been done by me, let the pollution of the city be
expiated by my punishment.’ Most tellingly, the Vestal Cornelia, on her way
to be buried alive by the order of Domitian, ties the safety of Rome explicitly
to her virginity and reveals the underlying magical logic: ‘Does Caesar think
that I have been unchaste, when he has conquered and triumphed while I
have been performing the rites!’59

The Sacrifice of the Vestal Virgin: A Theoretical Outline

The question now arises: how can a people sacrifice its symbol? How can the
incarnation of the state be ritually murdered? Burkert’s explanation for the
sacrifice of a virgin in his reconstruction of prehistoric ritual (and perhaps in
Greek myth) will not do. He proposes: ‘Man declines love in order to kill:
this is most graphically demonstrated in the slaughter of “the virgin” ... In
the period of preparation, maiden-sacrifice is the strongest expression of the
attempt to renounce sexuality.’60 However, there is no necessity for ‘virgin-
ity’ in a renunciation of sexuality. Further, there is nothing in the Roman
ritual of the sacrifice of the Vestal Virgin to show the connection that
Burkert proposed between maiden-sacrifice and hunting or preparation for
warfare (as distinct from the threat of external warfare). Rather, to summa-
rize what the Roman sources cited below make clear, the sacrifice of a Vestal
Virgin was the sacrifice of a scapegoat, in both the popular and the ritual
sense. For it is important to note that the sacrifice of a Vestal Virgin is a
ritual, a precisely delineated social construction.
René Girard’s careful exploration of the roles and patterns of sacrifice61
can aid in isolating elements and functions of the ritual sacrifice of the Vestal
Virgin.62 In turn, by using the society of ancient Rome as a source of
anthropological data, we can cast light on and make some corrections to
Girard’s theory. Certain features of his analysis illuminate the sacrifice of
the Vestal Virgins. A summary of his complex ideas may be presented under
the two headings of the nature of the sacrifice and the nature of the victim.
For all societies, says Girard, the greatest danger is that of unchecked
reciprocal violence.63 As the cycle of violence increases, the society reaches a
‘sacrificial crisis,’64 which can be, almost miraculously, resolved by further
violence, but of a specifically controlled type, namely sacrifice. In sacrifice,
‘society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a
“sacrificeable” victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its
own members.’65 Through sacrifice and the sacrificial victim, improper vio-
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 75

lence is channelled into proper violence. All are united in this single act,
which Girard defines as ‘the sacred.’66
For sacrifice to work in this way, it is essential that the violence be
unanimous.67 Anyone left outside is a potential avenger, a source of new
violence. As Girard says, ‘Such an attitude requires absolute faith in the guilt
of the surrogate victim.’68 To restate Girard’s thesis, no victim is ever sacri-
ficed and then found not to have been guilty.69
For Rome, we may note in the historical record the total lack of any
protest against the sacrifice of a Vestal Virgin, even from the Vestal’s fam-
ily.70 Pliny’s eyewitness account of the murder of Cornelia is revealing.
Though Pliny hated Domitian, was deeply suspicious of his motives for
attacking the Vestal, and denounced the illegality of her trial and execution,
he could not bring himself to believe that the charge was utterly without
foundation. He was able only to go as far as writing ‘I don’t know whether
she was innocent, but she certainly acted as if she were innocent.’71
Further, to eliminate the possibility of a new cycle of revenge, the sacrifi-
cial act must be sharply marked off from any non-sacred act of violence. The
nature of the sacrifice must be in some form, as Girard says, ‘disguised’: ‘A
properly conducted ritual killing is never openly linked to another bloodlet-
ting of irregular character.’72 The murder of the Vestal was a precise form of
sanctioned human sacrifice: violence broke out in a predictable pattern and
the sequence of events that led to the accusation of a Vestal was as formal-
ized as the details of her trial and execution.73
It is clear that the victims in Girard’s analysis must possess a stringent set
of qualities if their deaths are to unite the society in a unanimous act of
sacrifice. First, since ‘sacrifice is primarily an act of violence without risk of
vengeance,’ all sacrificial victims ‘are invariably distinguished from the
nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims
and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to
violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail
an act of vengeance.’74 However, the exact opposite must also be simulta-
neously true. Since the victim ‘is a substitute for all the members of the
community, offered up by the members themselves,’ the victim must also be
similar to and part of the community it represents. Therefore, says Girard,
‘the proper functioning of the sacrificial process requires not only the com-
plete separation of the sacrificial victim from those beings for whom the
victim is a substitute but also a similarity. This dual requirement can be
fulfilled only through a delicately balanced mechanism of associations.’75
Anthropological data reveal that the human victims share a common status:

[They] are either outside or on the fringes of society: prisoners, slaves, pharmakos ...
What we are dealing with, therefore, are exterior or marginal individuals, incapable
 76 Holt N. Parker

of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants. Their
status ... prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the
community.76

Following this pattern, the Vestal Virgin is both interior and exterior. She is
the child of citizens, originally confined to the upper classes, perfect to
represent the whole citizenry.77 Yet at the same time she is carefully segre-
gated, legally removed from all familial ties, as outlined above.
Likewise, the victim must be innocent – for vengeance on a guilty party
may lead to another act of vengeance – and at the same time guilty, since
only a collective belief in guilt can guarantee the necessary unanimity.78
Ritual measures are taken in order to increase the future victim’s guilt. The
victim is frequently charged with the most hideous crimes, violating the
society’s most basic taboos, notably incest.79 I use the words ‘charged with’
in two senses: both charged with sin and charged with power. One form of
charging the victims with magical power (the familiar Polynesian mana) is
to force the members of the group of potential victims to violate taboos (as
done by the kings in various African cultures). The other is its opposite: a
strict and compulsive guard on the victims, but with the purpose of holding
the victims all the more guilty for violating these taboos. Thus the Vestals
were bound by a complex series of duties and prohibitions. The lesser
violations were punishable by a scourging from the Pontifex Maximus, but
the most awesome violation, accusation of the loss of virginity, by burial
alive.

The Vestal Virgin as Victim

The Vestal Virgin thus provides a perfect example of the pharmakos, as

known from Greece, as described by Frazer, and as analysed by Girard.80
Even as she was a physically perfect priestess, so she can become a sacrifi-
cially perfect victim. However, Girard notes a striking exception in his
description of the marginality of the victim:

It is clearly legitimate to define the difference between sacrificeable and nonsacrificeable

individuals in terms of their degree of integration, but such a definition is not yet
sufficient. In many cultures women are not considered full-fledged members of their
society; yet women are never, or rarely, selected as sacrificial victims.81

This statement is contradicted not only by the analogous worlds of myth

and Greek tragedy to which Girard applies his theory, but also by a wide
range of cross-cultural data.82 He has neglected, in particular, evidence from
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 77

anthropological discussions of witchcraft (see below).83 Girard, however,

offers an argument for his exclusion of women:

There may be a simple explanation for this fact. The married woman retains her ties
with her parent’s clan even after she has become in some respects the property of her
husband and his family.84 To kill her would be to run the risk of one of the two
groups interpreting her sacrifice as an act of murder committing it to a reciprocal act
of revenge.85

Girard need not have confined himself to married women. The deaths of
women in their role as daughters are equally subject to revenge.86 To restate,
though Girard does not use these terms, the role of Woman as Sign makes
the use of Woman as Sacrifice dangerous. Women, however, are the most
obviously sacrificeable class of victims; indeed they are the perfect victims.
Better than any other group, they have been endowed with the marginality
crucial to sacrifice. Yet it appears they cannot easily be sacrificed. Girard’s
own remarks point the way to the solution that culture after culture has
found. If Woman as Sign prevents her use as victim, she must be made to be
a sign for something else; she must be exempted from vengeance and
removed completely from all social bonds.
Thus, the special status of the Vestal Virgin made it possible for her to be
this perfect victim. The sacrifice of the Vestal Virgin reveals a deeply rooted
cultural technology of the pharmakos. The magical ways of thinking are
evident from the sources. A single example may suffice. Livy (2.42.9–11)
described the sacrifice of the Vestal Oppia in 483 BC:

War with Veii then broke out and the Volsci resumed hostilities. Roman resources
were almost more than sufficient for war against an external enemy, but they were
squandered by the Romans fighting among themselves. Adding to everyone’s men-
tal anxiety were heavenly prodigies, occurring in Rome and the countryside, which
showed the anger of the gods almost daily. The prophets, after consulting first the
entrails and then the birds about both the public and the private omens, announced
that there was no other reason for the gods being so moved, except that the sacred
rites were not being performed correctly. These terrors finally resulted in the Vestal
Virgin Oppia being condemned for incestum and executed.87

Note the flat narrative tone, the logical sequence of events. Girard writes:
‘Whenever violence threatens, ritual impurity is present.’88 As Livy and the
other sources make clear, this magical law is both resultative and causal. The
logic runs: We are in trouble; therefore, the rites designed to protect us are
not being performed properly; therefore, those entrusted with those rites
 78 Holt N. Parker

have betrayed us; therefore, the way to restore safety is to sacrifice those
who have betrayed us.89

Vestal Virgin as Witch

Throughout his work, in my opinion, Girard overemphasizes the role of

internal violence at the expense of external threats. Here the Roman data
can qualify his broad formulations. As various historians ancient and mod-
ern have noted, the sacrifice of the Vestal Virgin occurs primarily in times of
‘extreme religious hysteria and political crisis.’90 The crisis, however, is not
exclusively one of internal dissension but also external military threat (see
Appendix). As an example, note the emphasis that Livy places on both
elements in his account of the sacrifice of Oppia. Girard, however, rightly
links internal and external threats by identifying an element of ‘betrayal.’
Girard writes on African magicians:

As soon as the community becomes aware of a backlash of violence, it will shift the
responsibility to those who led it into temptation, the manipulators of sacred
violence. They will be accused of having betrayed a community to which they only
half belonged, of having used against this community a power that had always been
mistrusted.91

Those who work with and are in contact with the sacred are especially
likely to become its victims. The primary notion is that of contagion. This fear
of the contaminated insider abetting an external enemy is crucial to the
thinking of many societies, and anthropological analyses of witchcraft can help
illuminate how this fear manifested itself in Rome as well. Thus Philip Mayer
in a famous article describes the witch as ‘The Traitor within the Gates’:

The figure of the witch, clearly enough, embodies those characteristics that society
specially disapproves. The values of the witch directly negate the values of society ...
However, I think that another or a more particular kind of opposition is also vitally
involved. I mean the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ ... The witch is the figure
who has turned traitor to his own group. He has secretly taken the wrong side in the
basic societal opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This is what makes him a criminal
and not only a sinner.92

These remarks cast an important light on the Vestal Virgin.93 For the Vestal
accused of incestum was held not only as a sinner but as a criminal as well,
and the worst criminal of all: a traitoress. The specifically feminine form is
significant. In undoing herself, she has undone Rome.
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 79

I say ‘undoing herself’ in the same sense as ‘got herself pregnant.’ The
entirely optional presence of a man is a feature usually unnoticed or
unremarked by both ancients and moderns. The sequence of events is incon-
sistent: misfortune results in suspicion of unchastity; unchastity implies a
seducer; one is occasionally sought and found. While we know the names of
several men executed or exiled for having had intercourse with Vestal
Virgins,94 and while such a charge clearly might be used for political pur-
poses,95 Vestals were most often tried for unchastity quite by themselves,
with no male co-defendants, or (just as revealing) the existence of male
co-respondents was not considered worthy of record.96 There is no case re-
corded of a Vestal Virgin suspected or convicted because she was pregnant or
any case where a Vestal was charged with unchastity because she had been
raped.97 Vestals always sinned willingly. It was necessary for them to do so.
In Giovannini’s analysis, just as la Vergine serves to mark the family’s
boundaries, so her anti-type, la Puttana, ‘can act as a synecdoche (part for
whole) for her family’s weakness in the face of external threats ... Also,
because she was willingly penetrated, this female figure connotes individual
disloyalty to the family. In fact, people commonly referred to such a woman
as una traditura (a traitor).’ Likewise, the supernatural Witch (la Strega),
who unites Whore and Stepmother, ‘while actualizing the penetration of
Woman,’ is called upon ‘to represent the uncontrollable forces that under-
mine family unity.’98
Thus the penetrated Vestal Virgin becomes a witch – that is, when a witch
was needed, a Vestal was deemed to have been penetrated. Here we see one
of the most frequent uses of witchcraft: to protect other value systems. The
failure of sacred ritual can be attributed to witchcraft, specifically to betrayal
by those very technicians of the sacred whose duty it was to perform the
rituals that protect society.99
This linking of betrayal and unchastity in the figure of the traitoress
(traditura) ran deep in the Roman mind. It is an intimate part of the cultural
encyclopedia. It features prominently in myth and mythical history (Horatia
and Tarpeia) as well as rhetoric and rhetorical history (Sempronia).100 It is
also enshrined in law, which allows the torture of slaves to provide evidence
against their masters only for cases of incestum and for treason.101

The Trial: Legal Status

The ambiguous legal status of the trial for incestum of the Vestal Virgin has
excited the curiosity of many commentators. Two divergent views are held:
one, that the trial of the Vestal was a purely secular procedure; the other, that
it was a purely religious matter. Koch and others have claimed that Roman
 80 Holt N. Parker

law had no procedures for dealing with offences against the gods.102 This is
not precisely correct103 but leads them, nevertheless, to view the trial of the
Vestal Virgin as a strictly criminal matter, with the Pontifex Maximus
exercising a purely judicial and paternal authority in a trial for incestum.104
Koch believed that the Vestal was held guilty of incest (in the English sense,
German Blutschande) since all Romans were somehow the brothers of the
Vestal.105 He then likened it to a trial by a father for a daughter’s adultery.
Koch, however, misunderstood the very nature of the term incestum. Incestum
was not just ‘incest,’ nor was it the same as stuprum (sexual defilement,
which covers adultery and rape).106 Both familial incest and the Vestal’s
incestum were types of a specific genus of un-chastity, united by the fact that
each involved, unlike stuprum, not just legal but religious consequences, and
so danger to the state as a whole.107 Likewise, the trial of a wife accused of
adultery before the family tribunal and the trial of a Vestal accused of incestum
before the entire pontifical college differed in numerous aspects, most impor-
tantly in the unique specification of the Vestal’s death by being buried alive.108
Wissowa and others, noting the obvious ritual significance of the trial and
punishment of a Vestal, argued that they were not criminal procedures at all
but the purely religious matter of the discovery and purification of a
prodigium (procuratio prodigiorum).109 Cornell objects that the unchastity
of a Vestal was not in itself a prodigium, but a crime that a series of prodigia
served to disclose.110 This is not quite correct. Rather, it is the case that
prodigies give rise to prodigies.111 The accused Vestal shared with other
prodigia the essential feature of pollution.112 She was a contradiction in
terms, a penetrated virgin, the impure pure, and so a miasma. Like a her-
maphrodite, she crossed boundaries that must not be crossed, and so she
must be removed and destroyed.113 The details of her execution were those
of the expiation of a prodigy.
Again, each single explanation is inadequate. The crime of the Vestal was
neither against the gods alone nor against the Pontifex Maximus alone. The
trial and execution of the Vestal Virgin was unique because it was simulta-
neously both a religious rite to drive out the pollution of incestum and a
judicial rite for the punishment of treason.114 The penetrated virgin was a
monster and so must be expiated as a prodigium. Yet she sinned willingly
and so was a traitor.115 The trial therefore had two corresponding functions.
First, the trial guaranteed the unanimity of the sacrifice, the ‘absolute faith
in the guilt of the surrogate victim.’116 It separated the Vestal Virgin from
the community and increased the sacrificially necessary guilt. She was made
responsible for all the evils that occurred in the time of crisis, especially
sterility of women and diseases of cattle – common witchcraft charges.117
Second, the trial served as the disguise necessary to the proper functioning
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 81

of the sacred. The Greek and Latin sources themselves carefully distin-
guished between the execution of the Vestals in 215 and 113 B.C. and the
sacrifice of the two Greeks and two Gauls along with them (see Appendix).
The disguise has worked extraordinarily well. Pliny is not the only one to be
unable to convince himself of the possibility of wrongful conviction. Mod-
ern authors commenting on the historical texts hold to an oddly naive and
credulous style of reporting. The trials and executions of the Vestals are
never referred to as – what they so palpably are – human sacrifice.118

Execution and Burial: The Vestal as Prodigium,

Pharmakos, and Devotio

As Prodigium

The execution of the Vestal followed the same magical and religious logic as
the expiation of a prodigium. In each case the first principle was to remove
all traces of the prodigium.119 Thus two oxen that had climbed up the stairs
to the roof of a block of flats were burned alive and their ashes scattered in
the Tiber (Livy 36.37.2). A person who had changed sex is said by Pliny the
Elder to have been left on a desert island (Hist. Nat. 7.36). A hermaphrodite
was sealed alive in a chest and set adrift at sea.120 Cornell rightly compares
the hermaphrodite with the case of M. Atilius, who was convicted of reveal-
ing parts of the Sibylline books on the testimony of a slave, sealed in a sack,
and thrown alive into the sea: ‘The ritual purpose of [this] culleus is clearly
to remove all trace of an unholy and polluting object.’121 The goal, however,
of such rituals is not only to remove the polluting presence of a prodigium,
but to do so without incurring that pollution. Thus the prodigium is burned
or abandoned alive. Death is left up to a natural force and no one is person-
ally responsible for the death and so tainted. No one, therefore, is the object
of a further act of vengeance for that death. Girard explains the mechanism
in these terms:

It is best, therefore, to arrange matters so that nobody, except perhaps the culprit
himself, is responsible for his death, so that nobody is obliged to raise a finger
against him. He may be abandoned without provisions in mid-ocean, or stranded on
top of a mountain, or forced to hurl himself from a cliff ... the object is to achieve a
radically new type of violence, truly decisive and self-contained.122

Thus the details of the Vestal’s execution. She was uniquely buried alive, yet
provided with a small amount of food, which Plutarch explicitly said was
done to prevent the death of a sacred person from being attributable to
 82 Holt N. Parker

anyone but herself (Quaest. Rom. 96, Numa 10). The execution of a Vestal
was in itself her trial by ordeal. If she were pure, Vesta would no doubt
rescue her. Since the goddess never did, the Vestal’s guilt was proved.123

As Pharmakos

The Vestal Virgin was the symbol of the city, specially set apart in order to
incarnate the impregnable boundaries of Rome. When Rome was subject to
violence, it was because the Vestal had been violated. Yet it was this very
status that made it possible for her to be used as a witch figure whose
sacrifice averted the anger of the gods. She could become a pharmakos.124
Like the pharmakos, she was a ritually pure victim. Seneca (Cont. 4.2)
explicitly compared the physical perfection of the sacrificing priest to the
physical perfection of the sacrificial victim. Yet we hear of no examination to
determine a loss of virginity, apart from the trial by ordeal of burial alive. To
have definite medical evidence one way or the other would destroy that
precarious balance that Girard points out, since the victim must be simulta-
neously pure and yet guilty. Like the pharmakos, she was paraded through
the town in order ‘to absorb all the noxious influences that may be abroad.’125
She partook therefore of the dual nature of the pharmakos, even as
pharmakon has a dual sense. The ritual victim is both disease and cure. Dion.
Hal. 9.40.1 (on the murder of Urbina in 472) makes the mechanism clear:
once the Vestal was buried alive, the plague that had afflicted the women
with sterility and miscarriages ceased (again, note the standard association
of witchcraft with plague).

As Devotio

The Vestal Virgin’s status as pharmakos means that after her execution, she
was paradoxically a protection to the city. She was a prodigy: sacred before as
Virgin and Mother, she was still sacred (that is crossing category boundaries)
when defiled, as both penetrated and unpenetrated. Like Oedipus, the pres-
ence of her body helped guard the very city that she was held to have
betrayed. This explains the fact that not only were the bodies of Vestals
ordinarily given the honour of burial inside the city walls, but even Vestals
found guilty of incestum were buried alive within the pomerium. Most
important, this explains the fact that yearly sacrifices were made on the now
holy site of the burial, the campus sceleratus.126 Plutarch expressed aston-
ishment that the site of the burial of a traitoress should receive yearly
sacrifices. Only the Vestal’s status as pharmakos can explain this.
The Vestal Virgin was thus the most magically effective form of devotio.127
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 83

Just as the Roman general could devote any soldier from the army as a
substitute for himself, and as a representative of the army and the Roman
people as a whole, so the Vestal Virgin was devoted as sacrifice for the
Roman people to expiate the anger of the gods.128 Indeed, only comparison
with the devotio explains the fact that the Vestal was buried alive. The
standard punishment for both treason and incest was to be thrown off the
Tarpeian rock.129 However, if someone survived after being made an invol-
untary devotio, an image had to be buried seven or more feet deep and the
spot was declared sacred (Livy 8.10.2). The Vestal was thus an image of the
Roman people and a devotio for them.

Death and the Matrons

The Vestal Virgin functioned as Sign, Stranger, and Sacrifice. She was the
Sign for the Roman people, incarnating the collective. Yet in order to serve as
the totem of Rome, she was made a Stranger, removed from all familial
ties. This combination made her the ideal Sacrifice: both interior and
exterior, she could serve as prodigium, pharmakos, and devotio to expiate
and protect the city.
These uses of women were not confined to the Vestal Virgins. Rather,
Roman society reveals a deep misogyny, erupting at times of crisis into
murderous fear directed against its own matrons, against women in their
roles as wives and as mothers.
Again, the logic of sympathetic magic is evident. The emphasis is on the
element of control. Even for the Vestal Virgins, the sources are emphatic that
although the Vestals no longer belonged to any man, they were still under
the discipline of the Pontifex Maximus, whose punishments extended to
beatings for minor infractions and to execution for incestum. To control
women and their sexuality was to control the state. As the state escaped
control, among the omens was the escape of women from proper male
control. The danger to the Urbs could only be warded off by the punishment
of women and the subsequent foundation of public cults of chastity with
admonitory and apotropaic functions.130 Again this was a common ploy of
rhetoric and is reflected in a number of historical or quasi-historical events
(see Appendix for the sources).
As in the case of the murder of the Vestals, these outbreaks of witch-hunts
against the matrons of Rome cluster around times of external threat and
internal danger. Thus in 491 BCE, the cult of Fortuna Muliebris was founded,
open only to univirae, celebrating the salvation of Rome by the mother and
wife of Coriolanus. In 331, a year of plague, twenty patrician wives were
charged with a city-wide poisoning conspiracy.131 The women were forced to
 84 Holt N. Parker

drink the drugs that they claimed were beneficial and of course died – an
obvious trial by ordeal.132 A further 170 matrons were executed as a result of
the subsequent investigation.133 In 296, the cult of Plebeian Chastity was
founded.134 In the following year an unknown number of matrons were
found guilty of adultery, fined, and the money used to build the temple of
Venus Obsequens as a warning to adulteresses.135 In 215, following the
disaster at Cannae, the Oppian law was passed, the temple of Venus Verticordia
dedicated, and the Vestal Virgins Floronia and Opimia executed, together
with more explicit human sacrifice.136 In 213, there was a suppression of
foreign cults and an unspecified number of wives exiled for adultery.137 In
204, there was the trial by ordeal of Claudia Quinta, charged with adul-
tery.138 In 186, the Bacchanalia crisis erupted, when unknown numbers (in
the thousands) of women were executed by family tribunal or the state.139 In
184, there was a further series of poisoning trials, including both men and
women.140 In 180, Hostilia Quarta was condemned for poisoning her
husband in order to advance her son by an earlier marriage, while in Rome
and environs three thousand people were found guilty of poisoning.141 In
154, Publilia and Licinia were accused of poisoning their husbands, tried by
family tribunals, and strangled.142 In 113, following the condemnation
and execution of the Vestal Virgins, the temple of Venus Verticordia was
rededicated.143
Two questions arise: Why was this fear directed against matrons, women
at the centre of society, rather than solely against the old, the widowed, the
unprotected, or other societally marginal women, as in the European witch
craze?144 And why was the charge of adultery the expression of that fear?
These eruptions of rage against women reveal a profound fear at the core of
Roman society. In brief, the role of Woman as Sign has led to the role of
Woman as Stranger: the very interchangeability and exchangeability on
which Rome was based necessitated that a woman still be attached to, and a
member of, her father’s family for her to have value as an exchange.145 As a
result, she was still a stranger in her marriage family and feared as a
stranger, that is, as a potential traitoress to her new family, as a potential
witch to her husband, and as poisoner of his children.146
This fear, though best known to folklore as centring on the figure of the
step-mother, was not confined to her. Rather, since for Rome the children
were the husband’s, both legally and biologically, all mothers were step-
mothers, fostering another’s children.147 Anthropological data from a vari-
ety of cultures demonstrate the way in which accusations of witchcraft are
frequent against brides brought into virilocal or patrilineal villages.148 For
Rome a single example may serve to illustrate this nexus of adultery,
poisoning, and betrayal. According to Plutarch (Rom. 22.3), the laws of
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 85

Romulus specified that a husband may divorce his wife only for poisoning
his children, counterfeiting his keys, or adultery.149
This very marginality of women, as we have seen, makes them the perfect
victims. In times of panic, the society can easily be restored to health by the
sacrifice, exile, or punishment of wives, who are central to the family, yet not
fully members of it; who are necessary to produce children, yet expendable;
who are, in short, human but less than human.150 Yet why do Girard’s
objections to women as the ideal sacrificial victim not apply? The execution
of a wife would appear to be fraught with the dangers of reciprocal violence
from either her birth family or her marriage family that Girard noted. Here
we can see the role that the charge of adultery played. Adultery of a wife was
the betrayal of all her male relatives, both by birth and by marriage. Only
for adultery did both husband and father have the right, indeed the duty, to
kill a matron. Only the charge of adultery could sever a woman from both
her agnatic and her marriage families.151
The list in the Appendix makes clear the prevalence of the theme of
conspiracy. We hear not of individual women put on trial, but masses. We
are told of monstrous women acting not alone, but in concert, and not
merely with adulterers, but more terrifyingly with the other outsiders, with
slaves and foreigners, and most terrifyingly with each other. They formed an
anti-society, an underground where women were adulterous and poisoned
their husbands, even their children. They created a witch-world whose
values were distorted parodies of the values of patriarchal society: women as
active, rather than passive; as sexual subjects, rather than sexual objects; as
murderers, rather than victims.
Thus the magical and liminal functions of women were not confined to
the Vestal Virgins. Female sexuality under male control was the basis of and
the paradigm for keeping society under control. Yet in times of crisis, the
society turned on those elements which it feared would threaten social
stability, the very categories it created in order to have stability at all. The
unpenetrated virgin and the well-regulated wife both embodied the city, in
the symbolic universes of sympathetic magic and ideological praxis.

Appendix: Chronology

c. 750 BCE (traditional): Vestal Tarpeia. Only three sources call her a Vestal:
Varro LL 5.41, Prop. 4.4, Plut. Numa 10.1. The rest merely label her
virgo or parthenos: Livy 1.11.5–9; Ovid F. 1.261–2; Dion. Hal. 2.38
(citing Piso, Fabius, Cincius); Val. Max. 9.6.1; Plut. Rom. 17–18.1 (citing
Juba, Sulpicius Galba, Simylus, Antigonus of Carystus); Festus 496L
(464L, frg.).
 86 Holt N. Parker

c. 616–579 (traditional): Vestal Pinaria (under Tarquin Priscus). Dion. Hal.

3.67.3, Zonar. 7.8 (no name).
491: Foundation of Fortuna Muliebris, open only to univirae (widows and
others excluded since they were unlucky: Dion. Hal. 8.56.4; Tert. Monog.
17). Livy 2.40.12; Festus 282L; De Vir. Ill. 19; Val. Max. 1.8.4, 5.2.1, 4.1;
App. 2.5; Plut. Cor. 1.2, 4.3–4, 34–6.
483: Vestal Oppia (during the Volscian War, with signs of ‘divine anger’).
Livy 2.42.11; Dion. Hal. 8.89.4 (Opimia); Oros. 2.8.13 (Popilia); Euseb.
2.101 (Pompilia).
472: Vestal Orbinia (during a year of plague which caused miscarriages).
Dion. Hal. 9.40.3.
420: Vestal Postumia (spoke and dressed too freely; acquitted). Livy
4.44.11; Plut. Mor. 89ff. (Pont. Max.: Sp. Minucius).
337: Vestal Minucia (same charge as Postumia; condemned). Livy 8.15.7–8
(RE Minucius 68), Per. 8; Hieron. Adv. Iovinian. 1.41; Oros. 3.9.5. Cf.
Hell. Oxy. (P. Oxy. 12. col. iii, 33–7 = FGrH 255, 1155.6–8) under
Olympiad 111, Year 1 (= 336 BCE), which mentions plural Vestals.
331 (a year of plague): 20 patrician wives executed for a poisoning con-
spiracy. Further 170 matrons subsequently executed. Livy 8.18 (170),
Val. Max. 2.5.3 (170), Oros. 3.10 (370).
296: The cult of Plebeian Chastity founded. Livy 10.23; Prop. 2.6.25.
295: Matrons found guilt of adultery, fined and the money used to build
the temple of Venus Obsequens. Livy 10.31.9.
275: Vestal Sextilia. Livy Per. 14; Oros. 4.2.8.
266: Vestal Caparronia (plague). Oros. 4.5.6–9.
c. 230: Vestal Tuccia. Livy Per. 20: Tuccia, virgo vestalis, incesti damnata est;
all others know her as proven innocent by the trial of the sieve: Dion.
Hal. 2.69; Val. Max. 8.1 abs. 5; Pliny HN 28.12; also Aug. Civ. Dei 10.16.
228: Sacrifice of two Gauls and two Greeks for the first time; in the Forum
Boarium.
215: (following Cannae) Vestals Floronia and Opimia.
a) One Vestal executed, the other commits suicide, together with more
explicit human sacrifices. Livy 22.57.2, Per. 22; Plut. Fab. 18.3 (no
names).
b) The Oppian law is passed. Livy 26.36, Tac. Ann. 3.34, Val. Max. 9.1.3,
Oros. 4.20.14, Zonar. 9.17.1.
c) The temple of Venus Verticordia dedicated. Val. Max. 8.15.12, Pliny
NH 7.180.
213: Wives exiled for adultery. Livy 25.2.9–10.
207: Lightning strikes Temple of Juno (among other prodigies). Matrons
summoned and fined. The occasion of Livius Andronicus’s hymn. Livy
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 87

27.37.8–10.
206: Sacred fire goes out; Vestal scourged by Pont. Max. P. Licinius. Livy
28.11.6.
204: Trial of Claudia Quinta. Livy 29.14.12; Ov. F. 4.305f.; Lactant. Inst. Div.
2.7, App. Hann. 56.
186: Bacchanalia suppressed; women are executed by family tribunal or the
state. Livy 39.8–18.
184: Poisoning trials involving both men and women. Livy 39.41.5–6.
180: a) Trial and execution of Hostilia Quarta for poisoning husband C.
Calpurnia Piso (cos. 180) in favour of her son from a previous marriage,
A. Fulvius Flaccus. Livy 40.37.1–7 (184: Hell. Oxy. 39).
b) 3000 people found guilty of poisoning. Livy 40.43.2–3.
178: Vestal Aemilia: fire went out, and eventual miracle proving her (or her
disciple’s) innocence. Dion Hal. 2.68.3–5; Val. Max. 1.1.7. Cf. Livy Per. 41,
Obseq. 8.
154: Publilia and Licinia accused of poisoning their husbands, tried by
family tribunals, and executed by strangling. Livy Per. 48, Val. Max.
6.3.8; see Licinius 178, RE XIII.196.
114 (Dec.): (a) Helvia, a girl, blown up by lightning.
(b) Vestal Aemilia condemned (16 Dec.), but apparently not executed
immediately; Saturnalia intervened (17 Dec.); Licinia tried (18 Dec.) but
found innocent.
113: (a) The other two Vestals, Licinia and Marcia, condemned, again with
more explicit human sacrifice.
(b) The temple of Venus Verticordia rededicated.
Macr. Sat. 1.10.5 (citing Fenestella, our source for the dates); Dio 26 (frg.
87); Ascon. Milo 45–6 (§32) Clark; Oros. 5.15.20–2; Plut. QR 83; Obseq.
37; Livy Per. 63; cf. Cic. Nat. Deor. 3.74. For Venus Verticordia: Val. Max.
8.15.12; Ov. F. 4.157–60. (Val. Max. 3.7.9, 6.8.1, cited by MRR I.536 and
others, concern a vague charge of incestum against the orator M.
Antonius.)
73: (a) Accusations against Licinia (Licinius 185, RE XIII 498) for inter-
course with Crassus (charge brought by Plotius: see MRR II.114). Plut.
Crass.1.2, Mor. 89e.
(b) Accusations against Fabia for intercourse with Catiline. Cic. Cat. 3.9,
Brut. 236: Sal. Cat. 15.1; Plut. Cat. Min. 19.3; Oros. 6.3.1.
83 CE: Trials of the Vestals by Domitian: Oculata, Varronilla, Cornelia.
According to Suetonius, Oculata and Varronilla were allowed to choose
the methods of their deaths; their lovers banished. Chief Vestal, Cornelia,
buried alive; her lovers beaten to death, with the exception of one ex-
praetor who was exiled. According to Pliny, Cornelia buried alive; her
 88 Holt N. Parker

(possible) lover, Licinianus, exiled; other accused lover, Celer, scourged.

According to Dio, many Vestals (no names) put to death, but not by
being buried alive. Suet. Dom. 8.3-5; Plin. Ep. 4.11; Dio 67.3.
213: Caracalla said to have raped Clodia Laeta; she was buried alive,
protesting her innocence; Aurelia Severa and Pomponia Rufina buried
alive; Cannutia Crescentia committed suicide. Dio 77.16, Herod. 4.6.
219: Elagabulus ‘lives with’ the Vestal (Iulia) Aquilia Severa (Dio 77
[78].16); incestum (SHA Ant. Elag. 6.6-8). His marriage to her is known
only from coins: see PW Iulius (Severa) 557. Dio 77 [78].16, SHA Ant.
Elag. 6.6–8, Herod. 5.6.2, Zonar. 12.14.
Late 4th cent. (c. 390): Incestum of Primigenia, Vestal at Alba, with a
certain Maximus. Punished ‘in the custom and institution of our ances-
tors.’ Symm. Ep. 9.147–8.

NOTES

This paper is a slightly revised version of ‘Why Were the Vestals Virgins? Or The
Chastity of Women and the Safety of the Roman State,’ American Journal of
Philology 125 (2004) 563–601, and is reprinted with the permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press. Versions of this paper have been previously delivered at
APA 1988 (Baltimore); University of Arizona, March 1989; Miami University,
April 1992; Vassar College, March 1993; and at the conference ‘Virginity Revisited,’
University of Western Ontario, October 1998.

1 Cf. Dion. Hal. 2.66.1.

2 Staples (1998).
3 For example, Aristotle points to the luxury of Spartan women as revealing an
essential weakness in their constitution: Pol. 2.6.5–11 (1269b–70a). Cf. Ath.
12.517. For Roman examples: Juv. 6, Livy 1.57.6 (Roman vs. Etruscan), Tac.
Germ. 19. See Pomeroy (1975, 211–12). Modern parallels are discussed later in
this article.
4 In the anthropological sense as defined by Turner (1985, 57): ‘a postulate or
position ... usually controlling behavior or stimulating activity, which is tacitly
approved or openly promoted.’
5 An Appendix lists the chronology and sources.
6 For criticism of previous work, see Dumézil (1970, 311–26); Beard (1980, esp.
15–16) and Beard (1995) (a self-criticism); Staples (1998, 135–8, and 182 n. 13
for some of Beard’s previous positions).
7 Beard (1995, 167).
8 This idea of a ‘creative era,’ familiar from the Australian Aborigines’ ‘dream
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 89

time,’ has found its principal proponent in Eliade (1954) and (1961). For a brief
outline and criticism see Kirk (1974, 63–6). For its application to the status of
women in various societies and myths, see Bamberger (1974).
9 For the first idea, see Hommel (1972, 403–5, 415–17); for the second, see Guizzi
(1968, 113).
10 Beard (1980, 15–16).
11 See Rose (1926, 442–3), who relates the virginity of the Vestals to this notion.
12 Cf. the kanephoroi for Athena, or the arktoi for Artemis Brauronia (Thuc.
6.56–8, Arist. Const. Athens 18, Ar. Lys. 641–5).
13 One of the purposes of this paper is to follow Beard’s recently expressed desire
(1995) to see how Vestal virginity functioned within the play of gender at
Rome. Her wish to subject these categories themselves to analysis is a major
concern of most feminist anthropology. For cross-cultural examples, see below.
14 Staples (1998, 129–30, 135, 137, 143).
15 As Brelich (1949, 9) points out, ‘We know nothing of a cult of Vesta that is
older than the public Roman cult, whether it is at Rome or elsewhere’; cf.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1931, 1: 158); so too Koch (1958, 1762). The cult of
Vesta was sacra publica, rites performed for the Roman people as a whole,
rather than sacra privata, private or household rites. Further features of public
cult are that the temples or buildings stood on public land that had been made
sacred (locus sacer) by the Roman people (or later the emperor) and that the
cult was funded from the state treasury. For this distinction, see Beard, North,
and Price (1998, 251); Rüpke (2001, 26–31).
16 Dumézil (1970, 1: 315): ‘The continuous fire of the aedes Vestae, the ignis
Vestae, is indeed the hearth of Rome, and hence one of the guarantees of the
city’s being rooted in earth, of its permanence in history.’ Cf. Koch (1958, 1737).
17 Dion. Hal. 2.66.1; Wissowa (1925, 247–53).
18 See Wissowa (1912, 158) and (1925, 247–8); Koch (1958, 1766) for examples.
19 E.g., Livy 5.52.6–7.
20 Hor. Odes 3.5.11–12; Verg. A. 1.292.
21 Gell. NA 1.12.14: ‘sacerdotem Vestalem, quae sacra faciat, quae ius siet
sacerdotem Vestalem facere pro populo Romano Quiritibus’ (‘As a priestess
of Vesta, to perform the rites that it is right for a priestess of Vesta to perform
for the Roman people, the citizens’).
22 Cic. Font. 48, Hor. Odes 1.2.26–8, Gell. NA 1.12.14, Symm. Ep. 10.3.14, Cic.
Haur. 37: ‘pro populo romano Quiritibus.’ Cf. ‘Expositio Totius Mundi’ in
Geographi Latini Minores, ed. A. Riese (1878; rpt. 1964), 120.12–13: ‘quae sacra
deorum pro salute, civitatis secundum antiquorum morem perficiunt’ (dating to
c. 350–3 CE, ibid. xxx).
23 Leg. 2.8.19–9.22.
24 Dion. Hal. 2.66.5, Lact. Inst. 3.20.4, cf. Ov. Fasti 6.254.
 90 Holt N. Parker

25 pignus imperii Romani: Fest. 296L; see Wissowa (1912, 159). Livy 28.11, Serv.
Aen. 7.188. Porcius Latro (Sen. Cont. 1.3.1) also called Vesta the Romani
imperii pignus.
26 Dion. Hal. 2.67.5.
27 Odes 3.30.8–9: ‘dum Capitolinum / scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex.’
28 So rightly Swartz (1941, 42 and n. 148); Koch (1958, 1735–6). Cf. Dion. Hal.
2.66.1.
29 See Peristiany (1965), Schneider (1971), Schneider and Schneider (1976), Davis
(1977), Pitt-Rivers (1977, esp. 126–71), Brandes (1980), Gilmore (1987). For
critical surveys, see Brandes (1987), Giovannini (1987).
30 Giovaninni (1981).
31 The fear of women’s unquenchable lust is of course an ancient one; see, e.g.,
Hes. WD 695–705, Theog. 590–612; for two catalogues, see Prop. 3.19, Ovid AA
1.275–342. For a Mediterranean anthropological perspective, see also Mernissi
(1975, 4, 10, 16); Fallers and Fallers (1976, 258–9).
32 Giovaninni (1981, 412). See also the pioneering analysis of Hastrup (1978).
This symbolism is not, of course, confined to Mediterranean societies. A well-
known example is the Samoan taupou (taupo) described by Mead and others.
The taupou was a girl of high rank whose virginity was religiously preserved
in order to exchange her in marriage with another village (the system was
already passing in Mead’s day). ‘The prestige of the village is inextricably
bound up with the high repute of the taupo and few young men in the village
would dare to be her lovers. Marriage to them is out of the question, and their
companions would revile them as traitors rather than envy them such doubtful
distinction’ Mead (1928, 100). For later treatments (and the controversy
engendered), see Holmes (1987, 79–80, 97, 100–1); Shankman (1996).
33 Douglas (1970, viii–ix).
34 Turner (1969, 98).
35 See, inter alia, Fowler (1922, 47–67).
36 Tambiah (1985, 60, drawing on Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962).
37 Frazer (1911, 1: 52).
38 Gell. NA 1.12, Gaius 1.133, Fronto 149 (Naber); cf. Sen. Cont. 1.2. See Gardner
(1986, 22), Staples (1998, 138–40). This does not appear to be the case for all
priests: see Morgan (1974); but cf. Sen. Cont. 4.2, Dio. Hal. 2.21.3, Plut. QR 73;
Wissowa (1912, 491 n. 3).
39 Mauss (1972, 12). Cf. Giovannini’s remarks on la Virgine as synecdoche for the
family, quoted above.
40 Cf. the analyses of Beard (1980) and Cornell (1981, 27); cf. Giovannini (1981,
416).
41 Staples (1998, 130, 143).
42 Pomeroy (1975, 210).
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 91

43 For a full description, see Guizzi (1968, 159–200). My analysis differs from that
offered by Staples (1998, 138–43).
44 Gardner (1986, 25). Cf. Hallett (1984, 126–7), though I do not accept the
suggestion that the lack of patria potestas and tutela is a regal survival.
45 See Cowie (1978) and the succinct statement by Arthur (1984?, 24).
46 The anthropological idea of the exchange of women (first articulated by Lévi-
Strauss 1949/1969) has had a profound effect on feminist anthropology: Rubin
(1975), Lerner (1986, 46–9); Strathern (1988, esp. 311–16); [Joplin] Klindienst
(1991, 40–2); and literary theory: Irigaray (1985). It has had little impact on
Roman studies, where exchange is viewed narrowly in terms of ‘politics.’ Dixon
(1992, 42–3) rightly draws attention to the suspicion that arises from the ex-
change of women but explains their marginality primarily in economic terms.
47 XII Tables apud Gaius 1.144–5, 3.114; Paul. 70; Gell. NA 1.12.9; Plut. Numa 10;
cf. Ambr. De virg. 1.4.15, Ep. 1.18.11.
48 Plut. Numa 9–10, Dio. Hal. 2.67.3, Livy 28.11.6, Obsequ. 8, Fest. 94L, Lyd. de
mens. frg. 6 (180.4W). For discussions see Koch (1958, 1741–2); Guizzi (1968,
113, 143–4); Mommsen (1887, 2: 54–7) and (1899, 18–20, 21 n. 2); Cornell
(1981, 30); Staples (1998, 152, 183 n. 39); contra Wissowa (1912, 158 n. 7).
49 Gardner (1986, 5–80) for an overview of the law of status.
50 This is not to say that despite her legal and religious status, a Vestal would not
have felt emotionally part of her birth family, still tied by affective bonds to
father, mother, and siblings, or that she could not be acted upon as a member of
that family, both by friends (cf. Cic. Font. 26–8), and political enemies (so the
cases of Licinia and Fabia). Likewise, since her term of service, though long, was
limited, considerations of the benefits accruing to her agnatic family might
have played a part. See Hallett (1984, 83–90); Gruen (1968, 127–32); Herrmann
(1964, 42–3); Staples (1998, 144).
51 Labeo quoted by Gell. NA 1.12.18.
52 Will: Gell. NA 1.12.9, Cic. Rep. 3.10, Gaius 1.145, Plut. Numa 10; cf. Sozom.
1.9. Witness: Gell. NA 7.7.3, Tac. Ann. 2.34 (cf. 11.32), Plut. Numa 8 and cf. Cic.
Font. 21.46, Suet. Caes. 1.
53 Beard (1980, 15, 17–18). Cf. Dumézil (1970, 2: 587).
54 So rightly Koch (1958, 1734): ‘Als freie Persönlichkeit besizt die Vestalin
sodann das ius testimonii dicendi’; Staples (1998, 143). The same is true of the
right to make a will. The lictors who accompany the Vestals (Plut. Numa 10.3:
an ancient right; Dio 48.19.4: first in 42 BC) are not a specifically masculine
privilege but an extra-legal honour accorded several functionaries. See Staples
(1998, 145).
55 Cf. Durkheim’s definition of the totem (1915, 123): ‘The species of things
which serves to designate the clan collectively,’ and his analysis of the symbolic
value of the totem (235–72).
 92 Holt N. Parker

56 In Greek mythology famous examples are Achilles’ heel, Nisus’s purple lock of
hair, Meleager’s log. See Faraone (1992) for a survey.
57 See n. 18.
58 Dessau 4932: ‘cuius egregiam morum disciplinam et in sacris peritissimam
operationem merito res publica in dies feliciter sensit.’
59 Pliny 4.11.7: ‘me Caesar incestam putat, qua sacra faciente vicit triumphavit!’
60 Burkert (1983, 64).
61 Girard (1977).
62 See the special volume of Helios Golsan (1990) devoted to Girard; see also
Golsan (1993), Hamerton-Kelly (1987), Dumouchel (1988), McKenna (1992),
and Reineke (1997, 128–60).
63 Homer, Hesiod, and especially Greek tragedy show a heightened awareness
of this. Girard curiously does not discuss the Oresteia and only mentions
Aeschylus in passing (1977, 46). For the Roman sources (e.g., Livy 1.2; Dion.
Hal. 9.40–1), see text.
64 Girard (1977, 39, 52).
65 Ibid. 4.
66 Ibid. 30–1. Girard’s schema closely resembles Victor Turner’s analysis of ‘social
dramas’ as consisting of four stages: (1) ‘breach of regular norm-governed
social relationships between persons or groups within the same system of social
re-lations,’ (2) ‘a phase of mounting crisis,’ (3) ‘redressive action’ in the form of
the ‘performance of public ritual,’ (4) either reintegration or schism. See Turner
(1974, 40–1).
67 Girard (1977, 13).
68 Ibid. 83.
69 Seneca’s Cont. 1.3, though a fictional case only loosely based on the laws
surrounding the Vestal Virgins, is a clear demonstration of this point.
70 The only recorded protest comes from Cornelia as she is led to death. However,
it is clear that the accused Vestal could speak in her own defence at her trial
before the Pontiff; see Macr. Sat. 1.10.5.
71 4.11.8: ‘nescio an innocens, certe tamquam innocens ducta est.’ This unques-
tioning assumption of guilt is something that Pliny shares with many modern
historians (see below).
72 Girard (1977, 41).
73 Dion. Hal. 2.67.4; Plut. Numa 10, QR 96, Ti. Gr. 15.6; Dio. apud Zonar. 7.8.7;
Cato frg. 68M; Cic. Har. Resp. 13; Pliny 4.11.6–11.
74 Girard (1977, 13).
75 Ibid. 39.
76 Ibid. 12.
77 Including plebeians. Difficulties in recruiting led Augustus to make daughters
of freedmen eligible: Dio 55.22.5.
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 93

78 Girard (1977, 77).

79 Ibid. 104–6. See also Girard’s remarks at (1986, 15). Cf. the increase in sacred
value (kapu) when a Hawaiian king married his sister: Radcliffe-Brown (1979,
50).
80 See also Bremmer (1983).
81 Girard (1977, 12). The blindness to the role of women continues in many of his
explicators. There is a near total absence of women in, e.g., Hamerton-Kelly
(1987), Dumouchel (1988), and McKenna (1992).
82 See, however, his remarks on Dionysus and Euripides’ Bacchae (1977, 141–2):
‘Like the animal and the infant, but to a lesser degree, the woman qualifies for
sacrificial status by reason of her weakness and relatively marginal social status.
That is why she can be viewed as a quasi-sacred figure, both desired and dis-
dained, alternatively elevated and abused.’ See also the recent interview in
Golsan (1993, esp. 141–3).
83 Brief remarks at Hamerton-Kelly (1987, 86–8, 94).
84 Not so, of course, in a variety of cultures, but this is exactly the case for
virilocal and patrilineal Rome. See Parker (1998, 154–5).
85 Girard (1977, 12–13).
86 So for Verginia, one of the founding legends of Rome (Livy 3.4–54).
87 Bellum inde Veiens initium, et Volsci rebellarunt. sed ad bella externa prope
supererant vires, abutebanturque iis inter semet ipsos certando. accessere ad
aegras iam omnium mentes prodigia caelestia, prope cotidianas in urbe agrisque
ostentia minas; motique ita numinis causam nullam aliam vates canebant
publice privatimque nunc extis nunc per aves consulti, quam haud rite sacra
fieri. qui terrores tandem eo evasere ut Oppia virgo Vestalis damnata incesti
poenas dederit.
88 Girard (1977, 33).
89 For the tone and logic, cf. the narratives in Dion. Hal. 2.68.3, 8.89.3–5 and 9.40.
90 Cornell (1981, 28); cf. Herrmann (1964, 52–3); Hallett (1984, 88 n. 32);
Fraschetti (1984, 101); Mustakallio (1992, 56); Staples (1998, 129, 143, 136).
91 Girard (1977, 261).
92 Mayer (1970, 60). For cross-cultural data, cf. the Amba of western Uganda, who
view witches as a secret association within the village, operating as a fifth-
column, attacking only fellow villagers, but sharing reciprocal cannibal feasts
with the witches of enemy villages (Winter 1963). So too the Kuma of New
Guinea suspect witches of aiding enemy groups (Reay 1959 136); while the
Abelam of New Guinea believe that sorcery is performed by a traitor in one’s
own village working with an enemy sorcerer (Forge 1970, 257–75, esp. 262–3
and cf. xxvii).
93 Cf. Douglas on ‘internal traitors’ (1970, ix, cited above) and Levine (1982, 271).
94 So L. Cantilius with Floronia (Livy 22.57.3), yet no one is accused with Opimia.
 94 Holt N. Parker

Veturius (Vetutius) with Aemilia (Oros. 5.15.20–2, Plut. QR 83), Valerius

Licinianus and Celer with Cornelia (Pliny 4.11), Maximus with Primigenia
(Symm. Ep. 9.147–8). Fest. 277 L: a general statement that the man who
makes a Vestal unchaste (incestavisset) is beaten to death. Even when the
existence of a man is mentioned his name is seldom given: two men with
Oppia (Dion. Hal. 8.89.4) and Orbinia (Dion. Hal. 9.40.3), one with
Capparonia (Oros. 4.5.6–9), unknown numbers of corruptores and stupratores
with Oculata and Varronilla (Suet. Dom. 8.3–5).
95 So for example the cases of Antonius, Crassus, and Catiline; and cf. Elagabalus.
These, however, are not my concern in this paper. See Rawson (1991, 149–68);
Gruen (1968, 127–32).
96 So Postumia (Livy 4.44.11–12) was accused but acquitted merely for dressing
too well and being too clever (‘propter cultum amoeniorem ingeniumque
liberius quam virginem decet’), while Minucia is buried alive on exactly the
same grounds (Livy 8.15.7). Aemilia (178 BC) is accused only on the evidence
of the sacred fire being allowed to go out (Dion. Hal. 2.68.3–5, Val. Max. 1.1.7,
cf. Livy. Per. 41, Obseq. 8); cf. the case of 206 (Livy 28.11.6). Tuccia (Dion.
Hal. 2.69.1–3) is accused without even this. No man is mentioned at all for
Minucia, Opimia, Sextilia (Livy Per. 14, Oros. 4.2.8), or for Aurelia Severa,
Pomponia Rufina, and Cannutia Crescentia, executed by Caracalla. See
Appendix.
97 Only the mythical Rhea Silva is pregnant (Livy 1.4). Nero is accused of raping
a Vestal but no further mention of her is made. The event is used to demon-
strate his sexual insatiability and impiety rather than as evidence of an im-
pending crisis (Suet. Nero 28.1). Thus the lack of virginity in a Vestal is of
importance only when a victim is needed. The account in Dio 77.16 fuses two
accusations: that Caracalla raped a Vestal and that he put four Vestals to death
for unchastity.
98 Giovannini (1981, 422, 419).
99 Cf. Mayer’s remarks (1970, 52) on the Gusii, a western Kenyan Bantu tribe,
and Levine (1982) on the Nyinba, a Tibetan-speaking group in Nepal.
100 For Horatia, see Livy 1.26, Dion. Hal. 3.7: cf. the brother’s words to his
murdered sister: ‘sic eat quaecumque Romana lugebit hostem’ (‘so may she
fare, whatever Roman woman grieves for an enemy’) with his father’s ap-
proval and ultimately that of all Roman men. For Tarpeia, see Prop. 4.4, who
makes the lust, rather than feminine greed, the reason for her betrayal; so
Antigonus of Carystus, and the poet Simylus (Plut. Rom. 18). See Ogilvie
(1965, 74–5) and Burkert (1979, 76). For Sempronia, see Sall. Cat. 24–5. An
analysis of the adulteress/traitoress/poisoner requires a separate paper. See
Currie (1998).
101 Livy 8.15.7, Cic. Mil. 59, Schol. Bob. Cic. 90S, Val. Max. 6.8.1. Cf. Pliny
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 95

Panegyr. 42.3–4, Livy Per. 77, Dio 55.5. See Cornell (1981, 34–5) and Buckland
(1908, 90–1). Cases involving evidence from slaves (see Appendix): Orbinia in
472 BC (Dion. Hal. 9.40.3), Minucia in 337 (Livy 8.15.7); Aemilia, Licinia,
Marcia in 114 (Plut. QR 83, Dio frg. 87.5 B). Note the execution of the conscii
servi (that is, the slaves who failed to report the crime) with Caparronia in 266
(Oros. 4.5.6–9); see discussion by Guizzi (1968, 145–9). Significantly, the Lex
Julia expands this to adultery by means of a fictitious sale to the state;
Wiedemann (1987, 27). For incestum, see below. Cf. Mayer’s remarks (1970,
61–2).
102 Cic. Leg. 2.19, 22; Tac. Ann. 1.73 (Tiberius: deorum iniuriae dis curae); Cod.
Just. 4.1.2. See Koch (1958, 1747; Mommsen (1887, 2: 50–54) and (1899,
36–7) (on Sacraldelict); Wissowa (1912, 380–409, esp. 388–9); Nock (1972, 2:
531).
103 As Cornell (1981, 29) points out, ‘offenses against the gods, which involved
the community as well, such as sacrilege ... were subject to the normal process
of criminal law.’ Further, even purely religious matters could come under non-
religious law. See Cornell (1981, 36–7: e.g., the censors could degrade a man
for impiety (Cato frg. 72M).
104 So Mommsen (1899, 18).
105 Koch (1958, 1749) and (1960, 1–4); cf. Guarino (1943, 177).
106 See Fantham (1992).
107 See Guizzi (1968, 143–4 and nn. 6–7); Ogilvie (1965, 349). For the etymology
and meaning, see Fest. 95L, 277L (s.v. probrum), Gaius 1.59, 64.
108 The laws relating to adultery are notoriously confused, but only the law
attributed to Romulus (Dion. Hal. 2.25.6 = FIRA 3) makes any mention of a
trial (held by the accused’s husband and her father’s relations). For the trials
after the Bacchanalia of 186 BC (Appendix), see below. The Lex Julia refers not
to trial, but to summary execution by the father of a daughter caught in the
act of adultery. See Rotondi (1912, 443–7); Richlin (1981); Beard (1980, 15 and
n. 20) (citing Volterra 1948); Cantarella (1976); Cohen (1991). No other crime
specifies burial alive and the only analogue is the execution of Antigone in
Sophocles.
109 Wissowa (1923–4, 201–14, esp. 207–8); Nock (1972, 1: 254); Ogilvie (1965, 74,
349); Staples (1998, 133–4).
110 Cornell (1981, 31).
111 Cornell (1981, 31) cites Livy 28.11.6–8 for a hard and fast distinction between
the prodigies and the act that produces them: ‘id [a Vestal allowing the fire
to go out] quamquam nihil portentibus dis ceterum neglegentia humana
acciderat, tamen et hostiis maioribus procurari et supplicationem ad Vestae
haberi placuit.’ Livy does not, however, mean that all such events are human
mistakes rather than portents, but it was so in this particular case. In fact, the
 96 Holt N. Parker

proof (within the belief system) that this was error and not incestum is the
very fact that the Vestal was merely scourged and not killed; cf. the case of
Tuccia (c. 230 BC; Appendix). Likewise, Livy 22.57.2: ‘territi etiam super tantas
clades cum ceteris prodigiis [N.B.] tum quod duae Vestales eo anno, Opimia
atque Floronia, stupri compertae’ shows that their crime was indeed accounted
a prodigium, while 22.57.4 – ‘hoc nefas cum inter tot, ut fit, clades in pro-
digium versum esset’ – does not show ‘that such offenses were not normally
considered prodigies’ (Cornell 1981, 32), but rather, that Livy considered
himself less credulous than others.
112 For sacredness and pollution as the characteristics of things that cross
classificatory boundaries, see Douglas (1966, esp. 41–57). For the application of
this to the sacred character of the Vestal Virgin, see Beard (1980, 20–2).
113 One can also compare Turner’s remarks on the way in which twins in many
cultures are either ‘permanently assigned a special status’ or else one or both
of the twins are killed (1969 48–9): ‘This may be regarded as another instance
of a widely prevalent social tendency either to make what falls outside the
norm a matter of concern for the widest group or to destroy the exceptional
phenomenon. In the former case, the anomalous may be sacralized, regarded
as holy ... Here the anomaly, the “stone that the builders rejected”, is removed
from the structured order of society and made to represent the simple unity of
society itself, conceptualized as homogeneous, rather than as a system of
heterogeneous social positions.’
114 See Staples (1998, 151–2) for a different explanation.
115 Koch objects that the Vestal cannot be considered a prodigium for this reason
(1958, 1748). So too Cornell (1981, 35).
116 Girard (1977, 83), quoted above.
117 Mustakallio (1992).
118 Cf. the comments of Fraschetti (1981, 58). E.g., Dumézil (1970, 2: 450): ‘crime’
for the Vestals, vs. ‘quadruple murder’ for the Greek and Gaulish couples;
Cornell (1981, 28): ‘punishment’ vs. ‘human sacrifice’ and writes, ‘A confirmed
instance of incestum was an extremely rare occurrence,’ without asking by
whom and how confirmed. Marshall (1985, 196) thinks Licinia and Marcia’s
brief escape from death was due to ‘an obvious coverup.’ Mustakallio (1992,
63) is even able to tell us the season of the ‘crimes’: ‘We may suggest that
Orbinia, Sextilia and even Caparronia had committed their incest crimes in
spring time, thus contaminating the fertility and purification rites of this
period.’ Even Staples (1998, 134) merely states that the ‘execution of Vestals ...
coincides with two of the three known instances of human sacrifice ever
recorded in Rome.’ Porte (1984, 233) is almost alone in calling both ‘sacrifices
humains.’ Radke is also explicit (1975, 1129): ‘Sie entsprechen weder der
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 97

Königin noch Königs- oder haustöchtern, sondern wurden ... Mädchenopfer

bereitgehalten, wofür Bruch sexuallen Tabus als Motiv galt.’
119 Wissowa (1923–4, 24, 209).
120 Livy 27.37.6. For other examples, MacBain (1982, 127–33).
121 Cornell (1981, 36); Briquel (1984, 226); Dion. Hal. 4.62, Zonar. 7.11, Val. Max.
1.1.13; cf. Cic. Rosc. Am. 71–2.
122 Girard (1977, 79).
123 Pomeroy (1975, 211), Rose (1970), Staples (1998, 133).
124 The comparison is made by Wissowa (1923–4, 211).
125 Girard (1977, 287); Plut. Numa 10, Dion. Hal. 2.67.4, 8.89.5, 9.40.3, Pliny
Ep. 4.11.
126 Pomerium: Serv. Aen. 11.206, Dion. Hal. 8.89.5; sacrifices: Plut. Numa 10,
Quaest. Rom. 96; Dion. Hal. 2.40.3 on Tarpeia, citing Piso.
127 For an overview, see Versnel (1976, esp. 405–10) with previous literature.
Versnel makes a distinction (which the Romans did not) between the
consecratio of the general and his devotio of the enemy troops. He does not
deal with the aftermath of the rite.
128 For the details of the ceremony, the oath, and the expiatory purpose, see Livy
8.9.4–10.12.
129 Quint. 7.8.3f., Tac. Ann. 6.19, Livy Per. 77, Val. Max. 6.5.7, Plut. Sulla 10, Sen.
Dial. 3.16.5. Radke (1965, 311; 1972, 432) is misled by Hor. Odes 3.30.8
(quoted above) and the fictitious case of Sen. Cont. 1.3 into thinking that this
was a punishment for the Vestal Virgins.
130 For cultic practice and the reinforcement of women’s social roles, see Can-
tarella (1987, 150–5).
131 For the ritual significance of poisoning as a charge, see Girard (1986, 16–17)
and Levine (1982, 265) (on the Nyinba).
132 Instead, Herrmann (1964, 47–8) sees an early attempt at ‘women’s liberation’
culminating in murder. Bauman (1992, 13–14, 17–18, 20–1) sees a protest
against manus marriage, taking ‘the form of a criminal conspiracy directed not
only at their husbands but at public figures in general.’ The resemblance to
the African poison oracle should not need to be pointed out but apparently
does. Any other discipline, historical or anthropological, examining a year of
plague during which 170 women are charged with poisoning and then
executed, would smell a rat. What is most disturbing here is the lack of the
barest con-sideration of the possibility that these women were innocent, a
failure of the historian’s minimal obligation to question the sources. Given a
choice between seeing a vast murderous conspiracy of wives, or acknowledg-
ing the use of ritual scapegoats, some have chosen the former.
133 See Münzer (1923, 1721); Gagé (1963, 262–4) (for doubts as to historicity);
 98 Holt N. Parker

Monaco (1984). Cantarella (1987, 126) gives the number as 160, Pomeroy
(1975, 176) as 116.
134 See Palmer (1974, 122–5, 132–4).
135 Bauman (1992, 17 and 223 n. 15) assumes they were guilty of prostitution;
Gardner (1986, 123) of no more than drunken high spirits. I see no reason to
assume they were ‘guilty’ of anything.
136 See Palmer (1974, 135–6); Culham (1982).
137 Bauman (1992, 25), though covering the first event, fails to note the second.
Gruen (1990, 40) does not comment on implication of women in the purifica-
tion.
138 See Herrmann (1964, 58–9); Gallini (1970, 71–2); Beard (1995, 171).
139 For the poisoning trial and the Bacchanalia of 186, see Herrmann (1964, 68–
79); Gallini (1970, 11–52); Pailler (1988), (1990); Rousselle (1989); Gruen
(1990, 34–78); Bauman (1992, 35–40).
140 See Herrmann (1964, 78); Gallini (1970, 45); Bauman (1992, 38) is right to
argue for the inclusion of women.
141 Bauman (1992, 38) wonders if the surviving members of the Bacchic cult were
not indulging in ‘a fund-raising programme’ by murder; again, the idea of a
witch-hunt does not occur.
142 Bauman (1992, 38) speculates that Publilia was ‘a Bacchanalian sympathizer
who killed for the cause.’
143 Bauman (1992, 52–8).
144 For an excellent introduction, see Briggs (1996).
145 See Hallett (1989); Dixon (1992, 42–3) (purely in economic terms); Saller
(1994, 76–88); Parker (1998, 154–5), for overviews of this conceptual diffi-
culty. The most obvious sign of this lifelong possession is the fact that a
woman retained her father’s gentile name; Hallett (1989, 67): ‘Roman society
thus labeled her the daughter of her father for purposes of lifelong identifica-
tion’; see also Kajanto (1972, 13–30); (1977, 184); Pomeroy (1975, 152, 165)
and (1976, 225–6). Even in the case of (increasingly rare) manus marriage the
new materfamilias did not lose all connection with her natal family. She was
transferred to her husband’s familia (Gel. 18.6.9, Serv. A. 11.476) for purposes
of property transfer (especially intestate succession); she stood filiae loco (Tit.
Ulp. 23.3) but she was not part of her husband’s gens (see Ulpian’s careful
definition: D. 30.16.195.2). As Treggiari (1991, 30) writes: ‘She was not a
daughter but in the position of a daughter.’ That is, her pater remained her
pater (though she was no longer in patria potestate), her mater remained her
mater, and so on. The most vivid proof of these agnatic ties, besides the fact
that the wife in manu did not change her gentile name, is that a father
retained the right to kill a daughter taken in adultery even after he had
transferred her to the manus of her husband (Coll. 4.2.3 from Paulus = FIRA
 Why Were the Vestals Virgins? 99

2.553; but not over a daughter freed by emancipatio: Coll. 4.7.1): ‘Secundo
vero capite permittit patri, si in filia sua, quam in potestate habet, aut in ea,
quae eo auctore, cum in potestate esset, viro in manum convenerit, adulterum
domi suae generive sui deprehenderit isve in eam rem socerum adhibuerit, ut
is pater eum adulterum sine fraude occidat, ita ut filiam in continenti occidat.’
See Treggiari (1991, 282) for texts and analysis.
146 Purcell (1986, 95); Edwards (1993, 51–2); Santoro L’Hoir (1992, 41–2); Wiede-
mann (1987, 25–6); Parker (1998, 154–5, 164). See also the bibliography cited
in n. 27.
147 Noy (1991), Watson (1995).
148 See Rosaldo (1974, 32–4) for an overview. Gluckman (1956, 98) (Zulu); Mid-
dleton and Winter (1963, 14–17) (E. Africa); Beidelman (1963, 86–7) (Kaguru,
a Bantu-speaking people of Tanzania); Winter (1963, 278, 287–8) (Amba,
mentioned above); Epstein (1967, 135–54, esp. 150) (Mysore); Harper (1969
(Brahmins in S. India); Hunter Wilson (1970, 252–63, esp. 261) (Mpondo,
Bantu-speaking people of S. Africa); Marwick (1970, 280–1) (South-Eastern
Bantu). See also Giovannini (1981) (Sicily).
149 Ziegler (1957): ‘for poisoning, or for substitution of children or keys,’
producing a harsh zeugma. There is no reason to doubt the text, unless one
has already decided that it cannot be saying what it says.
150 Cf. the famous remarks of Metellus Macedonius on the burdensome necessity
of wives in order to procreate: Suet. Aug. 89.2, Livy Per. 59, Gell. NA 1.6.
151 See n. 81.
 5
‘Only Virgins Can Give Birth to Christ’:
The Virgin Mary and the Problem of
Female Authority in Late Antiquity
kate cooper

Stretching out her hands, she prayed thus to the Lord, ‘Lord God, you who healed me
of leprosy by the prayers of your martyr Agnes and graciously showed me the path
of your love, and moreover preserved the marriage-bed of the virgin your mother,
where you the Son have shown yourself to be a Bridegroom, you born of Mary and
you true progenitor of Mary, you having suckled at her breast and you in turn
feeding the whole world ... I ask, Lord, that you win over these daughters of
Gallicanus ... that they may seek to attain entry to your celestial bed-chamber.’1

The sixth-century Passion of Gallicanus, a Latin romance purporting to

record the martyrdom of a Christian general of the fourth-century pagan
emperor Julian the Apostate, records the prayer of Constantia, daughter of
Constantine the Great and virgin of the Church.2 Beseeching Jesus, son of
Mary, to move Artemia and Attica, the general’s daughters, to dedicate
themselves as virgins of the Church, Constantia illustrates the firm belief of
Christians at the end of antiquity that human relationships echoed or re-
flected the mysterious workings of the heavenly realm. According to this
view, the Virgin Mary stood as an intercessor before God for the interests of
women, and among women virgins enjoyed a special, though not exclusive,
claim to her protection.
We also see in Constantia’s prayer a number of other important themes
which will concern us in the present study. First, the heavenly sphere was
punctuated by relationships of patronage and intercession. The intercessory
role which women of the imperial family were understood to play was not
unlike that played by the Virgin herself. Second, the intercession of Mary
and other female saints – such as the virgin martyr Agnes – was understood
to reach across the divide between heavenly and earthly spheres and thus to
contribute to the spiritual wherewithal on which their earthly counterparts,
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 101

Christian women, could draw. Finally, there is compelling evidence that

meditation on – and imitation of – both Mary and the other female saints
was considered central to women’s spiritual life, serving in addition as a
resource which women could invoke on behalf of their own spiritual power
as women of God. Dozens of lives of female saints and passiones of female
martyrs produced at the end of antiquity attest to a widespread interest in
holy women, and many of these texts include, as does the Passion of Gallicanus
itself, some indication of how late Roman women could invoke the power of
‘their’ saints even as they sought to imitate their virtues. It is only in the last
generation that scholars have begun to assemble the mosaic of glancing
references attesting to this nexus between Christian women and their heav-
enly champions.
Still paradoxically little understood among the female saints who played
such a central role to Christian spirituality at the end of antiquity is the best
known of them all, Mary, mother of Jesus. Known since the third century as
Theotokos, the one who gave birth to God, Mary is by far the most discussed
of the female saints in the ancient sources, but several factors have kept her
from centre stage where the study of female spirituality is concerned. Per-
haps most significant is the fact that historical theology has long treated the
ancient sources on Mary as of interest predominantly for their Christological
implications. Even more surprisingly, feminist theology and gender studies
have shown little interest in Mary and her cultural history. What these
approaches have in common, however, is that they are rarely accompanied
by sustained attention to the evidence for how ancient women themselves
understood Mary and her cult. This neglect, the present essay will suggest,
threatens to distort our understanding of late Roman women and their
contribution to late Roman Christianity.
Many factors have contributed to the neglect of Marian piety among late
Roman women as a subject of study. In addition to general factors such as
the strength of Protestant, non- and post-Christian sensibilities in gender-
focused scholarship, two more specific factors seem to have been significant.
The first is the historiographical tradition surrounding the idea of the Divine
Feminine. While Jung had made a great case for the Virgin Mary as an
expression of the Divine Feminine in the 1950s, by the 1970s feminist
writers came to view this notion with suspicion. Already in 1968, Mary Daly
argued in her The Church and the Second Sex3 that far from being an
unequivocal boon to women, the projection of the Virgin as a female icon of
religious authority could also serve a negative function, as a compensatory
licence for misogyny against real historical women, a position echoed by
Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex.4 While a number of feminist writers
sought to develop the idea of an icon of female authority in early Christian-
 102 Kate Cooper

ity, either through the figure of Sophia or through the figure of Mary
Magdalene as an early recipient of the Kerygma, the Virgin Mary was
viewed with suspicion by the scholarly parties who would in theory have
been most likely to be interested in her.
A second factor has been how scholars have understood the problem of
women’s agency. Where women and gender were concerned, the relation-
ship between rhetoric and reality was often characterized by paradox. De-
spite the sometimes overwhelming misogyny of the early Christian tradi-
tion, in late Roman society women could exercise enormous power in cer-
tain, especially elite, contexts. Even while women were barred from the
clerical and many other institutional roles, their active and demanding
presence as agents within and beyond the Church needs to be fully realized
in our imaginations if we are to understand late antiquity accurately.5 This
now is a truism, but it did not go without saying a decade or two ago.
Though women were clearly not the only people to take an interest in the
Theotokos, it is now fairly clear that the interest taken in her by women of
the patronage class was important if not decisive at turning points in the
development of her cult. What this adds up to, among other things, is a
warning that, like the late Roman bishops, the present generation of scholars
will have to take an interest in the Theotokos if we are to understand late
Roman women.

‘Has God a Mother?’

According to the fifth-century historian Socrates of Constantinople, the

Christological controversy which convulsed the Christian churches in his
day opened in earnest when Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, defended a
visiting priest who had preached against the increasingly widespread term
Theotokos as a description of the Virgin Mary.
Nestorius had an associate whom he had brought from Antioch, a presby-
ter named Anastasius; for this man he had high esteem and consulted him in
the management of affairs. Anastasius, preaching one day in church, said ‘Let
no one call Mary Theotokos [‘god-bearer’]: for Mary was but a human
being, and it is impossible that God should be born of a human being.’ This
caused a great sensation and troubled both the clergy and the laity, as they
had been heretofore taught to acknowledge Christ as God and by no means
to separate his humanity from his divinity on account of the economy of
incarnation.6
Only decades after the Council of Constantinople in 381 had established
what was meant to be an enduring theological settlement on the nature of
the Trinity – the relationship among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – a
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 103

further crisis emerged whose central question was whether the Son was
fully human or fully divine. Although Nestorius was deposed as Bishop of
Constantinople and condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, the prob-
lem of how to understand the Incarnation, with its implications for the
relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity – the so-called Two
Natures – was never definitively resolved. Over a millennium later, the
Eastern Churches are still in schism over it.
That the dispute over whether the Virgin Mary should be called Theotokos
was the trigger for the controversy is not in doubt, yet an attempt to
understand the Mariological aspect of the debate has played a surprisingly
small role in the scholarship on the controversy. On the historian of theology’s
usual reading, the Theotokos epithet was controversial because of its
Christological implications. As Frances Young puts it, in what has become
the standard introduction to the problem for English speakers, the core of
the controversy resided in ‘two different answers to the question, “Who was
the subject of the incarnate experiences of Jesus Christ?”’7 It is useful to
remember here that in the early fifth century, despite the agreements made
over the persons of the Trinity at Constantinople in 381, questions about the
person of the Son as basic as whether the Son of God referred by the Bible
was in fact the same being as the historical Jesus, born from the line of
David,8 were still not fully resolved. Christian theology was, in many re-
spects, still in its infancy.
Also in its infancy was the problem of the divine feminine, which the
traditional religions of the Roman Empire so often emphasized. At the
Council of Ephesus Nestorius was deposed from his position as Bishop of
Constantinople for having made statements such as the following: ‘“Has
God a mother? If so we may excuse paganism for giving mothers to its
deities ... No, Mary was not Theotokos. For that which is born of flesh is
flesh. A creature did not bring forth him who is uncreated; the Father did not
beget by the Virgin a new God.’”9 But the anxiety about the Theotokos has
been viewed by historians as turning on the problem of Jesus as Logos, the
divine Word of God, already existing in the beginning when God created the
world according to the first chapter of the Gospel of John.
According to Nestorius’s reasoning, the name Theotokos implied that the
Logos, having been born, also suffered the crucifixion, and that this manner
of mixing the distinct natures of the divine Logos and the human Christ
(Nestorius offers the term Christotokos as an acceptable substitute) was
tantamount to Apollinarianism, Arianism, or indeed to paganism.10 Cyril of
Alexandria, Nestorius’s principal though not only opponent, took the view
that with his Birth the Logos had taken on a new condition of existence.
Young summarizes Cyril’s position thus: ‘It was the Logos who was incar-
 104 Kate Cooper

nate, and there is only one Lord and Christ and Son. He admits that two
Natures are involved, but their union, he says, is hypostatic, because the
Logos united Manhood to himself “in his own hypostasis.”’11 Cyril’s view
depends on the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum – ‘communication of
properties’ – which J.N.D. Kelly defined as the idea that ‘in view of the unity
of Christ’s Person, His human and divine attributes, experiences, etc. might
properly be interchanged.’12 Although this idea was developed by Athanasius,
it in fact drew on usage going back at least as far as the early second-century
martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch, who talks about ‘the suffering of my God’
and ‘God ... [who] was conceived of Mary.’13 What bothered people like
Nestorius about people like Cyril was the danger that the Alexandrian ‘Word-
Flesh’ notion of the Son was not, in fact, sufficiently enfleshed – that they read
the communicatio idiomatum as meaning that the Word wins out over the
Flesh, with the result being a Gnostic, docetic Jesus who did not really suffer.
What makes the Christological controversy especially difficult to under-
stand is that neither of the men viewed as the key players – Nestorius or
Cyril – seems to have had a stable position to argue in the negotiations
across the twenty years between Ephesus and Chalcedon. Historical theolo-
gians have worked admirably to account for how each of these men could
shift his ground so significantly in matters of Christology without betraying
his initial position entirely, but on the face of it it is difficult to reconcile the
intensity of the conflict with the fact that neither figure seems to have been
fully committed to the view he was arguing for. Indeed, a school of thought
has grown up which suggests that the altercation leading up to the Council
of Ephesus should be explained as a misunderstanding of terminology for
two essentially similar positions.14 This is where the gender historian notices
that unlike their Byzantine predecessors, by and large the modern historians
and theologians have been looking only at the men.
The present essay, by contrast, will point to the influential women of the
imperial family who seem to have played an important role in theological
debates of the day, and particularly to the Empress Pulcheria (d. 453). At face
value, Pulcheria, too, looks as if her theology were as unstable as that of
Cyril and Nestorius – at least her Christology looks that way. She was
fiercely anti-Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus in 431, but at Chalcedon
two decades later she espoused a position on the two natures of Christ that
was far more reminiscent of Nestorius’s views than those of her old ally
Cyril. What did not change, however, was her vision of Mary as Theotokos,
the woman who confers human birth on the Logos. It can be argued that
Pulcheria’s Mariology was the one theological constant in the whole contro-
versy and, indeed, that it was the hinge on which the controversy turned.
Put bluntly, on this reading it is not Nestorius’s Christology per se that was
rejected at Ephesus, but more precisely his Mariology.
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 105

Our reading follows the suggestion made by Vasiliki Limberis a decade

ago that the coalition between Pulcheria and Cyril was a marriage of conve-
nience. While Cyril was interested in Christology per se, he only attained
the support of the Empress insofar as his concerns overlapped with her
interest in developing the cult of the Virgin Mary as a form of imperial civic
religion. Theologians and historians of theology have tended to assume that
serious people dealt with the ‘real theological issues’15 of Christology at the
Council of Ephesus while the Empress was running what amounted at best
to a theological side show, one whose significance was fundamentally ‘politi-
cal’ rather than ‘theological.’ But if the fifth-century Church was far more
dependent on female patrons and their concerns than has generally been
recognized, this does not mean that its concerns were ‘political’ rather than
‘theological.’ Rather, it means that Mariological debate was central to fifth-
century theological developments and that the theological concerns – and
contributions – of late Roman women must be taken seriously by historians
and theologians alike.

Mariology versus Christology: Putting the Women First at Ephesus

Kenneth Holum noted a quarter-century ago that the centrality of Pulcheria

is not in dispute in the ancient sources: ‘A tradition on both sides of the
question said that it was she who brought down Nestorius.’16 For Holum,
the conflict between Pulcheria and Nestorius developed a tradition of ten-
sion between the bishop of Constantinople, who sought to strengthen the
church hierarchy and to make his see independent from lay meddling, and
the imperial family, who viewed the church’s principal role as that of
sacralizing their rule and protecting the Empire. The classic instance of this
tension was the altercation a generation earlier between Pulcheria’s mother
Eudoxia and John Chrysostom, an earlier Bishop of Constantinople who was
widely believed to have been deposed due to the enmity of the Empress.17
The imperial women seem to have acted as focal points for this tension.
Holum saw the fact that the Council was held at Ephesus, a city whose
ancient cult of the virgin goddess Artemis had already given way to a
thriving cult of the Virgin Theotokos, and that the council itself was held in
the great basilica dedicated to the Virgin, as a sign of Pulcheria’s behind-the-
scenes engineering against her brother’s public support for Nestorius.18
Rather than detailing all of the evidence cited by Holum, or the subse-
quent debates over his hypothesis,19 I would like to highlight a context for
Pulcheria’s patronage which Leslie Brubaker has called the ‘matronage’
tradition.20 Brubaker’s own contribution was to demonstrate that the aristo-
cratic and imperial women of Constantinople built up a distinctive tradition
of patronage in which women of later generations commemorated the
 106 Kate Cooper

achievements – and indeed the patronage – of their female forebears. The

iconic act to which female patrons returned again and again in memory was
the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, and her founding
of a shrine to the Nativity at ‘the place where the Theotokos gave birth’21 in
Bethlehem. Thus the imperial mother and the Mother of God were bound in
a reciprocal relationship of patronage, and this was something that later
imperial women could not afford to forget.
Socrates himself seems to have meant to highlight this tradition. Follow-
ing the passage cited above, Socrates clarifies that Nestorius was not in fact a
proponent of docetism as some people believed but that his error arose from
his ignorance of Church history: he repudiates a term, Theotokos, which had
been established in ecclesiastical usage by Eusebius and Origen.22 To illus-
trate his point he gives a direct citation from Eusebius’s Life of Constantine:
‘And in fact Emmanuel submitted to be born for our sake, and the place of
his nativity in the flesh is by the Hebrews called Bethlehem. Wherefore the
devout Empress Helena adorned the place where the Theotokos gave birth
with the most splendid monuments, decorating that cave with the richest
ornaments.’23 There is every reason to believe that the champion of the term
Theotokos in Socrates’ day, the Empress Pulcheria, was conscious of the
resonance between her role as patroness to the Virgin’s cult and that of her
illustrious predecessor Helena.
Holum and Limberis saw Theotokos piety as incorporating a strong ele-
ment of popular piety in which Empresses mobilized a following of women
from all social classes, and in turn were perceived as speaking on behalf of a
constituency. As patronesses with special responsibility for women from the
different levels of society, they might have acted as intercessors on behalf of
less fortunate women in much the same way the Virgin herself was under-
stood to do. That a strong popular following was attached to the cult of Mary
could perhaps be inferred from writings such as the Panarion of Epiphanius
of Salamis24 which link Marian cult to heretical groups, but there is still
work to be done to understand how class and gender intersected in this
context as in so many others. We will see below that Mary would have been
received differently as a figure of intercession and identification by different
women according to the social location of each.

Women, Imitatio, and Spiritual Authority

In the century between Helena and Pulcheria the idea that the virgins of the
Church had a special relationship to the Virgin Mary had become central to
the ideology of virginity. What might be termed the politics of identification
had become central to the emerging cult of the saints.25 A little-known fifth-
century Latin text, the Epistula ad Marcellam, records the effort of an
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 107

anonymous writer to encourage a married woman to participate in an

advent retreat at which both virgins and married women would meditate on
the Nativity.
It is clear from the letter, which seems to follow up on an earlier invita-
tion, that the married recipient had tried to give her excuses, noting in
particular that this kind of retreat was really more appropriate for virgins of
the Church:

But perhaps you will say, why do you trouble me with a vain promise of hope? Only
virgins can give birth to Christ. But I do not wish that you restrict the grace of God to
the narrow confines of a single person. Look at where the apostle says to sinners and
prevaricators, ‘Until Christ is formed in you.’26

Even as he or she attempts to disagree, the anonymous writer makes it

clear that one of the criteria fifth-century women were using in choosing
devotional practices was whether they could as individuals identify with the
divine or saintly figures to whom meditative attention was directed.
Another text, the Handbook for Gregoria, a sixth-century devotional
manual for married women, shows a somewhat different approach to break-
ing the hold of virginity as the devotional sine qua non for women. ‘Gregoria,’
the text’s addressee, is exhorted to model herself after the legendary martyr
Anastasia, a married woman whose husband, a pagan official, imprisoned
her when he discovered that she was circulating freely in the city dressed as a
widow and engaging in acts of Christian charity. The Passio Anastasiae
shows a self-consciousness about the issue of the female reader, presenting
in its first section a correspondence between Anastasia, imprisoned in the
marital home, and her spiritual director, Chrysogonus, who counsels her to
have courage during her hidden trials.
It is certainly no accident that it is Anastasia whom the anonymous
author of the Handbook for Gregoria selected as a devotional model for
married women. The Handbook offers a metaphor of daily life as an enact-
ment of the sufferings of the martyrs, and Anastasia in particular, as a key to
the laywoman’s problem of finding Christian meaning in her own experi-
ence. The anonymous writer addresses the martyr Anastasia as serving as a
bridge for imitatio, both imitating Christ and herself serving as a model for
the imitation of women who could hope to identify with her. Since Anastasia’s
feast day took place on 25 December, she was seen as an especially important
link for married women to Mary and to the Incarnation:

Justly Christ took you up into the heavens on the same day on which he himself
descended to earth, and he permitted the anniversary of your martyrdom to occur on
the same day as the nativity of his assumption [of the flesh], because you, by
 108 Kate Cooper

suffering martyrdom, offered to many what he offered to all by being born. And just
as, having despised majesty, he took on the form of a servant, so that he might assist
us all, so you yourself, having despised the glory of nobility, took on an ignominy of
person, so that you might be imitated by others, and so that you might provide a
model of Christian endurance for all. You will receive everlasting glory as much
because you set an example for the edification of all matrons (pro adeificatione
omnium matronarum) as because of your own martyrdom.27

In the Handbook for Gregoria the Incarnation is explained in terms which

invite the lay female reader to imagine the incarnation through the lens of
Anastasia, a bridge through whom she too can engage in a form of imitatio
Christi. At the same time, the reader is repeatedly reminded that when she
faces the discouragement of daily life she should compare herself to the
martyrs – such as Anastasia – who in their courage sacrificed themselves for
Christ, meditating in the meanwhile on the figure of the miles Christi, who
fights the spiritual battle for virtue against the vices.
The notion of the Christian life as imitatio is one whose roots lie deep in the
period of the persecutions. The historical martyr her- or himself was expected
to engage in imitatio – to reenact by his or her own endurance the passion of
Christ – a topos which reaches back to the letters of Ignatius of Antioch at the
turn of the first century. The average Christian, in turn, was to find in the trials
of daily life an opportunity to reenact the passion of the martyrs.
While the idea of spiritual warfare had existed in the Latin west since
Tertullian,28 it was through Ambrose – and thus, indirectly, through the
influence of Origen – that it gained an important place in Latin preaching
and exegesis. From the allegorization of the scriptures, an application of the
allegorical method to the experience of the individual was perhaps the next
logical step. Ambrose’s innovation was to introduce the struggle of the
Christian martyrs as an exemplum to guide ‘average’ Christians as they
faced the struggle within the soul.
In his Expositio in Psalmum 118, Ambrose turned from discussing the
martyrdom of Saint Sebastian – on whose feast day the expositio was
delivered29 – to address the reader:

But what is worse, not only the visible but also the invisible are persecutors, and
there are more of these by far ... For who can be exempted, when the lord himself
suffered the temptations of persecution? Avarice, ambition, extravagance, pride, and
fornication all attack the soul.30

Ambrose went on to specify that because each Christian would continuously

be called to witness for Christ, he or she must take special care to show
allegiance to Him in every action.31
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 109

Writers and preachers following Ambrose took care to draw a connection

between the prowess of the historical martyr and the experience of ordinary
Christians wherever possible. The martyrs themselves were figured as tak-
ing part in the spiritual wrestling match with the vices with which the
faithful were presumed daily to struggle.32 Equally, Christian audiences
were encouraged to identify their own struggle with the vices with the more
patently heroic struggle of the martyrs against an earthly persecutor:

Beloved, if you wish we should have a share in the heavenly seat, as God promised to
the victors, let us in the first instance imitate the faith of the wholly martyr confessing,
and let us follow his path in virtue, nor should we be afraid in the love of God to set our
hearts against the bloody hands of the persecutor ... for it is not beyond you to be a
victor daily in any respect, if you will only reject the desires of the flesh.33

Such exhortations served to strengthen the sense of Christian identity

among the faithful. They accord precisely, as it happens, with the shift noted
by Charles F. Altman in a 1975 article from ‘diametrical’ to ‘gradational’
models in hagiographical writing from the fourth century onwards.34 On the
whole, according to Altman, the passiones of the pre-Constantinian period
served to pose a diametrical opposition between the forces of good and evil,
while the vitae of the post-Constantinian period place stress on develop-
ment and transformation within an individual and the possibility that others
may be transformed by contact with the individual in question.35
André Vauchez has suggested that the prevailing standpoint of hagiography
before the twelfth century was to stress the supernatural power of the saint
to the exclusion of the possibility of imitatio. The result of this was to situate
the invention of the saint’s life as a règle de conduite for the laity as a by-
product in the aftermath of the Gregorian reform, and there may be some
truth to this.36 Vauchez’s proposal might superficially seem to be confirmed
by twelfth-century citation of patristic auctoritates,37 but the presence of
such citations is misleading. To put it simply, almost any position on imitatio
could be defended by recourse to the fathers.38 This was not mere sophistry:
different aspects of tradition were brought forward in different pastoral
contexts. What made the difference was an assessment of the consequences
for the well-being of the faithful, which would be governed by context and
by an assessment of the individual or circumstance in question.
But certainly both the ascetics and the laity of the fifth and sixth centuries
saw saints as something to be imitated even while also being venerated.
Already at the end of the fourth century, imitatio could be a volatile and
powerful tool in the hands of the laity. The Empress Pulcheria’s use of
patronage for the cult of the Virgin Mary as a vehicle for consolidating her
own imperial power is a case in point.39
 110 Kate Cooper

Narrative and Agency

Our own view of how readers and viewers interact with texts and spectacles
has changed dramatically over the last generation, and this has repercussions
for our understanding of how women in late antiquity could engage and
identify with the figures of the saints. Theories of the gaze in early postmodern
feminist film criticism called attention to the unpredictability of the identifi-
cation process. I am thinking here particularly of Laura Mulvey’s 1975
article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’40 where female characters
were seen not as points of identification for the female viewer but rather as
an ‘erotic object for the characters in the story and erotic object for the
spectator.’41 Later theorists, such as Janice Radway, who undertook fieldwork
on readers of romance novels, or Jonathan Culler, whose 1981 essay ‘On
Reading as a Woman’42 undermined the idea of the reader straitjacketed to a
response ‘required’ by a text where gender was concerned. A single text can
be alternately hegemonic or empowering for the same reader, depending on
the context in which the reader encounters it and on the reader’s own
strategy in approaching the text. Whether there were specific issues where
ancient or medieval readers read religious texts is an open question, espe-
cially since we can never be sure how, if at all, ancient and medieval people,
whose sense of ‘self’ was so profoundly different from our own, perceived
what they read or otherwise encountered. Nonetheless there is something to
be learned from looking at how nineteenth- and twentieth-century human
beings have been understood to map their religious experience in narrative
terms.
At the turn of the twentieth century, William James argued, in his Variet-
ies of the Religious Experience, that narratives of religious conversions are
characterized by a ‘peak experience’ that marks the turning point after
which one cosmic paradigm is exchanged for another and the sense of self is
transformed. But while James saw this ‘peak experience’ as a fact of experi-
ence, it is in fact a product of language, of retrospective re-construction of
experience, a point which is not yet fully understood. Paula Fredriksen
looked at this problem in her article on the conversion narratives of Paul of
Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo,43 and Susan Harding’s 1990 fieldwork-
based account of conversion among American ‘born-again’ Christians44 saw
conversion as fundamentally a process of exchanging one language for
describing experience in favour of another. This idea of narrative and lan-
guage as central to the religious impulse is of course as compatible with
Durkheim’s idea of ‘God’ as ‘Society’ as it is with Wittgenstein’s idea of the
‘language game.’ It is surely at the heart of the problem of the exemplum in
late Roman and early medieval religion.
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 111

Comparative material can shed light here. For example, the debate on the
function of sati in the context of Hindu fundamentalism has stressed the
important difference between a martyr-heroine’s function as a social icon
and her possible effect on actual female members of the religious commu-
nity of which she is a part. This is a point similar to that made by Marina
Warner with regard to the Virgin Mary a generation ago. Part of this
depends on how we assess the power relationship between writer and in-
tended reader. This is important, because the issue of empowerment would
work very differently for a woman who was being addressed by a social
inferior – as would have been the case for a religious or literary patroness –
than for other, lower-status women, who might encounter a text at a later
stage, perhaps long after its production.
I have argued elsewhere45 that the idea of ‘invisible martyrdom’ which is
present in the anonymous sixth-century Handbook for Gregoria offers to
the reader the reassuring idea that however she may have failed in the
competitive late Roman game of self-representation in the earthly commu-
nity, her seemingly unrecognized performance of a heroic Christian identity
will have gone recorded by the all-seeing eye of God. Even taking into
account the caveats expressed above about ancient and modern ideas of
selfhood, it may be worth borrowing from postmodern psychology a critical
language for talking about this phenomenon. Though I would hesitate to
assign modern or postmodern ideas of pathology to ancient or medieval
experience, I think it may be relevant at least heuristically to look in reli-
gious texts for a pattern of offering enabling narratives by which the reader
can construe meaning, specifically pattern and coherence, agency, recogni-
tion, and identity, from the confused sequence of lived experience. An ap-
proach drawing on the literature of narrative psychology46 would stress the
centrality of the enabling narratives which women and men construct in
order to give meaning, shape, and validation to experience. In the fieldwork
case study provided by Michelle L. Crossley’s Introduction to Narrative
Psychology: Self, Trauma, and the Construction of Meaning, ‘Belief in God’
is assigned to the psychological ‘themes’ of recognition and agency.47 If this
is the case, it allows us to frame the problem of agency in these texts in a
somewhat different way from the ‘empowerment’-versus-‘silencing’ polar-
ity that has characterized some writing about Christian literature for women.
We can begin to imagine that where a text directed a woman reader’s self-
understanding toward a paradigm of self-sacrifice, this could have simulta-
neous and conflicting implications. It could serve a patriarchal social func-
tion of encouraging forbearance while at the same time offering the female
reader an empowering language of self-interpretation. Not only could this
language be used rhetorically to present her actions in the best possible light,
 112 Kate Cooper

but it could also be used internally to interpret her own experience in a way
that lent meaning to setbacks. Since the relationship between action, audi-
ence, and self-perception is always volatile, even an apparently misogynistic
language could furnish a vehicle for enhancing a woman’s claim to the
validity of her own agency. But we can begin to understand how a female
reader – or a female writer or literary patron – might have warmed to a
language linking femininity and sacrifice as offering positive, if also ambigu-
ous, rhetorical possibilities.
We began with the Roman princess Constantia, and her invocation of
Agnes, Mary, and Jesus as the intercessors through whom God would re-
ceive, and act upon, her prayer, made in turn on behalf of young women
bound to her through a chain of human relationships. In concluding, we
return to consider the layering of interdependence and reciprocal agency –
the chain of human and divine relationships stretching to heaven and back
again – which this brief episode evokes. When the fifth- or sixth-century
author of the Passio Gallicani invoked the memory of Constantina/
Constantia, he or she probably had little to go on in terms of narrative
tradition. Surely, however, the Roman community for whom the text was
written knew the dramatic fourth-century mausoleum centred on Con-
stantina’s sarcophagus, along with the nearby basilica of Agnes, which the
historical Constantina herself as patroness had dedicated.48 As daughter of
the deceased emperor Constantine and cousin of the pagan emperor Julian in
whose reign the story was set – although in fact she died before Julian became
Augustus – Constantia serves in the text as an icon of lay and female authority
but also as a representative of the authority of the imperial family. We must
remember that in a society where family and class so predominated as struc-
tures of identity, women frequently stood as the pivotal figures in an alliance,
often with life-or-death consequences for the men involved. Certainly, where
attempts to claim legitimate authority were concerned, women were still at a
disadvantage compared with men, and poor women still at a disadvantage
compared with the rich. But in many respects the centrality of kinship worked
to women’s advantage.
Finally, we should remember that the Christian literature of female spiritu-
ality was necessarily addressed to a disarmingly wide readership, ranging
from the emperor’s household in the capital cities to the slaves and artisans
of the distant provinces, where illiterate Christians could listen to another
member of the community rather than read independently.49 By elevating a
carpenter’s wife from Palestine to serve as Queen of Heaven, the fourth- and
fifth-century Church sought to unite the women of the Empire into a
collectivity whose shared identity as Christians could outperform the alle-
giances of family and class, race, and province. This collectivity, in turn, could
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 113

offer a platform for the authority of elite women, such as Pulcheria, who
acted to defend the pious traditions that had come to be identified with the
women of their generation. In championing the cause of Mary, Pulcheria
was seen to speak to the interests of women drawn from a wide social
spectrum. In the end, her attempt to mobilize an ideal of shared feminine
piety cutting across the allegiances of class and province would have the
effect of enhancing not only her own authority, but that of the Empire itself.

NOTES

1 Anonymous (1477 [1910], 570): ‘expandens manus ad dominum sic oravit,

Domine deus omnipotens qui me orationibus tuae martyris Agne a lepra
mundasti et semittam mihi amoris tui propitius ostendisti porro virginis tuae
matris thalamum reserasti, ubi sponsus tu filius manifestatus es, tu genitus ex
Maria tu genitor probatus Mariae, tu eius lactatus huberibus tu etiam omnes
saeculum nutriens ... Peto itaque domine ut has Gallicani filias lucreris ... ut
ferventes as thalamum illum tuum caelestem pervenire studeant.’ On this
passio and related texts, see Leyser and Pilsworth (forthcoming).
2 In fact, Constantine’s daughter was called Constantina, while he had a sister and
niece called Constantia; see Jones et al. (1971, 222).
3 Daly (1968).
4 Warner (1976).
5 Clark (1990, 253–73).
6 Bidez and Hansen (1995, 38).
7 Young (1983, 180).
8 Young (1983, 196): Diodore of Tarsus, for example, was accused of asserting that
they were not.
9 Nestorius, First sermon, cited in Loofs (1905, 252), and discussed in Holum
(1982, 155).
10 Young (1983, 219) characterizes the view of Nestorius thus: ‘To attribute birth
and suffering and death to the Logos is to fall into pagan thinking and follow
the heresies of Apollinarius and Arius.’
11 Young (1983, 217).
12 Kelly (1977, 143).
13 Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians 18, 2 (PG 5, col. 660); Ignatius, Letter to the
Romans 6, 3 (PG 5, col. 694).
14 For discussion see Young (1983, 228), and literature cited there.
15 Young (1983, 228), arguing against the position sustained by Sellers and others
that the controversy was caused by political rather than theological differences.
16 Holum (1982, 163).
 114 Kate Cooper

17 On the sources for Chrysostom and Eudoxia, see Cooper (1996, 17–19), and
literature cited there. On the complex evidence for Pulcheria and Nestorius,
see Cooper (1998, 31–43).
18 Holum (1982, 164).
19 For discussion of Holum’s view and subsequent critiques, see Cooper (2004) and
Price (2004, 31–8).
20 Brubaker (1997, 52–75). See also Clark (1990) and Harrison (1989).
21 Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica VII. 34. 11 (ed. Hansen, 383, tr. Zenos, 172).
22 Pelikan (1996) on the history of the term.
23 Eusebius, Life of Constantine, 3.18 (PG 20, cols. 1101–4).
24 Benko (1993), esp. chap. 5, ‘The Women Who Sacrificed to Mary: The
Kollyridians’; Burrus (1991, 229–48).
25 The next three paragraphs summarize material discussed in greater detail in
Cooper (1998, 36–41).
26 Morin (1928, 398); the biblical citation is from Galatians 4.19.
27 PLS 3, col. 227; my translation.
28 E.g., Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 29.
29 Expositio psalmi CXVIII 20, 44 (CSEL 62, 466): ‘Utamur exemplo Sebastiani
martyris, cuius hodie natalis est.’
30 Expositio psalmi CXVIII, 20, 45 (CSEL 62, 466–7): ‘Sed quod peius, non hi
solum persecutores sunt qui videntur, sed etiam qui non videntur, et multo
plures persecutores ... Quis enim exceptus potest esse, cum ipse dominus
persecutionum temptamenta toleraverit? Persequitur avaritia, persequitur
ambitio, persequitur luxuria, persequitur superbia, persequitur fornicatio.’
31 See, for example, Expositio psalmi CXVIII, 20, 47 (CSEL 62, 468): ‘Quod est
amplius, non sermonis tantummodo, sed etiam operis testimonium praebuisti.
Quis enim locupletior testis es quam qui confitetur dominum Iesum in carne
venisse, cum evangelii praecepta custodit? Nam qui audit et non facit, negat
Christum; etsi verbo fatetur, operibus negat.’
32 Victricius, De laude sanctorum, 6 (PL 20, col. 1447): ‘Quid est enim aliud martyr
nisi Christi imitator Domitor rabidae voluptatis? Calcator ambitionis, et mortis
ambitor, contemptor divitiarum, compressor lasciviae, intemperantiae persecu-
tor? Cui numquam sceptrum prudentiae avaritia praeripuit, aut cupiditas
vindicari. Per hos virtutum gradus unde descenderat salvator ascendite.’
33 Valerianus of Cimiez, Homilia XV De bono martyrii, 5 (PL 52, 740): ‘Si vultis
ergo, dilectissimi, ut sit nobis in coelesti sede portio, quam victoribus Dominus
repromisit, imitemur primo loco sancti martyris fidem in confessione, et
sequamur viam ejus in virtute, nec dubitemus in amore Domini cruentis lictoris
manibus pectus opponere ... non deest autem in quo possis quotidie vincere, si
volueris carnis desideriis repugnare.’
34 Altman (1975, 1–11).
 The Virgin Mary and Female Authority 115

35 Altman implies obliquely that the shift can be accounted for by the changing
social function of hagiographical narrative as the Church itself is transformed
progressively from an embattled group of ‘outsiders’ to a normative cultural
institution. For the present discussion, it will suffice to acknowledge the wider
problem of the social function of imitatio.
36 Vauchez (1991, 164).
37 Discussed by Brasington (1992, 135–52).
38 For example, the frequently cited opinion of Gregory the Great, explaining to
his interlocutor in the Dialogues that not all qualities of the spiritually great
are to be imitated: ‘The freedom of their life must not be taken as an example
by the weak, lest, while someone presumes that he is similarly filled with the
Holy Spirit, he should disdain to be a disciple of a man and become the master
of error ... Thus Moses was taught his mission in the desert by an angel, not
instructed by a man. But these things, as I have already said, must be venerated
– not imitated – by the weak [sed haec, ut praediximus, infirmis veneranda
sunt, non imitanda].’ Gregory the Great, Dialogues 1.16–17 (SC 251, 22); Bras-
ington (1992, 143), discusses the importance of the citation for medieval debate
over legal precedent. What becomes apparent, if we compare the citation from
Gregory with its converse (‘an intention of imitating them, not ... of actual
worship’) formulated by Augustine in his altercation with the Manichaeans,
is that the attitude to imitatio varied, depending on a variety of factors.
39 Cooper (1998, 31–43).
40 Mulvey (1975, 6–18).
41 Jill Nelmes (1999, 277).
42 Culler (1982, 43–64).
43 Fredriksen (1986).
44 Harding (1987, 167–81).
45 In Cooper (1996) ‘The Imprisoned Heroine.’
46 A term which, to my knowledge, first appears with Sarbin (1986).
47 Crossley (2000, 96).
48 On the dedication, see Curran (2000, 128).
49 On reading aloud in early Christian communities, see Gamble (1995).
 6
Virgo Fortis: Images of the Crucified
Virgin Saint in Medieval Art
ilse friesen

Postmodern feminist artists have thrust the unsettling image of the crucified
woman into the contemporary public consciousness, a deliberate and pro-
vocative challenge to the most androcentric religious sensibilities. British
sculptor Edwina Sandys’s Christa (1975) depicts a naked woman pinned on a
cross. Other, more confrontational, works by Barbara Kruger and Sue Coe
exploit the form of the crucifix as a metaphor for misogyny and sexual
assault.1
Although such images, which allow for what Jerry Meyer identifies as a
‘diverse expressive, political and social commentary,’2 seem to be a radical
departure from the traditional crucifix, they share an antecedent in what was
once one of the most popular saints in Europe. In this essay I explore the
origins and popularity of St Wilgefortis, the female crucifix whose cult
rivalled at one time that of the Virgin Mary and whose most noticeable
feature is her luxuriant beard.
In his pragmatic assessment of the history of the female crucifix, Erwin
Panofsky speculated that the image of St Wilgefortis evolved from a depic-
tion of the crucified Christ in which his body is fully covered by a long gown
which is gathered by a belt. This type of robed crucifix follows an oriental or
Syrian-Palestinian tradition and may well have been read as a female figure
by viewers more familiar with the Hellenistic or Western crucifix, which is
unclothed.3 The most famous example of this type of draped (male) crucifix
is the so-called Volto Santo (literally ‘Holy Face’), preserved in the Cathedral
of Lucca in Italy. A monumental, larger-than-life-sized wood carving, it was
one of the most venerated images of the Middle Ages. From the twelfth
century on, the Volto Santo was the focus of pilgrimages and the object of
vows and votive offerings of precious garments, jewellery, and shoes, which
gradually came to constitute the ‘wardrobe’ of the statue for festive occa-
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 117

sions.4 Already by the end of the twelfth century, various copies of the Volto
Santo had been produced throughout Italy. Since some of these copies
portrayed the statue as wearing additional clothing, these images contrib-
uted to the spread of a rather strange legend which concerned a bearded
virgin on a cross. Apparently, the Volto Santo came to be misinterpreted as
depicting a crucified woman because of the statue’s long and festive robes.
It is of course impossible to know the specific process by which the image
of the bedizened crucifix was read as female, but obviously the idea appealed
to the popular imagination and may have resonated with preexisting legends
and cults. Were there already stories in circulation about bearded virgins?
Did the image tally with permutations of ancient stories of the bearded
goddess Aphrodite? Certainly by the Middle Ages there was a philosophical
understanding that virginity could be associated with transvestism. The
Alexandrian philosopher Philo wrote that women could attain the superior
masculine qualities of rationality by taking the active male role, best at-
tained by remaining a virgin.5 It is only a short step from this to the idea that
virgins have a predisposition towards transvestism; control of libido is asso-
ciated with masculinity in this conceptual system.6 Early and medieval
Christianity abounds with transvestite saints. St Margarita-Pelagius, to name
but one of the earliest examples, avoided marriage, dressed as a male, and
lived as a hermit.
Legends, carvings, paintings, and prints depicting this venerated virgin
were created and circulated throughout Europe from about 1400 on. She was
referred to as Wilgefortis or Liberata in Italy, Ontkommer in the Nether-
lands, Uncumber in England, and Kümmernis in the German-speaking coun-
tries. The bearded female saint is depicted in a woodcut by the Augsburg
artist Hans Burgkmair in the early sixteenth century. In most editions of the
print, the full text of her legend has also been added, adjoining the image to
the left.7 The woodcut carries a double title, with the result that the crucified
person can be regarded either as the Volto Santo or as Kümmernis.8 The
artist informs the viewer in the text on the margin of the print that this
virgin saint’s cult had originated in Steenbergen in Holland around 1400.9
According to the lengthy text on Burgkmair’s woodcut, and other sources,
Kümmernis had been the beautiful and wise daughter of a heathen Portu-
guese king. She had refused to submit to marriage to a Sicilian prince, and
for this her father had her imprisoned. Christ, in fact, was supposed to have
visited her in the dungeon, and she had subsequently prayed to be trans-
formed into his likeness so that her appearance would not please any man
but only her crucified Lord, whom she called her true spouse. In some
versions, her prospective husband did in fact glimpse her hirsute face under
her veil and called off the engagement. The outraged father had her cruci-
 118 Ilse Friesen

fied, whereupon she died a martyr’s death. Burgkmair concluded his text
with the statement that whoever called upon this virgin ‘Kumini’ in afflic-
tions or grief (‘Kummer’) would be helped by her. Consequently, she ac-
quired the symbolic name of ‘Kümmernis,’ which means that she not only
embodied grief but could also help to overcome it.
The saint was often associated with her discarded right shoe, which had
fallen onto the altar table below her or onto the ground. The account of the
gift of a shoe originated in the twelfth century and was originally connected
with the Volto Santo. This motif was later transferred onto Wilgefortis or
Kümmernis, who was said to have deposited one of her shoes in order to
reward a poor and pious fiddler who played in front of her. Burgkmair’s text
also includes the story of the fiddler who had encountered her in her last
hours; he was supposed to have played so fervently that she dropped him a
golden shoe as a reward for his compassion and piety. The text goes on to
note that when he carried this gift to a goldsmith in order to sell it, he was
suspected of theft. Faced with his impending execution, he asked to be
brought before the image once more. After placing the shoe back on the foot
he played again, and the image thereupon dropped the second shoe. This, the
first miracle of the bearded virgin martyr, convinced the authorities of the
man’s innocence, and he went away happily, ‘thanking God and Saint
Kuemmernuss.’10 The symbolism of the shoe encourages us to associate St
Kümmernis with fertility. Many European wedding ceremonies included
throwing shoes at the bride and groom, a custom which persists in the
practice of tying old shoes to the car which carries the bride and groom to
their honeymoon. Fairy tales such as Cinderella associate shoes with mar-
riage, and indeed the shoe, a container with an opening, has been interpreted
as a female sexual symbol.
Through the medium of the woodcut, the virgin saint, having renounced
her sexuality for the sake of a martyr’s death, was proclaimed as a model of
virginity, worthy of imitation by other women. She was hailed as exemplify-
ing the fact that God could bring about wonderful things in his saints:
‘Mirabilis deus in sanctis suis,’ as Burgkmair put it. Burgkmair’s reference to
‘Stouberg’ most likely referred to the town Steenbergen in North Brabant, a
site which had emerged since the fifteenth century as the centre of the cult
surrounding the crucified virgin. Unfortunately buildings associated with
Catholicism were destroyed by the Calvinists, so it is impossible to deter-
mine the extent of the cult of Kümmernis in this area. Since neither a tomb
nor any relics nor any historical records concerning this saint have ever been
found, scholars have concluded that she is an entirely fictional and legendary
medieval creation. This conclusion, however, raises as many questions as it
purports to answer. Why would the cult of such a fictional person become so
widespread and intensive that even crucifixes of Christ were adapted, recarved,
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 119

or dressed with additional and fashionable clothing in order to resemble a

woman’s appearance? Why did she pose such a threat to the Catholic Church
and why was she seen as competing with officially sanctioned cults of other
saints? Many of her pilgrimage sites in Germany and Austria, for example,
were later forcibly abandoned in order to conform to cults of the Virgin
Mary and other, more established, male or female saints. Many of her
images were removed or else deliberately destroyed, either by burning
them, by whitewashing the church walls which had borne her likeness, or by
confining her statues to inaccessible storage places.11
As we have noted, the simple explanation proposed by historians has been
that the cult of a female crucifix was nothing but an ignorant misunder-
standing of images of the robed, crucified Christ. This explanation, however,
does not account for the phenomenon of widespread veneration and pro-
found popularity of this virgin. A mere misunderstanding could surely not
have created a cult that flourished for at least five hundred years throughout
Europe, nor does it explain why the name of this strange and controversial
saint appeared repeatedly in so many different versions and languages. Her
most significant names were, in fact, not common names at all but, rather,
symbolic expressions of basic human experiences: Kümmernis, the embod-
ied figure of grief who also triumphed over it; Liberata, the liberated one;
Ontkommer, the one who escaped bondage; Uncumber, the one who liber-
ates women from cumbersome men and especially troublesome husbands;
and Wilgefortis, a name most likely derived from ‘Virgo fortis,’ the strong
virgin.
It is possible that this powerful virgin may in fact have been a primeval
and cross-cultural personification of mythical proportions, substantially older
than either Christian art or other forms of Western culture. It has been
suggested that images of the crucified Christ might have been adapted or
otherwise integrated to merge with ancient images of female figures.
Wilgefortis may, indeed, have been an archetypal figure, symbolizing the
predicament of human life, which was understood as centring around suffer-
ing, giving life, and enduring death. In this connection, her image can be
thought of as having embodied a prehistoric, bisexual power of fertility.
Some of her peculiar features, such as the combination of male and female
genders, were expressed in ancient art and mythology, beginning with the
ancient Egyptians and Classical antiquity, particularly with regard to myths
of a ‘Venus Barbata,’ the bearded Venus.12 It has also been suggested that
Wilgefortis may have been an ancient, androgynous divinity who was sup-
pressed once patriarchal religions were established and who was only much
later reinterpreted as an embodiment of the Christian ideal of virginity.13
In Germany, centres of this virgin’s worship could be found in all regions,
but especially in the Bavarian towns of Burghausen and Neufahrn. Relevant
 120 Ilse Friesen

shrines and pilgrimage sites have also been recorded in Switzerland, Austria,
Poland, Slovenia, and Bohemia, where she was known as ‘the Flemish saint.’
In Austria alone, sixteen pilgrimage sites of Kümmernis have been recorded,
ten of these in Tyrol. She has also been represented in Italy and Spain, and
images of her were even taken by German immigrants to Brazil, where,
according to a Catholic Hauskalender, her feast day, 20 July, was still being
observed as recently as 1936.14
Her great popularity was based on the fact that she was thought to be
helpful in curing all kinds of afflictions. She was especially, but not exclu-
sively, a women’s saint and was called upon in sexual dilemmas, cases of
infertility or illnesses of the reproductive organs, or in situations of violence,
such as rape. She was also a patron saint for people who were imprisoned or
for soldiers who were engaged in war. In particular, people who were close to
dying, as well as those who were caring for the terminally ill, prayed to her
for a peaceful death without agony. Because of the legend of her generous
gift to the poor fiddler, she also became the patron saint of musicians and
minstrels. Her beneficial intercession even extended beyond humans to
encompass pets and livestock. She was also said to be helpful during droughts,
bad harvests, floods, and even periods of high inflation.15
A total of about one thousand examples of this remarkable type of female
crucifix have survived.16 The oldest examples are large sculptures which
were created with reference to the Volto Santo. A significant number of
medieval images were either deliberately or unintentionally ambiguous
with regard to the true gender of the crucified figure. Some of these images
are consequently referred to by various titles, not only within local commu-
nities but also in several collections and catalogues. An example of this
phenomenon concerns a Romanesque wood carving of a crucifix from Uznach
near St Gallen, now housed in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich.
It is a large wood statue whose left arm is missing and whose right arm has
been restored, with traces of various previous colours still apparent on the
robe and mantle. For stylistic reasons it has been dated to the eleventh
century and is thus the oldest work of art in the museum. In the museum
catalogue, it is simply referred to as a crucifix, but there is also reference to
the fact that this robed crucifix was ‘later’ often reinterpreted as represent-
ing the virgin saint Kümmernis.17 The carving of the folds may, in spite of its
Romanesque rigidity, suggest an ascetic female body, at least in the eye of
some beholders; it becomes clear from this example how easily a robed
crucifix could be ‘misunderstood,’ thereby making a confusion of genders
possible and even likely.
One of the oldest medieval wood carvings in Bavaria is a crucifix which is
displayed in the pilgrimage church of Neufahrn near Freising (see figure 1).
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 121

Figure 1 ‘S Wilgefortis Sive Liberata’ from the altar of the Church of Neufahrn,
Bavaria, 1661
 122 Ilse Friesen

Figure 2 Altar panel 1 from the Church of Neufahrn, Bavaria

This local Gnadenbild, or image of grace, is thought to be a Romanesque

replica of the Volto Santo and has been dated to the twelfth century. It was
badly damaged in a fire in 1580 and was later restored and frequently
repainted. This Bavarian crucifix is to this day the centre and focus of the
Baroque high altar, where it is surrounded by adoring angels and carries the
inscription ‘S. Wilgefortis Sive Liberata V.M. 1661 H. Jungfrau u. Martyrerin
ohne Kümmernuss bitt fuer uns.’18 It is not clear at what time this crucifix
first became venerated as Wilgefortis. While pilgrimages to Neufahrn appar-
ently began in 1497, people may have originally worshipped Christ in the
form of this image.19
Seven panels on either side of the altar of this church portray the story of
a miraculously bleeding crucifix, which was said to have been found floating
on the nearby river Isar and was eventually brought to this pilgrimage site
(see figure 2). The panels, created in 1527, constitute unique and intriguing
visual documents of this local legend. In the panel paintings, the crucified
figure wears a gown gathered around the waist, which could easily lead to a
possible misrepresentation of the crucified person as being female.
It should be noted in this connection that Christ, during the course of the
Middle Ages, had not exclusively been represented as being male. He was
also understood to be a nursing mother, especially on account of his bleeding
wounds, which were regarded as nourishment for the faithful.20 This sym-
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 123

bolic merging of genders can already be observed in sculptures and paintings

of early Christian art in which the figure of Christ appears to feature delicate
breasts.21
Saint Ontkommer, as seen in images from the Netherlands created during
the fifteenth century, is even more specifically portrayed with female char-
acteristics. These include a delicate bosom, a slender waist, and a sinuous
lower body. She is always tied, with ropes around her wrists and ankles, to a
T-shaped cross. A tightly pulled rope usually gathers her full skirt in such a
way that the folds obscure her feet together with the lower part of the cross.
She is frequently depicted alone and abandoned in a valley which constitutes
part of a rocky and otherwise uninviting landscape.
The fame and appeal of the crucified virgin were so great that her repre-
sentations are not confined only to monumental statuary and portraiture
but also appear in artworks for private consumption, such as books and
textiles. The aforementioned woodcut by Burgmair indicates how deeply
rooted her cult was. As far as the Netherlandish variation of the crucified
virgin is concerned, it is obvious that the visual references to the Italian
origin of the image have become rather faint, particularly in book illumina-
tions from that region. The background behind the crucified virgin, which
features either abstract ornaments or else a barren landscape, has no connec-
tion with the original altar niche in the cathedral of Lucca, where the Volto
Santo is still housed. Neither has the fiddler found his way into the Nether-
landish cultural environment. As a result, Ontkommer’s shoes have lost
their symbolic significance and consequently remain hidden under her long
dress.
A Book of Hours, now in the University Library in Liège, consists of a
devotional text illuminated by miniatures which was possibly made for a
woman because of the feminine endings of some of the prayers; within this
book, a very different depiction of Saint Ontkommer can be found.22 The
bearded virgin, holding a large cross, is now seen in the company of several
other saints, including Francis, Mary Magdalene, and Dorothy. It is interest-
ing to observe that St Francis, the central figure of the group, is portrayed as
youthful and beardless, while St Ontkommer, standing at his side, sports a
well-developed and bushy beard which is discreetly, albeit only partly, cov-
ered by her cross. Her ample dress, however, leaves no doubt about the true
nature of her sex; she exhibits the curvilinear feminine elegance of an
aristocratic lady. She carries a book in her right hand, while her left hand
holds the cross and a piece of untied rope. Ontkommer is shown here as
having escaped from bondage and is therefore visualized in the symbolic
context of her name. Thus, both the cross and the rope are portrayed as
attributes of her liberating power.
 124 Ilse Friesen

Once the Hapsburgs adopted this strange virgin, along with numerous
other saints of the Burgundian court, Ontkommer could be found embroi-
dered on garments belonging to the treasuries of the Golden Fleece, now
housed in the Schatzkammer in Vienna. This aristocratic order became the
most significant dynastic and religious symbol of the House of Hapsburg.
Their treasures included a set of gold, silver, and silk textiles. The ‘most
costly vestments in the world,’ as these Burgundian parament treasures
have been called, ‘can be regarded as the finest work achieved in the art of
European embroidery.’23 These treasures were first mentioned in an inven-
tory of the order in 1477 but must have originated, at least in part, already in
the first half of the fifteenth century. The design of the figures in these
textiles, as well as the individual scenes within them, can be connected with
the greatest Netherlandish artists working at that time, such as Van Eyck,
Rogier van der Weyden, and Hugo van der Goes.24 These vestments have
rightly been called ‘a textile All Saints Feast,’ originating at a time when
Flanders was at the centre of cloth and garment production in Europe. One
of the vestments, called a tunicle, displays female saints in three rows: the
first saint in the second row on the left can be identified as Ontkommer or
Wilgefortis, while other panels portray saints such as Apollonia, Martha,
Cecilia, Christina, Agnes, Dorothy, and other, less familiar, individuals who
were only of local significance with regard to French and Netherlandish
sites. In this connection, Wilgefortis has been described as ‘bearded, crowned,
with the cross, in a blue dress with red used for the belt and the lining of the
sleeves, while the undergarment and mantle is green.’25 Similar to the
previously mentioned miniature depicting her in the Book of Hours, the
virgin saint is portrayed as standing upright while holding a large cross.
Pieces of rope can be seen dangling from the wood and are grasped by her
right hand; these attributes identify her as having escaped from the cross.
Between 1500 and 1515, Hieronymus Bosch painted an altar devoted to St
Julia, a work which now belongs to the inventory of the Doge’s Palace in
Venice. The central panel of this altar portrays the crucifixion of Julia of
Corsica.26 Julia, according to a medieval legend, was a noble maid born in
Carthage during the early Christian era; she was sold in slavery to a rich
Syrian merchant called Eusebius, who brought her to the island of Corsica.
Since she was not willing to make sacrifices to heathen gods, she was
crucified by order of the local governor Felix. Monks later rescued her body
and brought it to Brescia. In time, she became the patron saint of Corsica as
well as of Leghorn (Livorno).27
In Bosch’s painting, Julia’s master, Eusebius, has collapsed to the ground,
either because of weakness or because he is drunk. This unflattering detail
may indicate Bosch’s grim sense of humour, together with his sarcastic view
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 125

of the nature of man.28 While Bosch appears to have used aspects of the
iconography of the crucifixion here, he ingeniously reverses the genders of
the main protagonists. Thus, Christ has been replaced by Julia, while the
uncouth Eusebius has assumed the role of the swooning Virgin Mary. There
is no proof that Julia, as presented in this painting, is actually intended to
represent Wilgefortis or Ontkommer, names which were presumably famil-
iar to Bosch as part of his Netherlandish religious background. He may have
painted this triptych during a trip to northern Italy, a region in which St Julia
was more popular than St Ontkommer. Consequently, he could have been
commissioned to paint this altar for Italian merchants or diplomats who
were active in the Netherlands during that time.29
It is interesting to note in this context that an Italian art historian, Dino
Buzzati, described this work as representing the martyrdom of St Liberata.
He was convinced that Bosch was depicting not St Julia, but rather
‘Ontcommer, cioe Liberata o “Virgo Fortis.”’ Interestingly, a book on Vene-
tian painting published in 1771 characterized Bosch’s painting as represent-
ing the crucifixion of either a male or a female martyr.30 The crucial detail of
this martyr’s beard is so delicately indicated that one could easily miss it and
therefore believe her to be St Julia. Once the beard is noticed, however, the
figure can clearly be identified as St Ontkommer. Bosch was apparently
shrewd enough to combine the iconography of Julia with that of Ontkommer,
thereby pleasing both Italian and Dutch patrons.
As mentioned above, Bosch was active at a time when the intense piety of
the Middle Ages had reached its climax. This piety was based, to a consider-
able degree, on the acceptance, or even deliberate seeking out, of physical
suffering, especially on the part of virgins who had taken religious vows.
Some popular images in illuminated manuscripts from that era show Christ
carrying the cross while followed by a personification of Love or Minne, who
is carrying her own cross, which is similar to that of Christ. She is portrayed
either as walking closely behind him or else as residing in his heart on the
cross itself.31
During the second half of the sixteenth century, Wilgefortis was depicted
with decreasing frequency due to a temporary decline in her popularity.
Humanists such as Thomas More, among others, were highly critical of her
because of the gross superstitions which flourished at her cult sites.32 Also,
the fictional nature of her origins, and especially her strange bearded appear-
ance, were no longer considered spiritually uplifting or aesthetically desir-
able. Only during the Counter Reformation, when some former devotional
trends were reactivated, did Wilgefortis regain some of her previous popu-
larity. During the Baroque era, her cult became so widespread, especially
among the population of the countryside and in alpine regions, that church
 126 Ilse Friesen

authorities felt compelled to discourage these devotions. While contempo-

rary artists have created many daring and provocative visualizations of a
female crucified figure, it has to be remembered that such controversial
images were already an integral part of the culture of the Middle Ages.

NOTES

1 Barbara Kruger’s work It’s Our Pleasure to Disgust You (1991) depicts a woman
in a gas mask pinned to a cross. Sue Coe’s Gray Rape (1983) shows a woman
being gang raped as if she were nailed to the cross. For further discussion and
other examples see Meyer (1997).
2 Meyer (1997, 27).
3 Panofsky (1923, 37).
4 While dating from about 1200, the Volto Santo is probably a replica of an
earlier image made in 1100 or even earlier. According to a medieval legend, the
image had originally been carved by Nicodemus in response to his witnessing
of the crucifixion at Golgotha. Angels, in turn, were said to have completed the
face of Christ while the artist was asleep. According to this legend, the sculpture
was brought to Lucca from Palestine as early as the eighth century. See
Haussherr (1962, 136, 153).
5 Philo, Questions and Answers, cited in Bullough (1974, 1382).
6 Bullough (1974, 1392) notes that medieval society condoned transvestism in
women because it signified their superiority to other women. Male transves-
tites, on the other hand, experienced a loss of social status.
7 Falk (1946, 64).
8 One cannot help but ask why Burgkmair, a court artist with connections to
leading humanists in southern Germany, obfuscated the identity of this image
by naming it as both the Volto Santo and Kümmernis. A possible answer lies in
the fact that the various traditions concerning a bearded and clothed crucifix
had merged in the arena of popular devotion to such an extent that people of
the late Middle Ages were not troubled by the sight of either male or female
crucifixes. It might also have been politically advantageous for the artist to
merge the two images in that the Netherlands had recently been incorporated
into the Hapsburg empire; in this way, pilgrimage routes could be redirected to
cult sites in the newly incorporated territory. Burgkmair could therefore have
seized the opportunity to advertise and publicize a new geographical and
political unity by integrating German, Italian, and Netherlandish religious
traditions concerning various saints, especially those involving the robed
crucifix in both its male and female manifestations.
9 Burkhard (1932, 29).
 Images of the Crucified Virgin Saint 127

10 Depictions of the dropped shoe can be found in numerous Central European

prints, paintings, and sculptures dating from the Middle Ages to the early
twentieth century. For further discussion see Friesen (2001, 35–45).
11 See Friesen (2001, 5–7) for an account of how the author located some of the
most arcane of these images.
12 MacLachlan (2002, 369–83).
13 Lexikon der Kunst, 3, 180.
14 Schreiber (1937, 33, 34, 61); Gugitz (1985, 83).
15 Handwörterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens 807–10.
16 Schnürer and Ritz (1934).
17 Baier-Futterer (1936, 6, fig.7).
18 This can translated as ‘Saint Wilgefortis or Liberata, Holy Virgin and Martyr
without Grief Pray for Us, 1661.’
19 Staber (1955, 55, 94).
20 Bynum (1982).
21 Newman (1993, 121–2).
22 Marrow (1989, 61, fig. 18, nr. 13).
23 Catalogue of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, The Secular and Ecclesias-
tical Treasuries, Illustrated Guide (1991, 208).
24 Leithe-Jasper and Distelberger (1982, 42).
25 Schlosser (1912, 25, figs. 28 and 29).
26 Bosing (1987, 84).
27 Thurston and Attwater (1956, 367).
28 Linfert (1970, 72, fig. 17).
29 Gibson (1973, 17).
30 Buzzati (1966, 96).
31 Büttner (1983, 59, fig. 48); Hamburger (1997, plate 10).
32 Shinners (1997, 201–2).
 7
Amplification of the Virgin: Play and
Empowerment in Walter of Wimborne’s
Marie Carmina
jenifer sutherland

The men and women who turned to the Virgin Mary for spiritual comfort
and guidance in the Middle Ages may have felt that the Mother of God was
more approachable than the Father. Certainly this is true of thirteenth-
century Franciscan writer Walter of Wimborne. His poetry expresses am-
bivalence towards the God who ‘prius rigidus et quasi seuiens / sub lege
fuerat et leo rugiens’ (previously under the law was rigid / and like a raging,
roaring lion), a God who held in his hand ‘ferulam ... et trucem uirgulam’
(the whip and savage rod). Walter seems to have been a schoolmaster at
Wimborne Minster in Dorset, a member of the college of secular canons who
may have studied at Oxford. He likely joined the Franciscans soon after they
were established in England at Salisbury, serving as eighth Franciscan lector
at Cambridge from 1261 to 1263, and ended his days in a Franciscan house in
Norwich.1 One of his early poems is dedicated to ‘infantibus quorum sum
flagio’ (the little children whose whip I am).2 Corporal punishment was a
routine part of the teaching of grammar, and the personified figure Gram-
mar is often depicted holding a flail. For Walter, and perhaps many others
like him, the Virgin Mother may have offered compensation for a premature
separation from his own mother as he was sent off to acquire his Latin
letters at the end of a rod. The reasons for Walter’s particular attachment to
Mary are not accessible to us; his poetry, however, affords a look at the ways
his devotion to the Virgin moved him to ask difficult questions of his world
and his faith.
Walter of Wimborne understood the importance of the Virgin as an
image. In his Moral Treatise on the Four Elements he tells the following
story, popular in his day:

When the leaders of the city of Rome thought to honour its greatness with a visible
image, they set about eagerly to have made out of bronze, with exquisite workman-
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 129

ship, the form of a woman, holding an orb in her right hand. The statue being of
perfect and exceptional form, certain men alleged that her shins alone were inad-
equate to support such a mass. The craftsman replied that the shins would do until
that time when a virgin gave birth, believing such a thing impossible.3

You can see what’s coming: ‘When the birth of Christ was accomplished,
the statue shattered and collapsed.’4 Walter uses the image of the monumen-
tal bronze woman to suggest the complete collapse of the ancient world: the
virgin birth was not simply a miracle; it was a revolution. Yet the image of
the shattered bronze woman is not removed but replaced, transformed, and
so, in some way, continued by Mary. Mary is the centrepiece in the City of
God, bronze cast replaced by radiant flesh, her basic humanity enhanced by a
wardrobe of images gathered from classical, biblical, and other sources.
Walter’s use of these images in his last extant work provides valuable insight
into the way sexual renunciation functioned in the collective psyche of the
later Middle Ages.
Walter’s earliest works are satirical poems, filled with classical references,
decrying flattery, bribery, and the greed of present times. His middle work,
the very long Moral Treatise on the Four Elements quoted from above,
offers a grab bag of science in the service of allegorical and moral exegesis of
scripture. Beryl Smalley, on the strength of these writings, counts him
among her ‘classicizing friars.’5 In his later poems in praise of Mary, Walter
demonstrates the kind of affective piety and Marian devotion that has been
particularly associated with the Franciscan order. All of his works contain
themes and elaborations that are part of his order’s development yet are
unmistakably idiosyncratic. The main focus of the present article is Marie
Carmina, which A.G. Rigg has argued convincingly to be Walter’s final
work.6
By the thirteenth century the Christian West had developed a vast fund of
Marian imagery, much of it a product of popular piety. More than eight
hundred years before Walter, in the year 431, a crowd protesting the heretic
Nestor’s denial of the virgin birth marched through the streets of Ephesus
chanting ‘Theotokos!’ From the icons of the Eastern Church to the interpre-
tive tituli of Western church architecture, the God-Bearer was praised in
images that became increasingly familiar. Hymns, often in the famous Stabat
Mater stanza associated with the Abbey of Saint Victor, were vehicles for
Marian epithets. Walter wrote one such hymn himself: ‘Ave Virgo Mater
Christi.’ Each of its 164 stanzas makes some claim for the Virgin based on a
more or less conventional image:

Hail, virgin, sweet luminary,

who are gloss and commentary
 130 Jenifer Sutherland

of scripture’s prophetic call,

whose long awaited gloss lays bare
what for so long lay hidden there
underneath the literal.7

To call Mary ‘gloss and commentary’ is by no means to diminish her

status. Scriptural commentary gathered together by Fulbert of Chartres and
Anselm of Laon and others into the Glossa Ordinaria compensated for
Mary’s minimal presence in the Bible by interpreting verses from the Old
and New Testaments as references to Christ’s mother. Marian typology in
the Ordinaria and the devotions of men such as Ambrose and the mystic
Hugo of Saint Victor, who gave the Virgin the role of the bride in Solomon’s
Song of Songs, combined to pave the way for more extravagantly Marian
glosses. In the Biblia Maria, attributed for a long time to Albert the Great,
the Blessed Virgin was Noah’s ark, the dove that flew out from it, the olive
branch the dove carried, and the rainbow of God’s promise. She was the holy
tabernacle of Isaiah, the throne of the incarnation of the son of God and the
flowering rod of Jesse. She was every good woman mentioned in the Hebrew
scriptures as well as the woman of John’s revelation of the Apocalypse,
groaning in travail, the moon beneath her feet and a crown of stars on her
head. Mary was Eve redeemed, Wisdom, Mother of God, sister of men, bride
of Christ, and the eternal Beloved.
Slowly over centuries the bronze figure of the woman in the centre of
Rome was supplanted by the new queen of the City of God. Her public
presence was every bit as monumental as that of the woman of bronze, but
far from being an unwieldy mass of alloy she was as intimate as every man’s
soul. The Virgin’s dual function as private belonging and public presence is
the key to her power. For a glimpse of her more intimate face we turn to
some of the opening stanzas of Walter’s Marie Carmina. Acting as muse,
Mary has appeared before the poet as he writes, placing the pen of her praise
in the poet’s modestly unwilling hand. He looks to her womb for inspiration:

Pausing for a moment, I raise my trembling eyes

To where the sacred belly of the Virgin lies;
I see the swelling, but no navel8 can devise
and I wonder what source feeds the sealed vessel’s rise.

Rising, I circle round the waist’s purse bulging,

desiring to know how the vessel is holding
the sacred weight without compromising
either covering or seal, or fastening.
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 131

Wondering, again wondering at this miracle,

I discover a confessional, or cubicle
and finally, see something softly spherical
and hiding deep within, the deer celestial.

I walk, turning around the belly’s little mound,

scarcely aware of the perfume rising around;
so breaking forth my tears and moans abound
and seeking the Virgin’s foot again I sink down.9

Under Walter’s gaze the Virgin is immobile; he imagines her as real, but
she very well could be a statue, although in a private rather than public place.
Her presence is signalled by a rising perfume, but the tears and the turning
and falling are Walter’s. This kind of affective piety is often identified, as I
have said, with the Franciscans, but, in fact, devotional practice was highly
articulated in the Middle Ages by more than one order. Hugh of Saint Victor,
for example, distinguishes between meditation, a sort of linear problem-
solving in his view, and contemplation, a holistic embrace of the divine
presence.10 Bernard of Clairvaux, a mystical writer whose sermons on Mary
and the Song of Songs Walter knew very well, was Cistercian. Another
Cisterician with a similar devotional temperament was Aelred, the famous
twelfth-century abbot of Rievaulx in Yorkshire, who instructed his own
cloistered sister in a method for the female celibate’s spiritual develop-
ment.11 Sexual renunciation allows the contemplative to identify with the
Virgin Mother in her life with Christ, he wrote. Aelred urged his sister to
meditate on the past – the annunciation and conception, Christ’s childhood,
ministry and crucifixion – allowing her mind to engage with the narrative in
order to bring the story home to her own soul in its present and future life.
Mary is a complex figure who allows her devotee to stand with her in a
number of different relationships: as sister and daughter, and through her to
Christ as sister, daughter and lover. Walter’s Marie Carmina is a poetic
variation of this threefold meditation, but, as might be expected, the fact that
its author is a man complicates his relationship with Mary. She is mother
and sister but also beloved, as well as the beloved of both Christ and God the
Father.12 In stanzas 13 and 14, keeping his gaze fixed on the figure of Mary,
Walter begins to experience the Virgin’s conception of Christ:

Mary, you speak, for rivers of honey rushing

down from your lips are sweetly trickling
and with such a surging springs of milk are gushing
that in a sweet milky flood the world is drowning.
 132 Jenifer Sutherland

By this honey the lord is drawn down from heaven;

with this honey suckle to the father’s son is given;
once sent, to the honey right away he’s taken,
a kiss of honey from the honey to awaken.13

The sensual, indeed openly erotic language of these stanzas is not particu-
lar to Walter’s sensibility. We might say that the libido has been transferred
from a physical object of desire to the divine image. Medieval contemplatives
would have no difficulty with that transference; the point of contemplation
is to move available energy away from the physical by redirecting it towards
a spiritual end. The source of the erotic language is the Song of Solomon:
‘Your lips distill nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue.’14
Bernard meditates on the bride’s kiss in his second sermon on the Songs.15
Walter, in his Moral Treatise, writes: ‘A kiss is not given from afar; no one in
Paris can give a kiss to one in Rome ... In a kiss there is contact and a joining
of faces ... The one who contemplates must join his face to the divine face.’
The contemplative, according to Walter, is a passionate lover who enters the
thalamus, the bedchamber of the bridegroom.16
The female contemplative renounces sex with an earthly companion be-
cause she longs for her divine lover. She seeks him, opening herself to his
embrace. The male contemplative, as a virgin, often identifies with the bride
who seeks the bridegroom’s kisses. Or, he may make the Virgin herself his
beloved.17 Either way, his ecstatic approach to the divine presence draws past
and future into a transformative present; the future union in death of soul
and God is subsumed in the present union of the virgin meditator with the
Virgin Mediator.
In theory at least. Those, however, who have read medieval guides to
mystical practice such as the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing18 may doubt
that 644 quatrains of rhythmical aesclepiads qualify as ecstatic union, the
poet’s claim to virginity notwithstanding. Fair enough: while the Middle
Ages have left us manuals for the instruction of contemplation, and master-
ful sermons meant to inspire contemplation, the actual practice of the con-
templative is incommunicable, being by its very nature a private commun-
ion between one soul and its Beloved. Walter’s Marie Carmina, moreover, is
neither manual nor sermon nor even hymn,19 but rather a kind of metrical
exploration of the territory and its themes. Indeed, repetition, rhythm, and
metre seem to draw him into places he might never have ventured without
the stanzaic form, which may, perhaps, have lulled him into thinking he was
safe within its strictly limited boundaries. Certainly, his prose treatise shows
none of the daring, even outrageous, tinkering with scriptural narrative that
he demonstrates in his last extant poem. ‘Be a child with child Jesus!’ the
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 133

Pseudo Bonaventure urges the ‘daughter’ who is the reader of his medita-
tions on the life of Christ.20 Although it is unlikely Walter had read the
Meditations, in Marie Carmina he plays at the feet of the Virgin Mother
with often childlike naiveté.
In his groundbreaking study of children’s play, Jean Piaget identified two
poles of ego development – accommodation of the ego to reality and assimi-
lation of reality to the ego. Imaginative play works towards both these ends.
When a child plays with a doll, for example, she identifies with it as the
object of various familiar and imagined experiences drawn from family life;
but she also has mastery over it as, with the doll as subject, she relates these
experiences from her own perspective.21 Female mystics of the thirteenth
century actually dressed life-sized baby dolls and laid them into cradles as
part of the liturgy. They sometimes clothed themselves as brides when they
went to receive the Eucharist.22 These aids to worship must have helped the
women both assimilate and accommodate themselves to the spiritual con-
tent of Christian doctrine as well as the reality of daily life in convents and
beguinages.
Male contemplatives, like Walter, did not, as far as we know, play with
dolls. Instead, some of them used language to tame the divine and bring
themselves into the intimacy of play. In stanza 221 of the Marie Carmina
Walter has seen the Magi come with their gifts, then leave:

Let others go home to their countries, I will stay,

our little boy in his cradle gently to sway;
those who wish let them leave; I will not go away
but will cling to the cradle by night and by day.23

Spoken aloud the Latin lines resonate with the rhythms of Dr Seuss. There is
a kind of comfort in the repetition of the single rhyme and the sing-song
metre that fits like an old and well-loved blanket. But what has become of
Mary? Earlier I remarked that men sometimes identified directly with the
Virgin Mother. In this scene Walter assumes the Virgin’s point of view,
looking over her shoulder as she offers her breast to the baby:

... I stay behind to see the breast which the Virgin

offers to her tiny wee little newborn son.

The tiny babe sits in his mother’s lap secure

and now with moistened lips a kiss he offers her,
a dewy kiss sweetened with intimate mixture
of saliva sprinkling its sweet melting moisture.
 134 Jenifer Sutherland

The infant’s tiny body Mary is turning,

now the cheeks, the mouth, now the tiny neck kissing,
the hand, tiny arm, chest and back of the princeling,
the thigh, tiny leg, foot and knee of the kingling.24

Walter’s over-the-shoulder view participates in the pleasure of both the

mother kissing and the child being kissed. Allow me to argue for a moment
that for Walter the Virgin has become a kind of soul-doll, figuring in his
personal devotion, in his approach, that is, to God, the way a doll a child has
designated as ‘Mommy’ figures in the imagination of a pre-adolescent girl
or boy, offering the child an opportunity to play at owning the adult woman’s
power over the child’s body. Dolls, according to Piaget, ‘are a symbolic
construction with multiple functions which borrows its means of expression
from the family but is by its content related to the whole life of the child.’25
If we replace Piaget’s ‘family’ with Roman Catholicism’s Holy Family we
can imagine that Walter’s elaborately constructed praise of Mary allows him
to minister to himself according to a whole range of possible needs created
by past experiences and present circumstances, even as the stanzaic form of
his poetry, with its overlapping images and repetitions, draws him into the
future.
Before I comment further on the nature of the reality Walter is playing
with in Marie Carmina, it is important to look more closely at the wardrobe
of images Walter has available to him in his verbal doll-play. I have charac-
terized Mary as a Mommy doll, but we have seen that she is also a lover with
honey under her tongue. In fact, in her wealth of accessory images it is
tempting to compare Mary to a Barbie doll with its pre-tailored, packaged,
and labelled outfits for every imaginable occasion. Many children wish they
were the owners of the full range of Barbie’s wardrobe; Walter, writing
squarely within the tradition of Marian devotion, has instant access to all of
Mary’s wealth. In fact, a glance at the contents of an encyclopedia of Marian
praise – once again attributed to Albertus Magnus, but now believed to be
the work of a canon at the Cathedral of Rouen, Richard of St Laurent26 –
reveals how richly elaborated are the costumes that support the enormous
repertoire of Mary’s roles. The headings alone of the Twelve Books of the De
laudibus Beatae Marie virginis state that the Blessed Virgin was full of
grace, without sin of intercourse, without pain of childbirth, at once mother
and virgin. In the first several books the author establishes the Virgin’s
feminine form as exemplary, much the way the ripe proportions of Barbie
establish an ideal of feminine maturation for the pre-adolescent girl or
boy.27 In Book Six, Richard indicates the relationships which are possible
between the meditator and his mediator – she is mother, friend, sister,
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 135

beloved, daughter, betrothed, wife, widow, good woman, virgin, strong woman
(virago), and queen. In Book Seven, he establishes the extent of her realm –
she is heaven, the firmament, sun, moon, horizon, morning star, dawn,
daylight, morning, and day, as well as a cloud of protection from the sun’s
intensity. In Books Eight through Eleven, Richard attributes to Mary a
collection of outfits and accessories appropriate to a complete presence on
Earth, dressing her as field and stone, fountain and sea, temple, church,
library, bedroom, fortress, ship and tavern – and that’s merely to hint at her
quick-change artistry. Finally, in Book Twelve, we arrive at the hortus
conclusus, Eve’s garden redeemed.28 Most of these images are biblical; the
exceptions are the library and the tavern. Leaving to Boethius the develop-
ment of the library as an image of interior wealth,29 I will consider Walter’s
conception of Mary as tavern.
In medieval Latin taverna is not just any shop but specifically a shop that
sells wine. Stanzas 132–42 demonstrate what Walter does with the collection
of accessories labelled Maria taverna:

Her belly’s cask Maria has consecrated;

mortals, angels and shades be inebriated;
let the poor man along with the rich be invited,
to drain wine from that cask until he is sated.

The angelic throng from the belly’s cask tipples,

drunk from it too are all the catholic peoples;
alone in despising it are Jewish pit-bulls –
excellent wine! they are oenephobic cripples.

To see the tavern close is excruciating;

so damn close and yet so far my hand is shaking;
I’m nowhere near paying what it costs for slaking
thirst with the likes of the wine the Virgin’s making.

Desperate now, I’m within sight of Mary’s store;

I open gaping wide my throat, so dry it’s sore;
gasping internally I pound the tavern door –
one little drinkypoo or a teensy trickle more!30

Walter indulges this alcoholic grovelling for another seven stanzas. Am-
plification was a more popular rhetorical device in Walter’s day than it is in
ours. In fact, at the beginning of the thirteenth century the rhetorician
Geoffrey of Vinsauf wrote: ‘If you choose an amplified form, proceed first of
 136 Jenifer Sutherland

all by this step: although the meaning is one, let it not come content with one
set of apparel. Let it vary its robes and assume different raiment.’31 The
power of the Virgin, I would suggest, comes to the contemplative through
precisely these varied robes, manipulated in a playful combination of ego
accommodation and assimilation. To our minds, perhaps, Walter gives away
more than he gets at Mary’s tavern, but by carefully inscribing his craving
for drunken love in metrical verse he is subordinating undisciplined desire to
purposeful repetition, the key to the contemplative project. We may believe
from our particular temporal lookout that he is breaking one or another rule
of decorum, but in fact Walter plays fair from start to finish. Once again the
game metaphor is useful here since everyone is familiar with the endless
diversionary tactics of the child’s imaginative invitation ‘let’s just say.’ ‘Let’s
just say’ allows the figure who one moment ago was exchanging honeyed
kisses with the godhead to adopt in the next moment the attitude of a
(somewhat discouraging) patroness of an English local.
Is the aging Franciscan celibate pining after a youth spent in the pub? This
would be far too simplistic an interpretation to do justice to an extraordinary
passage, and we do not know enough about Walter to guess at what meaning
these stanzas contain for him. We must take him at his own word, that he
craves Mary’s potent wine. The tradition of mystical contemplation gives
him ample room to express this craving, and while the eleven tavern stanzas
of Marie Carmina are outrageous, they are by no means outside the pale.
Peter Comester (d. 1179) describes Holy Scripture as ‘God’s dining room,
where the guests are made soberly drunk’ and also refers to the ‘sober
drunkenness’ of the mystics.32 Walter, it may be countered, seems suscep-
tible as a poet more to the inebriating possibilities of rhyme and metre than
to the mystical pleasures of scripture. However, within the next fifty or so
stanzas he recovers and embarks on a more conventional, scripture-based
‘let’s just say,’ for a while at least.
What Walter actually writes at the start of his narrative section of the
poem is ‘Pono quod reuocet Deus hoc tempora,’ or, in Rigg’s translation: ‘Let
us suppose that God brings back those times.’33 Rigg notes that the abbrevi-
ated version of the poem that survives from the fourteenth century omits
this stanza:34 can it be that Walter’s near-contemporary sensed the audacity
of our poet’s authorial manipulation of the deity? In any case, in the process
of supposing the return of those times, Walter, naturally enough, imposes on
them the structures of his Franciscan theology. One of the suggestions taken
up in the thirteenth-century development of Marian devotion was that the
two courts of divine Justice and Mercy were separately presided over by the
ruling figures of Christ and Mary respectively.35 The enormous popularity
of the Greek legend of Theophilus, translated by Paul the Deacon of Naples
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 137

in the ninth century, and increasingly retold in the West of the high Middle
Ages, attests to the extent to which the division appealed to the imagination
of the age. As the legend has it, clerical ambition drove Theophilus to sign a
pact with the devil. Nonetheless, because of his continued devotion to the
Virgin, when Theophilus died and the devil came to collect on his contract,
Mary ripped up the signed document and released the sinner to heaven. To
put the moral of the story in Piagetian terms: Christ, as a figure of justice,
gets associated with his chief executive officer, the devil; both require the ego
to accommodate to the reality of divine justice. Mary dismisses the devil and
his consequences, allowing the ego to assimilate divine reality to its own
terms of justice. This is not to say that the rules of the Marian game are so
flexible as to become meaningless. Submission to the Lady can be exacting.
In an earlier sequence of Marie Carmina Walter writes that inside Mary’s
womb the whips and scourges of the Old Testament God are transformed
into ‘a fiddle of rejoicing.’36 In the passage below, the whips are returned,
this time to the hand of Mary:

I will if you command go down on all fours as

your donkey; roll up the child’s clothing and we’ll pass
on our way, flying by night without a witness
so that the wicked enemy has no notice.

I am the donkey, so onto me now transfers

the Virgin’s small weight and the little one that’s hers;
if the brute should falter, then, Virgin, he deserves
that you goad with your heels, give him your bloodied spurs.

Should the beast falter and under the sweet weight trip
it’s up to you to lash him, to prick and to grip
with the spurs; should he kick, unwilling to gallop
then punish the wretched little ass with your whip.

I am your ass, for whatever reason, freely

you may kill me, I’m your beast and property;
if when he’s meant to run the ass walks unwillingly
why not plunge the spur into its side instantly?

With your sweet right hand, if the beast goes slow

snatch up the whip; you’re the mistress, with thick strokes show
the wretched creature, till with bloody sides he knows
your sacred heels, and then again repeat the blows.37
 138 Jenifer Sutherland

The whips and scourges of God’s judgments inflict pain; those wielded by
the Virgin dominatrix seem rather to give pleasure.38 In the first instance,
Walter represents humanity as victims of divine wrath, whereas in the
second, he is the Virgin’s willing accomplice.
Johann Huizinga wrote that not only does play create order, ‘it is order.’
Play tests a player’s prowess but also ‘his spiritual powers – his “fairness”;
because, despite his ardent desire to win, he must still stick to the rules of the
game.’39 The game of Our Lady has only one rule, and that is total devotion.
But total devotion to the mother clashes with the threefold meditation in the
two places in the New Testament where Jesus himself made a point of
separating from his mother, first at the age of twelve and then at his death,
aged thirty-three. These will therefore be crucial scenes for Walter. Indeed,
when his narration follows the Holy Family to Jerusalem at Passover only to
have the boy Jesus disappear, leaving his mother frantically searching for her
lost child, Walter takes Christ to court, calling on the Father to act as the
judge on behalf of higher justice and, in spite of the precocious boy’s
pretensions to divinity, to decide in Mary’s favour:

On behalf of My Lady, Lord, I make my plea:

Let the judge of mercy and piety decree
Whether, free of the slightest criminality,
A woman should endure such pain and cruelty.

He will not use words against the Word but instead calls on the expres-
sions of the mother’s suffering as supporting witnesses:

The witness trembling at the stand with anxious eyes

is mother of a thousand tears, a thousand sighs;
and if I add a hundred thousand groaning cries,
see the crowd of people, a family uprise!40

Walter wins his case and Christ is returned to his mother, but since the
court has lasted three days, scriptural integrity is unaffected. Furthermore,
Walter has reinforced the story of the crucifixion by creating a little allegory
for the final return of the son following his three-day separation of Mary
from her son at Calvary. Still, the fact that he has arranged for the outcome
on his terms, with God the father acknowledging Walter’s righteous indig-
nation on the mother’s behalf, is no small accomplishment. Walter has
interpreted the hard things of his faith in a way he can live with. This
repetition of the scriptural narrative with the purpose of its assimilation to
the ego of the narrator is an important part of imaginative play.
We see this work of the ego again later in the poem in the midst of some
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 139

rather conventional verses on human vanity. Walter may have held the
Franciscan lector’s chair at Cambridge for a term but likely spent most of his
teaching life instructing schoolboys in the lowly basics of Latin grammar. It
is one thing to submit to the Celestial Queen-Mother, quite another to
tolerate a fellow human being, especially a colleague with a superior teach-
ing post. Walter’s treatment of the conventional topos of the vanity of
human knowledge suggests that his nose has been put out of joint on more
than one occasion during the course of his professional life. In a tenth-
century Coptic text of ritual magic, the Creator is called upon to ‘obliterate
all the power of the adversary, / and make all his power become like the
power of a gnat.’41 In dealing with his own adversary, Walter gives an ironic
twist to this curse, calling on the mysteries of the gnat to obliterate the
power of his adversary:

I don’t want to make a speech about the stars at all,

or set forth any topic that’s celestial,
I wish to play instead with the smallest of the small
and seek what to the tiny gnat is natural.

The gnat with its sting first makes its incision,

drawing waves of blood into its inner region;
you’ve got two days to find out what constriction,
what little pipe or fissure gives the gnat suction.

Into its guts the gnat sucking delicately

draws thick blood; you from whom highest reality
cannot be hidden, nor deepest profundity,
unfold the ways lead by this fragile entity.

You know the source that causes the earthquake’s motion,

and the ebb and flow of the waves of the ocean,
what’s engendered by the mineral concoction;
look how easily stumped you are by my question.

You who blabber on, your empty words so risible

about heaven’s spheres and stars inummerable;
tell me, I ask you, how with barely visible
conduits the gnat can make blood drinkable.42

Whatever the passage may suggest about the effect of the Aristotelian
translations on the thirteenth-century project of science, its tone taps an
undercurrent of self-righteous peevishness tugging at Walter’s long-suffer-
 140 Jenifer Sutherland

ing humility. The Virgin-Mother doll may stand in for the highest Queen of
Heaven, but she is tethered to the emotional complexities of the ordinary
human being who manipulates her.
As Walter’s poem approaches the defining moment of the Christian story,
we are increasingly caught up in a drama that moves beyond the terms of an
individual imagination while still retaining the stamp of that individuality.
Piaget has remarked ‘that every symbolic game, even if it is an individual
game, sooner or later becomes a performance given by the child to an
imaginary companion, and that every collective symbolic game, even the
most highly organized, retains something of the ineffable which character-
izes the individual symbol.’43 It is instructive to recall that Walter probably
died in the last decade or so of the thirteenth century and that in 1290 all
Jews were expelled from England. The reader will have noticed, earlier in the
Maria taverna passage, Walter’s disparaging reference to the ‘Jewish dogs’
who lack an appreciation of good wine. Walter has his quibbles with scholars;
he may even view them, in his everyday struggle, as the players. Jews,
however, once insiders, have ruined the game; they’re what Huizinga would
call spoilsports:

The spoilsport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to
be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is
curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoilsport.
This is because the spoilsport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the
game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had
temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion – a pregnant word
which means literally ‘in-play’ (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). Therefore he
must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.44

This is an apt description of Walter’s relationship with ‘Judeus.’ Walter

breaks his head against his presence; Judeus is the negation, if you will, of
the longed-for reunion of mother and child. Nearly 150 stanzas of the Marie
Carmina are devoted by Walter to venting his outrage against Judas, who for
him represents all Jews. What wounds him most deeply is the failure of God
to strike down the torturers of Mary’s child:

Why not pay the Jewish wickedness a visit?

Why not smash them to pieces, bare your teeth a bit
that such barbarity might plunge into the pit
and the Styx swallow up the ruined aggregate?45

But, infuriatingly, God will not deploy the forces of his creation against
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 141

the Jews as he once did against their enemies in the Old Testament. Walter
summons the creation to Christ’s aid in a battle against the assembly of Hell:

The army of Christ turns tail on its assurance

and when the four elements, who owe allegiance,
it’s said, to Christ first, deny him their assistance,
the leader goes to battle with no alliance.

The soldier is terrified and gives way to the thug;

at least, let the flea come to give Christ some plug,
the locust and stinging wasp and whatever bug
helped to loosen the grip of the Egyptian hug.46

The cosmic battle he longs for fails to materialize, and when what does
appear before his eyes instead is the ‘hateful carpenter’ of the ‘gruesome
woodwork’ of the cross, Walter can no longer control himself. He’s like a fan
in the stands charging the referee who’s made a call against the home team:

Tormented by my zeal’s impetuosity

I rush on the man with too much velocity
and with his own hatchet for his atrocity
dispatch him swiftly to the Stygian nethercity.

To the worker, too, of the hatchet’s artifice

by which the cross I see was made an edifice,
inflamed, hacking his neck in two, I dismiss
both vipers, handing them down to the black abyss.47

Walter curses the carpenter and the artisan who made the hatchet the
carpenter has used. Then he curses the tools themselves, the fire and metal of
the forge, and finally, the earth:

Cursed likewise the earth which gave the iron

that poured out streams of such pestiferous poison
from which the lethal material was drawn
by him who made the hatchet making carrion.

Why did the earth throw up this deadly fever?

Why did it open up a view of foul things? Why offer
no grave to the diggers but instead proffer
poison that best lies within earth’s deepest coffer?48
 142 Jenifer Sutherland

The questions Walter asks are difficult ones. Why does the earth offer a
view of foul things? Why, we might ask, does a child playing with a favourite
doll occasionally subject it to violence? The answer to both sets of questions
lies, I think, in the double nature of play as accommodation to and assimi-
lation of reality, as well as the double nature of the mediating image as
shared container of public expectation and projected personal content. I
have said that the dual potencies of Mary’s private and public presence are
the key to her enormous influence. The internalized image, whether child’s
doll or contemplative’s beloved, is the exact location where self and other
meet. Why this intersection should become both bedchamber and battle-
ground is a question poets often ponder. Walter’s suffering, in the mean-
time, is made more acute by his conviction that both halves were once
united:

The race of Jews Jesus was specially content

to choose that they receive from him sweet nutriment
as from his nurse a son; look how vile their intent
now to destroy the one who gave them nourishment!49

Walter’s poetry breathes the air of anti-Semitism.50 His devotionally

inspired, poetically articulated hatred serves as a reminder that empower-
ment is morally neutral; the same figure that enables Walter to come to
terms with his faith also permits him to turn his rage against a people for
whom his own nation has designated the role of spoilsport. Just how fraught
with contradictions is that role is suggested by Walter’s final desperate
attempt to keep mother and child together:

Perfidious Jews, take Mary with the other,

and, with welcome execution, kill the mother;
into them both, I beg, pound the nails yet further
and both son and mother crucify together.

On one single cross let the mother and son

rejoice, embracing each other in unison,
let the fluids of the dear friends’ blood mingled run,
let the dead stiffen into a single junction.51

His plea for the Virgin’s sacrifice goes unheeded; the scriptures are already
written and there is no ‘let’s pretend’ to stave off the sentence of death and
separation. Walter is forced at last to resign himself to the inevitable:
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 143

Wholeness languishes and life gives up the fight,

profound clarity turns into murky night,
extinguished is the inextinguishable light;
Not Isaac but the highest crown concedes its height.52

The time has come for him to give up his pen. True to his contemplative
model, he humbly embraces the paradoxes of the crucifixion and accepts his
own mortality. Mary’s unbroken body still stands above him; to her he
addresses his final request:

O gate of heaven, open what’s been locked away,

and when your servant’s dressed in funeral array,
grant him be your footstool so that your feet you may,
one on his mouth, the other on his forehead lay.53

From our perspective at the far side of a century much given to psycho-
analysis, we have, no doubt, some insights that were unavailable to Walter.
Regardless of how we interpret his devotion, however, in working through
the familiar story so thoroughly and so honestly, Walter provides us with a
glimpse into the remarkable complexities of one thirteenth-century male
soul. Whipped, no doubt, as a young child, and in turn the ‘whip’ of his small
students, he rages against his experience of divine and human justice by
execrating the spoilsport Jews. Not an exemplary but, in the final analysis,
an unavoidably ordinary individual afflicted by all-too-human passions and
disappointments, the aging Franciscan celibate stands before us, a mirror of
our own cultural beginnings. Humble and arrogant by turn, Walter delights
in the sensual possession of a feminine figure, a presence who is not the
tawdry fallen Eve of passing pleasure but the bride of Christ, as beautiful as
the rising sun and as terrible as an army. In his final stanzas the Virgin
remains, like an old man’s heart, as mysterious as the universe:

This work I offer to the boys to read;

may their prayers commend me in my final peace
to the boy child late from the tender womb released,
born from the father’s womb before the dawning’s east.

Here ignorance makes an end to the paper scrap;

here confusion of the senses makes a gap;
around you, heavenly lady, all glory wrap;
around you, lady, uncharted praises map.54
Amen.
 144 Jenifer Sutherland

NOTES

1 For the sleuth work behind this paragraph, see Rigg (1971) and Townsend
(1986). I will refer to the Ave Virgo Mater Christi as AV and the Marie
Carmina as MC. The translations are mine unless otherwise noted. In an
attempt to capture the flavour of the original I have erred on the side of
colloquialism.
2 The complete poems of Walter of Wimborne have been edited by Rigg (1978)
with excellent notes and introduction. All of the poetry quoted in this article
comes from this Latin edition. These phrases are from MC, stanzas 23 and 38,
and De Palpone, 168. The Marie Carmina is in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Laud misc. 368, fols. 2034-216r.
3 ‘... cum maiestatem Romane vrbis principes visibili specie censerunt honor-
andam, exquisito artificio formam muliebrem, que orbem dextra continet, in
eris materia fieri studuerunt. Ea perfecta in forma egregia, quidam solas [tibias]
tante moli perferende inhabiles esse causati sunt. Quibus faber respondit: Eas
vsquequaque sufficere donec virgo pareret, impossibilem credens virginis
partum.’ Kirkwood (1988, 36–7). The word tibias is missing from the manu-
script and is supplied by the editor from the text of John of Salisbury, whose
earlier telling of the story Walter is quoting. A variation of the story is told by
Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden Legend (1993, 38–9).
4 ‘Quod in Christo nato impletum est, ea corruente et fracta.’
5 Smalley (1960, 50).
6 Rigg (1978, 6).
7 ‘Ave, uirgo gloriosa / que comentum es et glosa / scripture prophetice, / cuius
glosa facit nudum / quod uelatum erat dudum / literali cortice’ (AV 3).
8 ‘Neuulum,’ literally ‘flaw.’
9 ‘Cum pausam facio, trementem oculum / ad sacrum uirginis levo ventriculum; /
tumorem uideo sed nullum neuulum; / mirror quo tumeat intactum uasculum.
// Surgens circueo uentralem sacculum / nosse desiderans quale pondusculum /
uas sacrum teneat, quod nec operculum / nec seram perdidit neque signaculum.
// Miror et iterum miror miraculum; / lustrum inuenio siue cubiculum, /
tandem inspiciens unum molliculum / et intus celicum latentem hinnulum. //
Giro perambulo uenteris monticulum / uix fere senciens dulcem odorculum; /
prorumpens igitur in luctum querulum / descendo uirginis reuisens pedulum’
(MC 9–12).
10 Astell (1990, 78).
11 In his Rule of Life for a Recluse (Aelred of Rievaulx [1971]). There is a rich
alternative tradition of female-authored spirituality in the twelfth and espe-
cially thirteenth centuries using Christ’s body as the focus of meditation, the
body typically gushing with blood rather than the Virgin’s milk. For an
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 145

excellent discussion of women mystics and Christ’s body see ‘The Body of
Christ in the Later Middle Ages,’ in Bynum (1992, 79–117).
12 Even Freud sometimes has difficulty sorting out the ‘object of desire’ and the
‘object of identification.’ See, for example, his analytical contortions in ‘A Case
of Homosexuality in a Woman’ in Freud (1979, esp. 380–6). For a discussion of
the underlying difficulty of desire and identification in Freudian theory see
Borch-Jacobsen (1994).
13 ‘Maria, loquere nam tua labia / torrentes mellios sunt distillancia / tantoque
gurgite lac resudancia / quod mundus mergitur in lactis copia. // Hoc melle
dominus de celo trahitur; / hoc melle filius patris allicitur; / statim ad melculum
missus dirigitur / et mellis osculum a melle petitur’ (MC 13–14).
14 Song of Solomon 4.11.
15 Bernard of Clairvaux (1952, 25–8).
16 Kirkwood (1988, 22).
17 The variations of human relationship with the divine bridegroom are, one
suspects, endless. The most famous example of a woman who wedded ‘the
Godhead’ is Margery Kempe. She recounts the experience in chapter 35 of her
early fifteenth-century autobiography. Hermann Joseph (c. 1150 to 1241) was a
clockmaker who, according to art historian Carolyn D. Muir (2000–1, 51–69),
entered the monastery at Steinfeld (not far from Cologne) and spent most of
his life there, apparently after having consummated a marriage with Mary.
While it is not clear that Margery identified with Mary in her marriage with
Christ, Hermann took on the name of Joseph after his wedding, suggesting he
had appropriated Joseph’s role.
18 Anonymous (1961).
19 Its title, assigned by Rigg and later regretted by him, comes from the first line
of the poem, actually a reference to a previous work, not likely the Victorine
sequence, ‘Ave Virgo Mater Christi,’ which does not fit the description ‘carmina
exametra,’ but another poem that has been lost to us.
20 Pseudo Bonaventure (1961, 75). Current scholarship has moved the date of
composition of the Meditations from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century,
attributing them to John of Caulibus (see McNamer 1990). A recent Latin
edition of the work is in Iohannis de Caulibus (1997).
21 Piaget (1962, 107).
22 Bynum (1992, 198).
23 ‘Illi repatrient, ego remaneo / et nostrum paruulum in cunis cilleo; / qui uolunt,
abeant; ego non abeo, / sed cunis perdius pernox adhereo’ (MC 220).
24 ‘... ego remaneo uisurus ubera / que profert paruulo uirgo puerpera. // Sedet
infantulus in matris gremio / et offert osculum humecto labio, / quod quidem
osculum indulcat mixtio / saliue tenuis et deguttacio. // Maria paruuli girat
corpusculum, / nunc genas osculans, nunc os, nunc collulum, / manus,
 146 Jenifer Sutherland

brachiola, pectus, dorsiolum, / latus et crustula, pedem, geniculum’ (MC 221,

223, 229). Rigg glosses ‘crustula’ as the diminutive of ‘crus.’ It can also be a
little pastry. To give the effect of the Latin diminutives, and to save the rhyme
scheme, I have introduced ‘princeling’ and ‘kingling’ into the translation of
stanza 229, since ‘backling’ and ‘kneeling’ would only confuse.
25 Piaget (1962, 107).
26 Pseudo Albertus Magnus (1884). For an account of the attribution of authorship
to Richard of St Laurent see Chatillon (1946).
27 There is only anecdotal evidence that boys, as much as girls, have been influ-
enced by the Barbie figure, which, after all, is only a commercially produced
plastic representation of a cultural ideal shared by men and women alike. In
Walter’s day the evidence that women ‘played’ with Jesus, men with Mary, is
overwhelming. Julian of Norwhich’s Showings is an important example of the
first. Bynum’s (1982 and 1992) research touches on the division of devotion
along gender lines.
28 Pseudo Albertus Magnus (1884, 843–9).
29 In Book 1, Prose 5 of the Consolation, Philosophy dismisses the prisoner’s
elaborately appointed library, claiming instead a place in his mind ‘in qua non
libros, sed id, quod libris pretium facit, librorum quondam meorum sententias
collocavi’ (O’Donnell 1990, 16).
30 ‘Maria dolium uentris iniciat, / mortales, celicos et manes debriat; / pauper cum
diuite secure ueniat, / de uentris dolio quantum uult hauriat. // De uentris dolio
potantur celici, / potantur etiam omnes catholici; / hoc uinam nobile Judei canici
/ soli despiciunt, sunt enim rustici. // Ue michi misero! Tavernam uideo / et
uentris dolium, sed tamen doleo; / non enim precium condignum habeo / quo
frui merear uino uirgineo. // Marie dolium dolens aspicio, / hiulcans aridas
fauces aperio; / cauponam intimo pulso suspirio / ut fruar uinuli uel stillicidio’
(MC 132–5).
31 Geoffry of Vinseuf (1967).
32 Smalley (1964, 242 n. 3).
33 Rigg (1978, 185). In the notes for the stanza at p. 221 n. 216 he writes ‘I posit
that God brings back those times’; i.e. ‘let’s pretend’).
34 British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xx, saec. 14ex., fols 171v2–175r2, which
provides a version of Marie Carmina in 144 stanzas.
35 For a brief but useful account of this development see Graef (1963) 64. For its
literary expressions, see the entry ‘Four Daughters of God’ in A Dictionary of
Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Jeffry 1992, 290–1).
36 ‘Antiqus paruulus effectus ferulam / e manu proecit et trucem uirgulam; / sic
planctus uertitur in plausus [viulam], meror in canticum, nox in dieculam’ (MC
38). Rigg offers the lovely ‘a fiddle of rejoicing’ as a translation for ‘in plausus
viulam.’
 Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina 147

37 ‘Uolo, si iubeas, asellum sternere / et paucos pueri pannos conuoluere, / et caute

uolumus de nocte fugere, / ne possit impius hostis aduertere. // Ego sum asinus;
mihi sarcinula / debetur uirginis cum prole paruula; / si pecus cespitat, tu
uirgo uirgula / cede calcaribus, cruenta stimula. // Si pecus cespitat dulci sub
onere / tuum est cedere, tuum est pungere; / si forte calcitret nolens procedere,
/ castiga miserum asellum uerbere. // Tuus sum asinus, ergo me libere / ut
pecus proprium potes occidere; / si non uult asinus ut placet currere, / cur non
uis lateri ferrum immergere? // Si pecus lentum est, dulci tu dextera / flagellum
arripe crebroque uerbera / miscellam bestiam, cruenta latera / sacratis calcibus,
et ictus itera’ (MC 235, 238–41).
38 An interesting parallel to this is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of the devel-
opment of his sexual proclivities in Book I of his Confessions.
39 Huizinga (1967, 10).
40 ‘Appello, domine, pro mea domina: / decernat pietas si debet femina / quam
nulla faciunt ream peccamina / tot mala perpeti, tot cruciamina. // Testis que
titubat est mater anxia / milleque lacrime, mille suspiria; / addo gemituum
centena milia; / en quantus populus, quanta familia!’ (MC 287, 292).
41 Meyer (1994, 328).
42 ‘Nolo de sidere sermonem facere / nec de celestibus quicquam obicere, / sed
uolo paruulus in paruis ludere, / et parui culicis naturam querere. // Culex
aculeo forat articulam, / in se trahiciens cruoris undulam; / queso, perhendie dic
per quam canulam / uel per quam rimulam uel per quam fistulam? // Cruorem
turbidum culex in uiscera / sugendo trahicit; tu quem nec supera / latere
poterunt, immo nec infera, / subtilis explica ductus itinera. // Scis unde prodeat
terrarum mocio, / fluctus equorei reciprocacio, / que mineralia gignat decoctio, /
et ecce facilis artat te questio! // Tu qui deblateras uerbis inanibus / de celi
circulis et de sideribus, / dic, queso, quomodo uix uisibilibus / cruorem attrahit
culex canalibus’ (MC 392–6).
43 Piaget (1962, 109).
44 Huizinga (1967, 11).
45 ‘Cur non Judaicum scelus increpitas? / Quare non dissilis, quare non oscitas / ut
petat baratrum tanta crudelitas / et Stix excipiat cateruas perditas?’ (MC 488).
46 ‘In fugam uertitur Christi milicia / et mundi quatuor dicta principia / que
debent denegant Christo suffragia, / et dux soliuagus uadit ad prelia. // Formid-
ant milites et cedunt furie, / saltem subueniant Christo cinomie, / brucus et
ciniphes et musce uarie,/que terre fuerant onus Egipcie’ (MC 531–2).
47 ‘Cum zeli crucior impaciencia, / in carpentarium ruo ui nimia, / cesumque
miserum securi propria / mitto celeriter ad regna Stigia. // Fabro similiter qui
securiculam / fecit, qua fieri cerno cruciculam, / accensus animo cedo ceruicu-
lam, / utramque baratro tradens aspidulam’ (MC 536–7).
48 ‘Ue terre pariter, que ferrum dederat / que tam pestiferum uirus effuderat / de
 148 Jenifer Sutherland

qua materiam letalem sumpserat / is qui letiferam securim fecerat! // Cur terra
noxium uirus euomuit? / Cur fodientibus hiando paruit? / Cur non fossoribus
sepulcrum prebuit? / Cur non profundius hoc uirus posuit?’ (MC 540–1).
49 ‘Genus Judaicum peculialiter / Jesus elegerat et fouit dulciter/ut nutrix filium,
et ecce qualiter / suum nutricium occidit uiliter!’ (MC 580).
50 The racialization of the Jews was well underway in England following the
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. See Roth (1978).
51 ‘Judei perfidi, Mariam prendite, / cum dulci pignore matrem occidite, / eisdem,
obsecro, clauis confodite / matrem et filium et crucifigite. // Mater et filius
eandem habeant / crucem ut mutuo complexu gaudeant; / amici sanguinis
liquores misceant, / in uno stipite defuncti rigeant’ (MC 595, 597).
52 ‘Languiscit sanitas et uita moritur, / profunda claritas in noctem vertitur, /
inextinguibile lumen extinguitur; / non tamen Ysaac sed uertex ceditur’
(MC 636).
53 ‘O celi ianua, tu celum aperi / tuumque famulum cum datur funeri / fac tuis
pedibus scabellum fieri, / os uni subice, frons detur alteri’ (MC 639).
54 ‘Hoc opus pueris legendum offero; / illi me precibus commendent puero / qui
sero prodiit de uentre tenero / ante luciferum de patris utero. // Hic finem
cartule facit inscicia, / hic metam uendicat sensus aporia; / sit tibi, domina
celorum, gloria, / sit tibi, domina, laus mete nescia. Amen’ (MC 643–4).
 8
Christ from the Head of Jupiter:
An Epistemological Note on Huet’s
Treatment of the Virgin Birth
thomas lennon

The birth of Christ from a Virgin Mother can be read as belonging to the
Classical tradition of the miraculous birth of Minerva from the head of
Jupiter, or of heroes like Perseus or Heracles born of mortal women but
fathered by gods. This claim was made by a major thinker of the early
modern period, Pierre-Daniel Huet, who was challenging the empirical ap-
proach to the virgin status of the mother of Christ. With his claim, which
linked Christ’s miraculous birth to a tradition supplied by pagan narratives,
Huet entered the arena of intellectual debate that flourished in the age of
Enlightenment. In a climate of empiricism, virginity was identified as a
physiological state capable of verification, consistent with belief systems of
earlier centuries when various forms of testing were applied to a virgin’s
claim of sexual innocence. Huet anticipates the modern anthropological and
psychoanalytical approaches to truth claims by basing the truth of the
virginity of Mary in accumulated theological dogma and belief.
The epistemology of virginity is an exceedingly interesting question from
a historiographical perspective. How did people think they could establish
virginity? An even more interesting question is what they thought they
were doing by this. The status of the concept of virginity – among other
concepts that were religiously charged – was dramatically altered by biblical
studies in the early modern period. Prior to the higher criticism of the
seventeenth century, virginity was taken to be a brute physiological fact
relatively easy to verify, whose significance, even if obviously transcending
the physical, was transparent. Consider the fourth-century St Ambrose,
whose works on virginity were translated into French as late as 1729: ‘a
virgin who is not immediately recognized as such is not worthy of the
 150 Thomas Lennon

name.’1 At the end of the period discussed here, Pierre Bayle, to whom the
significance of nothing was transparent and who therefore does not accept
the reports of Democritus’s ability to determine virginity by external signs,
nonetheless devotes one of his famously long footnotes to a discussion of
the topic and includes a report of the same ability in Albertus Magnus.2
To make the case that this epistemological complacency, its naive accep-
tance of virginity as physically verifiable, was first undone in the seven-
teenth century would require more resources than can be mounted here. But
if it is at all plausible to suggest this thesis at least as a reading hypothesis, or
even as a research program, then a key figure will be Pierre-Daniel Huet,
whose views on the Virgin Birth construed the concept of virginity in
unprecedented terms. Huet was a committed antiquarian and just as com-
mitted to the idea that the knowledge of truth depended upon some tradi-
tion. He rejected the Cartesian position that any epistemological project
begins de novo, and in this Huet made the Classical tradition acceptable. In
reading this tradition allegorically, he was anticipated to some degree by the
hermetic and Neo-Platonic schools, but with Huet this epistemological ap-
proach was established with security. Without difficulty, Huet accepted the
Virgin Birth but gave it – or at least invited his reader to give it – a non-
physical interpretation. And he does so (necessarily, as we shall see) in a self-
conscious fashion, arguing for its theological validity. In his view, previous
treatments of the Virgin Birth that were heavily invested with mythological,
moral, political, and other kinds of overlay rendered them theologically
invalid by rooting them in the past. Huet instead brings forward the fact of a
pagan tradition of miraculous births to argue for the validity of Christ’s
birth from a virgin. Previously, not to accept the Virgin Birth as physically
true was simply to reject it as false. Because of Huet’s authority as an
intellectual and as a religious leader his orthodoxy was never questioned,
and the influence of his novel alternative may have been considerable.
Though far from being unknown in his own time, Huet has for a number
of reasons slipped into relative oblivion, so he will first need to be identified.
Then, the Bible criticism that was the philosophical context for his work will
be outlined, and three figures of particular importance here will be high-
lighted: Isaac La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Richard Simon. Finally, it will be
suggested that in Huet is found the earliest attempt to understand the Virgin
Birth in something like modern anthropological terms. Indeed, there will be
data to suggest a proleptic reading of it in terms even of Jungian archetypes.
If anything of this is at all plausible, then not only the concept of virginity,
but the significance of the previous sorts of physical testing for it, will have
undergone a dramatic alteration in this period. For, to repeat the main
epistemological point, although Huet introduces a non-literal concept of
 Huet’s Treatment of the Virgin Birth 151

virginity that for him had wide application in a variety of domains, he took
that concept to be true of the Blessed Virgin in a way that secured the truth
of the relevant Church dogma. To put it in simplest terms, the suggestion
from Huet is that the truth of the Virgin Birth is not a physiological
question but a theological question.
Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) was an erudite, perhaps a rather lesser
Scaliger (and thus a friend and correspondent of Leibniz, himself a rather
greater Scaliger). He was a polyglot, his linguistic competence including
‘oriental languages,’ which is to say Hebrew in addition to Greek, and his
having read the Bible in the original languages twenty-four times. He was a
member of the French Academy, charged along with Bossuet with the in-
struction of the Dauphin. Ordained in 1678, he received the Abbey of
Aulnay two years later and, in 1692, was consecrated Bishop of Avranches
(under which title he came most usually to be known). But health problems
and the incompatibility of episcopal duties with his scholarly interests led
him first to the Abbey of Fontenay and then to the Paris house of the Jesuits,
his first teachers, where he spent the rest of his life. A condition for his
pension there was the bequest to them of his huge library (the story has it
that its weight once brought the walls down around him); when the Jesuits
were expelled from France in 1763, this collection passed to the royal library,
thence to the Imperial Library, and finally the National Library, all of whose
stamps, in addition to Huet’s ex libris coat of arms, have been seen by many
generations of seventeenth-century scholars who have used the collection.
Especially earlier in his life, he was very interested in the sciences. He
founded an important academy of sciences in Caen in 1662. He was led to a
study of astronomy by Huygens’s work and was also interested in anatomy
and chemistry, although the most notable result of his work in chemistry is a
rather Paracelsan 122-hexameter poem in Latin on salt. He has been credited
with the invention of the anemometer. In addition to those to be discussed
here, his works include books on translation, the origin of the novel, the
location of the Garden of Eden (between the junction of the Tigris and
Euphrates, and the Persian Gulf), a history of trade, a certain amount of
poetry, and a novel (the posthumous Diane Castro, ou le Faux Yucab). There
is also a delightful, if not always reliable, set of memoirs.
Huet tells us in his memoirs that as a youth, before he had studied ancient
philosophy, he ‘belonged for several years body and soul to Cartesianism.’3
It is not clear what changed his mind, but in time Huet came to be one of
Cartesianism’s bitterest and, perhaps, most effective opponents. While in-
vestigating the relation between reason and faith, he argued in a series of
works a kind of skeptical fideism that saw in Descartes’s attempt to arrive at
absolute certainty by reason alone a threat to religion that was in bad faith in
 152 Thomas Lennon

at least two senses of the expression.4 Very roughly, the thrust is that
Descartes is an arrogant pretender, whose views if taken seriously would
upset the only basis for living, which is religious faith. This opposition to
Descartes is something of an irony, for Cartesian methodology may well
have been the initial basis for the higher criticism that was the context for
Huet’s own apologetics.
Popkin traces the new Bible criticism to mid-century and the application
of Descartes’s method of clear and distinct ideas to the authentication and
interpretation of Scripture, beginning with the work of Isaac La Peyrère,
who was led to deny that the existing text was authentic, that the Bible was
the framework for human history, and that Moses was the author of the
Pentateuch.5 La Peyrère’s arguments and even his new linguistic methods
are here of less interest than his conclusions. For a while there had been
critical debates right from the first attempts to establish canonicity, even to
the point of accusations of atheism over disagreement. None had resulted in
views so extreme as these. The same is true in the next decade of the works
of Spinoza, whom La Peyrère may have influenced. For him, a biblical view
at odds with reason – even if it was of interest historically, psychologically,
philologically, and so forth – was ipso facto false. La Peyrère was a Calvinist
who was ultimately hounded into recanting his views and converting to
Catholicism; the fate of Spinoza was no better. Employing the same sorts of
arguments and methods, however, the Oratorian Richard Simon in the next
decade was rather more clever and enjoyed a much better fate.6 To be sure,
he was expelled from the Oratory and his seminal Histoire critique du Vieux
Testament (1679) was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, but he was
allowed to continue exercising his priestly offices and (more importantly
here) to go on publishing his works of criticism, despite denying the Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch, for example. Unlike Spinoza, in any case, he
seems never to have admitted to heterodoxy of any sort.
One of the credentials Simon presented is of particular interest. In the
preface to the Histoire critique he underlines his adherence to ecclesiastical
tradition, its powers of validation: ‘It will be shown in the pages which
follow, that, if the rule of law is divorced from the rule of fact, in other words,
if the Scriptures are unaccompanied by Tradition, one can be sure of scarcely
anything in religion. It is in no way to derogate from the Word of God to
associate with it the Tradition of the Church, since he who bids us search the
Scriptures has bidden us also to betake ourselves to the Church, to whom he
confided the sacred treasure.’7 This necessary appeal to tradition in the
authentication and interpretation of Scripture was, of course, the principal
argument levied against Protestantism and likely explains why Simon was
accorded a measure of relative toleration by the Church. Huet’s step, how-
ever, was much more radical, for he appealed to all traditions.
 Huet’s Treatment of the Virgin Birth 153

Huet declares in the Alnetanae quaestiones de concordia rationis et fidei

that what is known by reason through evidence is asserted with greater
certainty and strength than what is known by faith.8 This is a rather star-
tling declaration, for it seems to assert the very Cartesianism he was con-
cerned to overthrow. But by ‘evidence’ Huet does not mean what Malebranche
meant by the term, or what Descartes meant by clarity and distinctness –
that is, a property of eternal truth available to individual minds divorced
from history, experience, and even their own bodies – all of which are for
Malebranche and Descartes impediments to the apprehension of truth. For
Huet’s notion of evidence we look to an earlier work, the Demonstratio
evangelica: ‘Evidence is the criterion of belief; we thus call true what seems
true to the greatest number, or at least to the greatest number of the learned;
the more a thing is generally believed, the more its truth is obvious ... Cicero
got it right when he said, general agreement is the voice of nature.’9 Huet
doesn’t draw the inference in so many words, but the upshot is that for him
belief in the Virgin Birth if true, cannot be an isolated phenomenon, and
that it is not is precisely what he attempts to show.
The Alnetanae quaestiones is divided into three books. In the first, Huet
argues the value of reason to faith. In the third, he offers a comparison of
Christian and pagan morality. The second book consists of comparisons of
Christian and pagan beliefs. Some of the comparisons border on the outra-
geous: Orestes because of his matricide given over to the Furies is parallel to
Job delivered to the demon; Jupiter’s delaying the arrival of dawn so as to
spend an extended night with Alcmena is parallel to Joshua’s halting the sun.
One of the twenty-four chapters in the second book deals with the Virgin
Birth and compares this with extraordinary births in the Classical mythical
tradition. He begins as follows. ‘Are we now any less able to say and believe
that Christ was born of a virgin than the Greeks were able to say that
Minerva was born from the head of Jupiter and Bacchus from his thigh, and
Orion from three fathers, Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury without any female
role, that Erichthonius was born of Vulcan without mother, that Vulcan and
Mars were born of Juno without father? Many were born of a mortal
woman by gods and, by the same miracle, of a mortal father by goddesses.’10
According to Huet, then, there were widespread beliefs in miraculous births
that were no less credible than, and justified belief in, Christ’s virgin birth.
The reception of this work was controversial. Arnauld, for one, despised it.
Huet ‘destroys his own religion’ by showing paganism to be no less reason-
able than Christianity.11 The abbé Houtteville later showed how the argu-
ment might be stood on its head: because the pagan analogues were absurd,
incredible, less than serious, not intended to be taken as true, and so forth;
therefore the same is true of the Christian analogues.12 The charge against
Huet was what was called indifferentism: the choice of religion is one of
 154 Thomas Lennon

indifference, for one is as good as another. Whether applicable to him or not,

Huet certainly was optimistic about the possibility of reconciliation among
Christian sects. ‘If the parties act with sincerity, without stubbornness and
self-interest, they would soon find ways to reconcile; but on both sides there
are such hotheads that they censure no less strongly their own members
who advocate conciliation than they do their opponents.’13 By contrast, then,
the work was favourably received by the Huguenot Menjot, even if not by
all of his co-religionists (Basnage criticized the work, in the Histoire des
ouvrages des savants for June of 1691, as based on an imagination gone out
of control).
In the nineteenth century, Huet’s work was still able to evoke outraged
protest. Here is Joseph d’Avenel, whose text summarizes the rest of Huet’s
catalogue of virgin births and, not incidentally, indicates the range of his
scholarship:

Frankly, because ... Alexander, Remus, Romulus, Achilles, Aratus, Hercules, Inachus,
were all the fruit of the union between a god and a mortal; because antiquity gave
virgins as mothers to Perseus, Homer and Plato; because the magician Simon dared
to claim himself the son of a virgin; because among the Turks those whose mothers
are said to remain virgins are called ‘soulsons’; because Avicenna and Paracelsus
dreamed that below the equator the earth or the sun give birth to men; because
Ulanus among the Tartars, and Buddha and Somonocodon among the Indians, are
regarded as sons of a virgin; because among the Chinese the rainbow introduces Fohi;
because some Buddhist priest in Japan claims to be the son of a virgin and some
exceedingly credulous men attribute the same origin to Merlin; because of all this we
are able to conclude nothing in favor of the great miracle that made the Blessed
Virgin the mother of Christ!14

Huet’s response to his critics was to accuse them of ignorance, prejudice,

and failure to read his book. ‘Unfortunately for them, Justin Martyr in two
places made use of the same comparison as mine [between the Incarnation of
Christ and the birth of Perseus]; these sorts of comparisons and arguments
are common among the Church Fathers.’15 Once again, Huet’s point is that it
is entirely legitimate to appeal to pagan sources, even mythographical ones,
in order to mobilize an argument based upon consensus gentium, to support
Christian doctrines. However seriously Huet intended this sort of argument,
its significance here is the concept of virginity that he self-consciously
employs in it. First, it must be understood that Huet is no naïf. One of the
sciences in which he was most interested in his early career was anatomy,
with hands-on experience in dissection.16 Whatever his experience with
human anatomy, he cannot have been ignorant about the physiology of
 Huet’s Treatment of the Virgin Birth 155

virginity. Nor can he have been claiming that hymens in the physiological
sense were miraculously preserved all over antiquity, mythical or otherwise.
What, then, was the meaning that Huet attached to the concept of virginity?
The more relevant question here is what he detached from it. The ques-
tion of the Virgin Birth, to take the key example, is not one to be decided on
the basis of gynecological data, even if such existed, from the Middle East
two millennia ago. Instead, it is a question to be examined in light of certain
texts as interpreted by a certain tradition. Huet’s contribution lay in his
appeal to texts and traditions beyond those expected of a seventeenth-
century bishop of unquestioned orthodoxy, whose very orthodoxy validated
a novel concept of non-physical virginity.

NOTES

1 Ambrose (1729, 128).

2 Bayle (1701), art. ‘Democritus, rem. C’.
3 Huet (1718, 35–6). I give an English translation of the influential French trans-
lation cited in all the literature, which, however, is not quite supported by the
original Latin text.
4 Huet (1679, 1689, 1690, 1692, 1723).
5 Popkin, in Lennon et al. (1982, 61–81).
6 For a discussion of Simon’s subversion of authority, see Hazard (1990).
7 Ibid., 189. For the law (droit)/fact (fait) distinction, see Lennon (1999, chap. 2).
8 Huet (1690, 87–9).
9 Huet (1679, preface) (unpaginated).
10 Huet (1690, 237).
11 Arnauld (1775–83, 400–2).
12 Flottes (1857, 204–6).
13 Ibid. 44–5. Only Spinoza and Toland were beyond the pale. Huet evidenced a
generally latitudinarian skepticism that one thinks of in connection with La
Mothe-Le Vayer, for example, who opened the gates of heaven to at least certain
pagan philosophers, or Bayle, who famously found (pagan) atheism less
problematic than (Christian) heresy.
14 Avenel (1853, 215–16).
15 Flottes (1857, 208).
16 Tolmer (1949).
 9
‘Sew and snip, and patch together a
genius’: Quilting a Virginal Identity in
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
anne geddes bailey

Near the end of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Simon Jordan dreams of a
dissection he must perform for his medical examination:

It’s a woman, under the sheet; he can tell by the contours ...
But under the sheet there’s another sheet, and under that another one. It looks like
a white muslin curtain. Then there’s a black veil, and then – can it be? – a petticoat.
The woman must be down there somewhere; frantically he rummages. But no; the
last sheet is a bed sheet, and there’s nothing under it but a bed. That, and the form of
someone who’s been lying here. It’s still warm. (422)

Bedding – good linen sheets, second-best sheets ‘cut in two and turned’
(138), and thick, warm, well-crafted quilts – abounds throughout the pages
of Alias Grace. The plethora of sheets and quilts suggests that Simon’s
dream of the veiled female body which lies forever hidden under layers of
bedding is a crucial one to the novel as a whole. Indeed, we might argue that
the image is the novel’s governing metaphor, not only of the sexual and
psychological enigma of Simon Jordan’s patient, Grace Marks, but also of the
very shape of her narrative and of the omniscient narrator’s additions which
frame it. Just as Simon draws away bed sheet after bed sheet in search of the
woman’s hidden body in this dream, the reader turns sheet after sheet of
paper in hopes of uncovering the mystery at the heart of Grace Marks and
her story. And, like Simon, we are ultimately frustrated in our attempt since
instead of a body under the layers of narrative, we find only traces of her
presence.
This approach to the novel complements Margaret Rogerson’s article
‘Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grace.’ Also noting the important func-
tion of bedding in the novel, she contends that quiltmaking is the central
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 157

thematic and structural metaphor of the novel. Rogerson situates the novel
within the ‘cultural and literary history of patchwork’1 and shows how
Atwood’s novel mimics the process of quilting. By doing so, she brings into
focus the ways in which quilting has long served women, in particular, as a
venue for both sharing and preserving female secrets. In the case of Grace,
Rogerson argues that quiltmaking ‘empowers Grace to speak in language
that is not universally accessible’ and ‘enables her to withhold her secrets
from her male inquisitor ... as [she] attempts to recover her lost memories.’2
Although quilts are often communally made and the art of quiltmaking one
which most nineteenth-century women pursued, Rogerson also reminds us
that the actual manifestation of any pattern is coloured, framed, and ar-
ranged by the individual quilter, and thus the meaning of any quilt is
ultimately inscrutable. Likewise, the meaning of the story which Grace
stitches together over the course of her conversations with Simon and the
patchwork history of the novel as a whole remain frustratingly elusive.
While Rogerson’s article focuses on the social and feminist meanings of
quilting and their implications for Grace’s story, I am more interested in the
metaphorical implications of Atwood’s quilting framework for the psycho-
sexual dimensions of Grace’s identity and Simon’s attempts to uncover it.
Grace not only spends her days stitching various pieces of fabric together;
she also pieces together her memories, a process which, like a quilt, appears
to reveal her inner self but in reality re-veils it.
The search for and the inscrutability of the self are common themes in
Margaret Atwood’s other works as well. As Eleanor Rao notes, ‘the presence
of doubles, encounters between the self and other, bodily transformations
and metamorphosis in Atwood’s novels posit the question of identity as a
recurring concern.’3 Not surprisingly, then, Alias Grace returns to these
concerns. When Mary Whitney suddenly speaks from the mouth of Grace
Marks near the end of the novel, it seems that our heroine has subcon-
sciously incorporated the spirit of her beloved friend into her own and is
now divided between the two personalities. Literally imprisoned by her
society, which judges her guilty of murder, and figuratively damned by the
numerous reports of her barely suppressed criminality and uncontrolled
mad outbursts, Grace, it seems, can only escape by turning within. That she
would need to do so suggests the depth of her entrapment and powerless-
ness. Indeed, so profound is Grace’s alienation from community that it
appears that perhaps the depths of her own psyche are a perpetual mystery
to her own conscious self. However, as Simon’s terror at the absence of the
female body in his dream suggests – an absence which represents his lack of
control – I will argue that Grace’s submerged self is not a sign of her
powerlessness but rather evidence of her power to resist and transform both
 158 Anne Geddes Bailey

the political and linguistic forces which imprison her. Instead of losing
control of her self, Grace purposely ‘absents’ her inner self – puts it under
cover, so to speak – and replaces it with a carefully contrived ‘self’ which
enables her to regain a socially acceptable public life while protecting her
inner, and powerful, self from psychological dissection.
Throughout the novel, Grace’s secret and elusive power is consistently
connected to her avowed virginity. Although virginity is sometimes defined
as antithetical to notions of agency and power, since it is denoted as a
negative rather than a positive state, it is used throughout Alias Grace as a
metaphor for both active resistance and intentional secrecy. As Simon’s
dream suggests, if Grace can protect the secrets of both her body and mind
through a perpetual striptease of sorts, then she will endlessly frustrate
Simon and her readers and succeed in protecting herself from intrusive
psychic and physical penetration. And such penetration is just what Grace’s
voyeuristic readers want. As she brilliantly surmises:

They don’t care if I killed anyone, I could have cut dozens of throats, it’s only what
they admire in a soldier, they’d scarcely blink. No: was I really a paramour, is their
chief concern, and they don’t even know themselves whether they want the answer
to be no or yes. (28)

In the 1840s, the story of Grace Marks caused a stir because of its mix of
sex, violence, and politics. She was a young servant girl who reportedly acted
on her sexual jealousy when she helped James McDermott to kill their
employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his lover, Nancy Montgomery. In the public’s
estimation, it was not surprising that such a sexually lascivious woman
would also commit violent crimes; a woman so loose with her body was
likely out of control of her mind and behaviour as well. In addition, there
was a political dimension to her alleged sexual and criminal acts. Her Tory
attackers held her up as an example of what could result from the insubordi-
nation of the lower classes, while her early defenders were largely republi-
cans. If only McDermott, her partner in crime, had claimed they were
Rebels, Grace tells us, they might have been given safe haven from the
Americans, rather than the death penalty from the Canadians.
By the time we meet Grace in the setting of Atwood’s novel, the political
implications of her story have faded. In 1859, her defenders are largely
middle- and upper-class do-gooders, many of whom now harbour demo-
cratic sentiments themselves. Indeed, in their minds, her membership in the
lower class adds to her innocence rather than her guilt. They cannot imagine
how a girl so skillful in the domestic arts, and so apparently without guile,
could possibly have been willingly involved in the murders. In the interven-
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 159

ing sixteen years between her arrest and the present, Grace has evolved from
Rebel paramour and murderess to, as Simon Jordan notes upon first seeing
her, ‘a nun in a cloister, a maiden in a towered dungeon ... the cornered
woman’ (66) – in short, a virgin. However, Grace Marks, Simon will quickly
discover, is not as helpless as she sometimes appears. Shortly after first
seeing her, Simon watches as the ‘maiden’ steps ‘forward, out of the light,
and the woman he’d seen the instant before was suddenly no longer there.
Instead there was a different woman – straighter, taller, more self-possessed
... as if it were he, and not she, who was under scrutiny’ (66–7).
When Grace begins to tell the story of her life to Simon Jordan in hopes of
remembering the crucial moment of Nancy’s death, he listens and the reader
reads with the desire and expectation that the end will reveal the truth, or to
use narratological terms, disclosure and resolution. We want to know exactly
what happened that afternoon at Thomas Kinnear’s farm and why Grace
cannot remember her precise role in those events. At first, it seems that our
curiosity is ‘purely scientific’ (45), as it is for Simon. However, it quickly
becomes clear that Simon’s academic research becomes infused with barely
suppressed sexual impulses as he begins to speculate on her sexual experi-
ences and his own fantasies of bedding and even marrying her.
The sexual nature of his professional interest unexpectedly, but not sur-
prisingly, surfaces at the climax of Simon’s examination of Grace. After
reluctantly agreeing to subject Grace to hypnotism because his own talking
cure has led nowhere (at least in his estimation), Simon is invited to ask the
first question. ‘“Ask her,” he says, “whether she ever had relations with
James McDermott.”’ His query may not surprise the reader, but at first,
Simon is shocked by his own question. After a moment’s reflection, though,
he realizes that it is ‘the one thing he most wants to know’ (478). Why is
Grace’s sexual state of such crucial importance to Simon? The most obvious
answer is, of course, that he is in love with Grace. Before the hypnotism,
when speculating on his feelings for her, he concludes ‘that Grace Marks is
the only woman he’s ever met that he would wish to marry’ (466). She has
all the requisite qualities – ‘beauty without frivolity, domesticity without
dullness, and simplicity of manner, and prudence, and circumspection’ (466)
– and, more important, she has ‘passion in [her] somewhere’ (467). It is
precisely the apparent subversion of her sexual passion in combination with
her explicitly murderous impulses which enthralls Simon; a virginal mur-
deress is the woman he most desires.
But why is the question of Grace’s virginity of importance to the reader?
The answer is that Simon’s desire for Grace’s subtle combination of inno-
cence and experience parallels and underscores the very motor of Alias
Grace’s plot. Peter Brooks’s description of narrative dynamics in Reading for
 160 Anne Geddes Bailey

the Plot aptly explains the motor and shape of Grace’s life story. According
to Brooks, ‘narratives both tell of desire – typically present some story of
desire – and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification.’4
Grace’s narrative, although full of the banal, domestic details of her child-
hood and youth, is fuelled by Simon’s growing sexual anticipation and
arousal over the course of their conversations. Foreplay, in this case, how-
ever, occurs through language rather than touch. Grace seductively reveals
her psychic and physical centre through artfully crafted memories while
Simon probes her with his pen. This sexual/textual dynamic between them
is apparent from the beginning of the novel. In the first encounter between
Simon and Grace, a conventional power imbalance exists between them,
with Simon, the male analyst, attempting to direct his female patient’s
recovery of lost memories. When he first glimpses her in the cell and likens
her to a maiden in distress, he is the one in control, ‘the last-minute cham-
pion come to rescue her’ (66). Familiar with such an imbalance, Grace fears
that he, like many others before him, will literally ‘draw her’ with his pen.
From the time of her arrest, she has been aware of the various versions of
her character and life story in public circulation – from Mr MacKenzie’s
fallacious defence arguments to Mrs Moodie’s melodramatic representations
of Grace’s madness and remorse in Life in the Clearings to various news
reports, clipped and pasted in the Governor’s Wife’s scrapbook.
With Simon, however, it is not long before Grace becomes aware of how
she, herself, can manipulate the pen, and by the end of that first interview, he
is the one who must ‘resist’ (67). The pen with which Simon writes does not
inscribe her with its nub end, but, rather, arouses her with its quill end. The
experience is implicitly sexual, but she does not passively give into the sensa-
tion; instead, she is in full control of her inner psychological and sexual core:

But underneath ... is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and
watchful ... And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn
open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even
torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord.
And inside the peach there’s a stone. (78)

As their conversations continue, this image of the peach stone becomes as an

apt metaphor for Grace’s agency as a virginal narrator. While hinting at the
hidden space within the flesh of Grace’s body, the stone and the space it
leaves inside the peach are also symbols of the impenetrable centre or empty
hole in her memory which she cannot or, as I will argue, will not narrate.
Objects, like this peach, play an important role within the novel. They
repeatedly become symbols connected to or representative of Grace’s body,
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 161

which, as Cristie March concludes in her article ‘Crimson Silks and New
Potatoes: The Heteroglossic Power of the Object in Atwood’s Alias Grace,’
raises ‘questions concerning who does or does not hold power over the
meaning of words as they relate to the woman’s body.’5 Simon Jordan, as
male doctor and scientist, presumes he will hold this power, but by focusing
upon Grace’s sexual response to the pen, not to Simon, the narrator suggests
that for once the woman will be the one to control the story.
Caressed by the feather pen, Grace becomes a sophisticated storyteller.
Her stories become increasingly structured by the dynamics of foreplay
between herself and Simon, her narrative itself delaying and prolonging
sexual excitement, making the possibility of orgasmic fulfillment at the end
even more satisfying. Indeed, as Grace’s narrative comes closer to its climax,
so too does Simon’s physical arousal. Yet, on the surface of their conversa-
tions, she pretends to an ignorance of the sexual dynamic growing between
them and, rather insistently, confirms her physical chastity – a tactic which
paradoxically preserves and endangers her virginity because her avowed
innocence seduces Simon all the more. She often relates how various men
attempt to take advantage of her, ranging from prison guards to doctors,
employers, and lawyers, but in each case, she assures Simon that she rebuffs
their advances and preserves her innocence. Even at the most exciting points
of her tale of escape with McDermott, she is careful to slip in the details of
their separate sleeping arrangements.
She is also quite prudish, sometimes refusing to continue the story if
Simon has asked a question she deems ‘improper.’ Whenever she becomes a
bit reckless and her conversation becomes at all suggestive or vulgar, she
claims to be mimicking her friend’s, Mary Whitney’s, coarse language,
rather than speaking as herself (182–3). Knowing that a woman’s ‘experi-
ence’ can reveal itself in subtle ways, she also refuses to participate in
Simon’s associative language games. For instance, when he brings an apple
to their meeting and asks her what thoughts it provokes, she pretends not to
know its symbolic meaning. Instead, she answers by treating the apple as a
mnemonic device – ‘A is for Apple’ – and a literal object – apples are made
into apple pie. Although she knows he wants her to associate this apple with
original sin, she pretends to be ignorant in order to highlight the apparent
depths of her innocence. March argues that Grace’s refusal to play Simon’s
game destabilizes the linguistic forum in which Simon wishes to conduct his
examination. He wants the apple, and later potatoes, parsnips, beets, and
turnips, to lead Grace down specific paths in her memory through various
linguistic connections, such as ‘Beet – Root Cellar – Corpses’ (90). However,
as March points out, ‘the game of master and student, question and answer,
does not elude [Grace]; instead she slips out of the relationship by refusing
 162 Anne Geddes Bailey

the game through her denial of the verbal.’6 The slippage between what
Simon wants the objects to mean and what Grace says they mean further
heightens the sexual tension between them. Simon and Grace’s inability to
come to agreement about what these particular objects mean leads to sexual
frustration as Simon ‘displaces [his linguistic frustration] onto Grace’s body’7
and ‘invests the objects between them with ... her inaccessibility.’8 Thus,
although Simon, as examiner, seems to be in control of these associative
games which he expects will lead him into the heart of her memories, Grace,
as artful misinterpreter, uses these games to prevent him access and create
the appearance of chastity.
Taking care to emphasize her sexual innocence, on the one hand, she also
notices that dreams excite Simon more than any other part of her story, and
so, on the other hand, she begins to fill her narration with thinly veiled
dreams of her repressed sexual desires. It is a clever strategy, because these
dreams once again hint at her sexual experience while not confirming it –
after all, they are only dreams. As a result, just at the point where Grace
seems to be most open, since she is revealing the secrets of her dreams, she is
simultaneously most inscrutable. Although her narrative appears to be an
honest account – which would mean that the dreams were really just dreams –
Simon cannot be sure:

I do not know whether to view myself as an unwitting dupe, or, what is worse, a self-
deluded fool; but even these doubts may be an illusion, and I may all along have been
dealing with a woman so transparently innocent that in my over-subtlety I did not
have the wit to recognize it. (506)

Simon’s inability to read Grace with any certainty increasingly falters as she
prolongs the story. In contrast, her control of the narrative becomes even
more skillful. She embellishes with details, making her narrative ‘as inter-
esting as [she] can, and rich in incident, as a sort of return gift to him’ (291).
She begins to rehearse what she will say to him next. Although she may
secretly question the reliability of her own memories, these insecurities are
completely subverted by the time of her telling, which is always delivered in
an unselfconscious but confident tone.
Significantly, in spite of Simon’s growing desire, it is precisely this surface
simplicity and clarity which prevent any actual assault upon Grace’s virgin-
ity. Through her various rhetorical strategies, Grace frustrates Simon’s de-
sire for knowledge, which results in a corresponding chasteness in their
relations. He cannot ‘know’ her, in other words, until he is certain of know-
ing whether or not she is a murderess and a paramour. In contrast, Simon
has no difficulty giving in to the sexual advances of Rachel, his landlady. His
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 163

physical penetration of Rachel parallels what he presumes to be his full

knowledge of her psychological state as well. Throughout his time with her,
he creates a sort of case study, enumerating and detailing her feelings,
motivations, weaknesses, and repressed desires. He knows their affair will
end soon since ‘he knows he’s reaching the end of the repertoire; the end of
what Rachel can offer; the end of her’ (488). Grace’s repertoire, on the other
hand, seems to have no end. Through her artful linguistic seduction, she
continually arouses and refuses the consummation of his desires and in
doing so, creates and preserves her sexual and textual virginity, which in
turns generates further desire. As is implied by Brooks’s theory of narrative,
Grace’s defence of both her sexual and criminal innocence, like Scheherazade’s
defence of her life, is the act of narration itself. All she needs to do is to
continue the story and keep him guessing – did she or didn’t she? With the
absence of certainty in Grace’s narration comes a successful guarantee of her
innocence and virginity. As Simon relates to his friend,

thus far she has manifested a composure that a duchess might envy. I have never
known any woman to be so thoroughly self-contained ... She ‘sits on a cushion and
sews a fine seam,’ cool as a cucumber and with her mouth primmed up like a
governess’s, and I lean my elbows on the table across from her, cudgelling my brains,
and trying in vain to open her up like an oyster. Although she converses in what
seems a frank enough manner, she manages to tell me as little as possible, or as little
as possible of what I want to learn. (152)

As they come closer to the mystery at the heart of her story – those few
precious moments on the day of the murders – Simon ‘can’t seem to keep
track of the pieces’ (346) and starts to lose control of his own thoughts and
body. He begins to dream Grace’s dreams and perform her subconscious
desires. Whereas Grace claims to resist Thomas Kinnear, Simon passively
begins the affair with Rachel. While Grace refuses to speak of gravesites and
cellars – thoughts he continually attempts to elicit from her – he begins
digging gigantic and apparently useless holes in Rachel’s backyard. As Grace
remembers herself caught up in the murderous schemes of McDermott,
Simon finds himself embroiled in Rachel’s melodramatic wish for her
husband’s death. However, the parallels between his current experience and
Grace’s past escape Simon; all he knows is that he has learned ‘nothing’
conclusively about Grace and so cannot conclude either his scientific report
or act on his love for Grace. Eventually Simon’s frustration overwhelms
him. As his indiscreet question during Grace’s hypnotism indicates, the line
between his intellectual and sexual interest is openly blurred and he can no
longer pretend to a solely professional interest in her case.
 164 Anne Geddes Bailey

Following Simon’s lead, readers are also drawn into the sexual dynamic of
the text. While Simon longs to penetrate Grace’s untouched sexual core, we
read with a slightly different emphasis – after all Grace is only a character –
but with a similar intent; we read in order to deflower the virginal text, to
consummate, through the act of interpretation, our sexually charged textual
desires. At first, it seems that we will succeed where Simon has failed because
Grace is more frank with us, and as is demonstrated by my previous discus-
sion, we are privy to her growing artistry. When Simon asks her intrusive
questions or attempts to elicit certain responses through associative games
and gifts, she allows us access to her private thoughts while she remains
mute or frustratingly inarticulate with Simon. We hear reports of dreams
that never reach Simon’s ears. However, just before the crucial moment of
the narrative, Grace’s apparent frankness becomes as murky for us as it is for
Simon. As she prepares to tell Simon about the day of the killings, she begins
by emphasizing the insecurity of her memory and then rehearses her mate-
rial for the reader in a series of questions.

Did he say, I saw you outside at night, in your nightgown, in the moonlight? Did
he say, Who were you looking for? Was it a man? Did he say, I pay good wages but I
want good service in return? Did he say, do not worry, I will not tell your mistress, it
will be our secret? Did he say, You are a good girl?
He might have said that. Or I might have been asleep.
Did she say, Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to? Did she say, I will
pay you your wages on Saturday and then you can be gone out of here, and that will
be the end of it and good riddance?
Yes, she did say that.
Was I crouching behind the kitchen door after that, crying? Did he take me in his
arms? Did I let him do it? Did he say Grace, why are you crying? Did I say I wished
she was dead?
Oh no. Surely I did not say that. Or not out loud. And I did not really wish her
dead. I only wished her elsewhere, which was the same thing she wished for me.
Did I push him away? Did he say I will soon make you think better of me? Did he
say I will tell you a secret if you promise to keep it? And if you do not, your life will
not be worth a straw.
It might have happened. (351–2)

This passage, which might let the reader into Grace’s secret memory, is
frustratingly inscrutable. Significantly, the only definitive statement is spo-
ken by Nancy Montgomery, which suggests that Grace has no need to raise
doubts about her relationship with another woman. However, in order to
keep the reader guessing about her own sexual and criminal innocence, she
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 165

obscures the other voices, all of which are male. Indeed, to whom does the
pronoun ‘he’ refer throughout this passage? To the lawyers at the trial, to
Kinnear, to McDermott, or to all three at different moments? Are these
questions asked at the trial by lawyers or by Kinnear and/or McDermott at
the time of the events? If the former, then Grace’s memory of the event is
certainly mediated by what she has heard from others, but if the latter, then
she seems to have access to the very memories she claims not to have. Most
important, are these rhetorical questions posed by Grace to confuse her
reader, or is she simply rehearsing the questions she truly cannot answer?
Precisely at the moment when readers most earnestly seek textual resolu-
tion, Grace suddenly refuses us entry into her private, ‘true voice’ (351) and
preserves her text’s virginity, just as she protects her body’s purity from
Simon’s covert advances. She is manipulating not only Simon’s desires but
those of the reader as well.
The question of how much Grace manipulates the story becomes even
more intriguing and baffling at the climax of Simon’s examination of his
subject. As I have already mentioned, at this point in the story, Simon’s
analysis of Grace is completely stalled. In despair, he agrees to allow Dr
Jerome DuPont to hypnotize Grace. Once she is hypnotized, the spirit of her
dead friend, Mary Whitney, is heard, apparently speaking through Grace’s
body. It is a shocking scene for a number of reasons – not only because
Simon openly confesses his sexual interest in his patient, but also because
Mary is everything Grace is not. She is vulgar, loud, and aggressively sexual.
Whereas Grace subtly manipulates the sexual tension between herself and
Simon, when Mary hears Simon’s surprising and improper question, she
accuses Simon outright of illicit sexual desires and calls Lydia, his young
admirer, a slut. Mary also freely admits her own sexual and criminal guilt –
describing with relish the strangulation of Nancy. The small group in atten-
dance – Grace’s greatest defenders – feel betrayed and humiliated, as Mary
mocks them, suggesting that they have only deluded themselves.
Yet the most fascinating effect of this scene is that although it resolves the
mystery – Grace is guilty – there is no interpretive resolution for either
Simon, Grace’s other defenders, or the reader. Why not? Because the appear-
ance of Mary Whitney suddenly throws Grace’s selfhood, and thus her
agency and culpability, into question. We are not sure what precisely we
have witnessed. Have Dr Jerome DuPont and Grace conspired to trick the
audience? Or, as the spiritualists might argue, has the spirit or soul of Mary
Whitney actually entered Grace’s body and used it to commit immoral and
criminal acts? Or is a psychiatric explanation more plausible? Has Grace
split herself into two, incorporating Mary’s personality into her own as a
way of coping with the trauma of Mary’s death, and then through this
 166 Anne Geddes Bailey

second personality, repressed her own violent and sexual actions and de-
sires? Or, and this is the theory I prefer, is Grace Marks actually Mary
Whitney? Has Mary embodied an alias and constructed a completely new
self – one which will redeem her, bring her ‘grace,’ and in doing so, make her
innocent and virginal once again?
At first glance this last theory seems impossible. After all, according to
Grace, she and Mary were once two distinct girls, serving together in the
household of Mrs Alderman Parkinson. Grace movingly relates the fate of
her friend, who dies a bloody and painful death after having an abortion.
Grace’s apparently sincere retelling of these troubling events touches Simon,
but he has to admit that ‘the only witness who could corroborate her
testimony ... would be Mary Whitney herself, and she is not available’ (215–
16). Nor, he discovers later, are there any potential witnesses from the
Parkinson household, since it disintegrated a number of years ago. When he
finally finds Mary Whitney’s gravesite, it offers no clues either in support of
or against Grace’s version of events:

But this stone is only that: a stone. For one thing, it has no dates on it, and the
Mary Whitney buried beneath it may not have any connection with Grace Marks at
all ...
Nothing has been proved. But nothing has been disproved either. (466)

This stone without dates or familial detail is similar to the peach stone
which lies within the flesh of Grace’s story. It potentially contains all but
reveals nothing. We are only left with theories. Perhaps the gravestone
marks the burial of some other Mary Whitney – a mother or grandmother.
Without birth and death dates, the stone tells us nothing definitely.
There are several clues in the narrative that allow for the possibility that
Grace and Mary are not, in fact, two distinct young women. I will relate two
of the most convincing. First, in her story Grace claims she did not witness
Mary’s abortion; she only saw the doctor greet Mary and take her into the
other room. Yet, when another doctor dressed in a black coat arrives to
measure Grace’s skull in the Governor’s parlour over sixteen years later, it is
not until the doctor reaches into his bag with his gloved hand that Grace
becomes hysterical:

And then I see his hand, a hand like a glove, a glove stuffed with raw meat, his
hand plunging into the open mouth of his leather bag. It comes out glinting, and I
know I have seen a hand like that before; and then I lift my head and stare him
straight in the eye, and my heart clenches and kicks out inside me, and then I begin to
scream.
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 167

Because it’s the same doctor, the same one, the very same black-coated doctor with
his bagful of shining knives. (31)

Her extreme response suggests that Grace, as Mary, did not simply witness
the effects of the abortion but actually had the abortion herself and during
her recovery afterwards reinvented herself as Grace.
Second, the only person who appears in both Grace’s memories and the
present time of the narrative who could actually corroborate the separate
existence of Mary and Grace is Jeremiah the pedlar, who himself adopts
various aliases throughout his life. Jeremiah’s relationship to Grace is an
intriguing one. The first time he meets her, he quietly whispers to her, ‘You
are one of us’ (180) and thereafter always claims an intimacy which belies
the actual length of contact between them. They always understand each
other immediately, often through the smallest of gestures and subtlest of
looks. In the one lengthy conversation they have, which occurs after Mary’s
apparent death when Grace is already at Kinnear’s farm, Jeremiah proposes
that Grace run away with him and become his partner in a mesmerism act.
The very fact that he should make this suggestion to her hints that Grace is
an accomplished con artist of a sort already, or at least as Jeremiah says, she
‘ha[s] the talent for it’ (318). Perhaps it is a change of name which induces
Jeremiah’s presumptuousness? Perhaps, having met Mary before, he knows
that she is now posing as Grace Marks. Although she refuses his offer to
work (and sleep) with him (with a remarkable lack of distress at the imperti-
nence of it), Grace and Jeremiah thereafter agree to keep each other’s secrets.
While Grace always makes it clear to her reader precisely what secret
Jeremiah needs kept, the same is not so for herself. What could it be? That
her real name is Mary Whitney? In the climactic scene, as we see Jeremiah
and Grace working together, we have good reason to question whether she is
actually hypnotized by Jeremiah. When Grace is first introduced to Jeremiah
as Dr Jerome DuPont, he ‘made a pact with [her] under [the others’] very
eyes’ (365) but what pact? Not to tell anyone that he is not really Dr
DuPont? Or that they would together perpetrate a fraud on the others? This
ambiguity becomes even more unclear later in the novel when Grace writes
Jeremiah a letter. In the first two-thirds of the letter, Grace writes from the
perspective of ignorance; she really does not seem to know what happened
while she was hypnotized and cannot understand why the others now react
to her as they do. However, near the end of the letter, Grace’s supposed
ignorance becomes questionable when she writes:

The other thing I would like to know is, why did you want to help me? Was it as a
challenge, and to outwit the others, as with the smuggling you used to do; or was it
 168 Anne Geddes Bailey

out of affection and fellow-feeling? You said once we were of the same sort, and I
have often pondered over that. (511–12)

The fact that Grace knows that Jeremiah ‘outwits’ the others suggests that
the climactic scene in the library was an act, performed together by the two
of them.
The possibility of ‘Grace Marks’ being the alias for Mary Whitney – one
which is also suggested by the title of the novel – may detract from her
actual physical and criminal innocence, but it adds another dimension to her
agency, both in terms of the construction of her narration and, most impor-
tant, her manipulation of the sexual dimensions of her narrative. Her alias,
in other words, highlights the crucial connection developed in Alias Grace
between virginity and agency. If we accept that Grace is actually Mary
Whitney, we can see how imperative it is that she reform not only her
behaviour but also her sexual identity if she is to survive her disastrous
affair with her employer’s son, George Parkinson. Having given in to the
seductions of George, Mary, as Agnes and Mrs Parkinson clearly indicate, is
‘lost.’ He refuses to acknowledge and marry her, leaving her little choice but
to have an abortion if she is to retain her place in the community. If she were
to remain pregnant, Mary would no longer have control of her sexual
secrets, and with that loss, so Atwood’s novel suggests, would come a corre-
sponding inability to control the telling of her own life story. According to
Amanda Anderson’s research on fallen women in Victorian society, Mary
would have been perceived ‘as lacking the autonomy and coherence of the
normative ... subject’;9 in other words, she would no longer have a subject
position from which to author her own autobiography. Anderson contends
that the fallen woman’s lack of autonomy was evident not only in her
inability to resist seduction, but, more importantly, in her failure to sustain a
separate, distinct selfhood in the face of various economic, social, or environ-
mental forces. The fallen woman was not only morally weak, she was also
socially determined, a person who ‘lack[ed] any transformative capacity’ and
‘power to alter her fate.’10 By hiding away the truth about her sexual fall
under the more powerful cultural ‘secret’ of virginity, Mary is able to
maintain this transformative power. She reinvents herself and her virginity,
not only finding ‘grace’ but actually conceiving of and creating a form of
‘grace’ which will make her a visible, autonomous person once again. Through
‘Grace Marks’ Mary regains the purity implied by her own namesake and, as
Simon notes, becomes as impenetrable as the Virgin Mary:

As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all
the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him ... Her strongest prison
is of her own construction. (435; my italics)
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 169

With the construction of ‘Grace,’ we can see how Mary is able to keep her
admirers and defenders guessing while at the same time actually achieving
political and social revenge. She kills Nancy Montgomery and Thomas
Kinnear, both of whom deserved to die in Mary’s mind – Nancy because she
was about to receive the social and financial security that Mary had been
denied and Kinnear because he, as a Tory, was indirectly responsible for her
family’s losses in the Rebellions and her parents’ subsequent deaths. Indeed,
after the murders, Mary apparently believes that she is no longer in need of
her alias and gives her own name after she and James McDermott cross the
border and register at a hotel. As Mary falls asleep in America, she thinks of
the action of the lake’s waves:

And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind ... all traces of me,
smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black
tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand.
On the edge of sleep I thought: It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me
remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed.
It is almost the same as being innocent. (411–12; my italics)

Mary’s words here are interesting, especially since she claims to have been
innocent all along. These thoughts seem to confirm the opposite, that she
has, in fact, helped James McDermott kill Thomas Kinnear and Nancy
Montgomery, but that in doing so, she has revenged the sins perpetrated
against her family and herself. That night, ‘Grace’ dreams of Mary and is
about to be reunited with, I would argue, herself when a knock is heard at
her hotel door. As the police come to arrest her, Mary discovers she is in need
of her alias ‘Grace’ once again and cleverly claims to have used the name
‘Mary Whitney’ as an alias for Grace.
By the time we reach the climax of the novel and are witness to Mary’s
emergence, she has so destabilized our ability to interpret who she is that we
cannot know with certainty what is happening. When Mary announces to
Grace’s defenders that ‘I am not lying! ... I am beyond lying! I no longer
need to lie!’ (481), she is quite right. She can be truthful or deceitful and we
will not be able to know the difference and the effect will be the same – in
our minds, ‘Grace’ will emerge as innocent, virginal, ‘calm,’ and ‘dutiful’
(483). This is precisely what happens. In spite of witnessing Mary’s shocking
emergence, Reverend Verringer, along with other supporters, argue that
poor Grace is the victim of a rare psychiatric disorder and so cannot be held
responsible for her actions. In his final report, Verringer argues for Grace’s
innocence even while acknowledging ‘Mary’s’ guilt. Thanks to his efforts,
Grace is finally released from prison and reintegrated into society success-
fully. That his arguments fool the parole board, however, should not be
 170 Anne Geddes Bailey

grounds enough for us to accept them. To concede that Verringer’s interpre-

tation of events is the most plausible would mean that Grace is truly unable
to control or know her own self or story and that the crucial connection
between virginity, power, and narration, which I have argued the novel
subtly weaves, would be lost.
If, instead, we are convinced that Mary has brilliantly created her alias
Grace, then we can read the ending of the novel as a carefully orchestrated
realization of everything Mary has desired. Her alias ‘Grace’ receives clem-
ency, marries the farmer Mary planned on finding in her youth, and climbs
up the social ladder. She lives in America, under the kind of republican
democracy her parents died working for in Canada. With Simon, she also
succeeds in wreaking revenge upon the medical profession. His inability to
‘know’ Grace not only creates sexual confusion within Simon but rocks his
very sense of self. As his professional experiment with Grace fails, Simon
admits to his friend that he almost suffers a nervous breakdown, and like a
conventional ‘fallen woman,’ he lacks agency and becomes determined by
forces external to his self. His only defence is to flee. In doing so, Simon
literally ends up losing himself – a head injury sustained during the Ameri-
can Civil War causes the loss of his adult memories. Like Grace, he now has a
hole in his story, but unlike Mary, he has no power to transform himself,
only the memory of Grace to perplex him. She, in other words, succeeds in
preventing him access to her physical and psychic centre and in doing so
refuses him the ability to ‘write’ her. Instead, she takes that power for herself
and defies not only moral and social judgment but economic and class
determinants as well.
Grace, of course, is also not the only narrator playing with the materials of
her life. Running parallel to Grace’s rhetorical flourishes and sleights of
hand are those of the omniscient narrator, who, like Grace, preserves the
text’s ‘virginity’ by ensuring our inability to get to the interpretative centre
of the novel. Just as Grace teases Simon with the possibility of future
consummation of their relationship, the omniscient narrator simultaneously
adds to the outside readers’ confusion while also suggesting that our confu-
sion will ultimately be resolved.
In order to explore the role of this narrator let me return to my opening
metaphor: the quilt as metaphor for the novel itself, as both interpretable
pattern and impenetrable cover. As Rogerson has carefully shown in her
article, the motif of the quilt is everywhere present in the pages of the novel,
most obviously displayed in the section titles and illustrations. These quilts
highlight how Grace’s sexual innocence or experience underpins her public
history and her private story; indeed, the novel repeatedly illustrates how all
women’s sexuality is crucial to their social position and value. As Grace tells
us, quilts illustrate this position and value. Not only does quilting allow
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 171

women to demonstrate their unique talents and their community with one
another, it also indicates their sexual experience. Married women are al-
lowed to display certain patterns, such as the Tree of Paradise, while unmar-
ried women must hide them away until they have a marriage bed to cover.
Quilts can also reveal whether a woman is an acceptable member of society.
While Grace is welcomed into the Governor’s house daily and asked to sew
hundreds of quilting squares on her own because of her exceptional needle-
work, she is also painfully aware that she cannot be included in the larger
community of a quilting bee, due to her criminal and sexual past as well as
her class.
Although denied one of her own, Grace often contemplates various quilts’
symbolic value. As a young servant girl, she notices that quilts waving on
the line look like flags, an observation she thinks about later as she sews
during her long incarceration:

why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops
of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I
thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and
to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for
everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. (186)

Her comments, of course, seem a thinly veiled reference to the traumatic

events in Grace’s life – Mary’s ‘death,’ Kinnear’s murder – both of which
take place in bed. However, they also point to more general notions of
female subjection illustrated in the novel; while, for men, beds are cozy,
desirable places, for women, they are the site of wanted and unwanted sexual
encounters and all their consequences – labour, childbirth, and, often, death.
For women, the quilt is a way of communicating and also covering what
cannot be said aloud, serving as an ambiguous sign for what occurs in secret.
In contrast, as Simon’s dream recounted at the beginning of this article
suggests, for men the quilt is a prelude to disclosure, a final veil they need
only peel back before the female body will finally be exposed and made
ready for them.
The omniscient narrator highlights the dual function of quilts by giving
each section of her text the name of a quilt pattern. These patterns, at first,
seem to function as signs, as ‘flags.’ Their presence seems to imply that if we
look carefully enough at the various fragments and pieces in the quilt of this
novel, a definitive pattern will finally emerge. Indeed, Grace, in her narra-
tive, also claims to have learned this lesson:

Then something came clear to me which I used to wonder about. There is a quilt
pattern called Lady of the Lake, which I thought was named for the poem; but I could
 172 Anne Geddes Bailey

never find any lady in the pattern, nor any lake. But now I saw that the boat was
named for the poem, and the quilt was named for the boat; because it was a pinwheel
design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that
things did make sense, and have a design to them, if you only pondered them long
enough. (409)

Although Grace is finally enlightened as to the source and meaning of the

Lady of the Lake pattern, the pattern itself highlights the layers of refer-
ences and meanings embedded within the quilt. Significantly, Grace’s dis-
covery demonstrates that while the quilt may allude to the story of the Lady
of the Lake, it also stops short of it; instead of portraying the fate of the lady,
the quilt is a representation of a boat named for the poem. So the quilt hints
at and covers over the story simultaneously. Similarly, Alias Grace is full of
the traces of Grace Marks, hinting at the possibility of our knowing the truth
about her while never fulfilling this promise.
As Simon shifts through the various details of Grace’s life, we sort through
both her life story and the various other versions of that story provided to us
by the omniscient narrator. We read trial transcripts, letters from doctors
and lawyers, conversations between Simon and Mr MacKenzie, and so forth,
all with the aim and hope that a coherent portrait of Grace will finally
emerge from the patchwork of narratives, reports, and letters. However,
while the presence of the quilt patterns elicits such expectations, they also,
paradoxically, highlight how the pattern can shift and repeatedly defy our
attempts to define it. Indeed, as Grace makes clear at the end of the novel,
one cannot fully interpret or understand the pattern without knowing the
one who sews it. And if the sewer finally eludes us, then so too does
interpretation.
All of this begs the question: who precisely is sewing the textual ‘quilt’
known as Grace Marks? The answer is complex. Even though Simon be-
lieves when he first meets Grace that ‘her story is over. The main story, that
is: the thing that has defined her,’ Grace starts the story over again while
‘threading the needle’ (104). Later when he is completely perplexed by
Grace, Simon wonders if ‘you [could] sew and snip, and patch together a
genius’ (217). Throughout the novel, Grace sews as she talks and she does
precisely this – she brilliantly pieces together an alias that others will
interpret as innocent and virginal. However, until Mary surfaces at the
hypnotism, we believe that Grace is gradually exposing her lost, inner self
rather than artfully concealing herself under a textual quilt. By giving Grace
space to tell her own (albeit fictional) life story – the opportunity to pattern
her own life – the omniscient narrator suggests that the ‘real’ Grace Marks is
not, in fact, constituted by the various texts which have been written about
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 173

her (both in her day and since then) – that she, instead, escapes all textual
attempts to define her, just as she frustrates Simon’s (and other men’s)
attempts to deflower her. The first indication of a gap between the Grace
who is already written and the ‘I’ who narrates comes early in the novel:

I think of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an inhuman
female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will
and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to
hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very
handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes,
that I have auburn hair and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the
average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to
appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition
with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my
humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me,
that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an
idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? (23)

The very fact that Grace is conscious of the different versions of her in public
circulation suggests a gap between those ‘selves’ and the ‘self’ which lies
hidden within, and the autobiographical tale which follows illustrates how
this ‘real’ Grace incorporates and exceeds these versions. Until the climactic
scene in the Governor’s parlour, the whole novel seems to be moving to-
wards the revelation of what Grace refers to as her ‘true voice’ (351). With
Mary’s appearance, however, the narrative pattern which has slowly been
emerging over the course of the novel is abruptly changed. We suddenly
realize that, like Simon and all of the others in Grace’s circle, we have
actually been shown the quilt – an artfully patterned cover – rather than the
body underneath.
Grace may be clever, but she is also only a character, and so we might
argue that Margaret Atwood, as author, is the master quilter. Yet, much of
the content of her novel calls her authority into question. Many of the bits
and pieces within the novel are not fictional; they are copied from other
historical and literary resources authored by others, such as Susanna Moodie,
Mr MacKenzie, and others. To cloud the issue further, though, many of these
sources also have indeterminate origins. As Atwood tells us in her Afterword,
‘Moodie’s retelling of the murder is a third-hand account’ (556), and as
MacKenzie tells us within the novel, Moodie’s account was, in turn, influ-
enced by her readings of Dickens. However, the very presence of these other
accounts, which have an existence outside of Alias Grace, undermine Atwood’s
authority over her own text and remind the reader that Grace Marks is not
 174 Anne Geddes Bailey

wholly an invention of Atwood’s imagination. Significantly, it is Atwood

herself who underscores her own lack of authority by including an Afterword
which both emphasizes the historical accuracy of her novel and raises doubts
about such supposed ‘accuracy.’ The Afterword has the paradoxical effect of
illustrating how Atwood is confined and dictated by a story which is not
initially her own while also revealing how the prior story is ripe for her
artful manipulation. Like a quilter, she has a pattern to follow, but she can
adapt it, within bounds, as well.11
In addition, Atwood’s Afterword reveals how she is not simply the author
of ‘Grace Marks’ but the reader of her as well. The ‘Grace’ which emerges on
the pages of Alias Grace is as much the product of Atwood’s reading as she is
a product of Atwood’s writing. Like the readers in and of Alias Grace,
Atwood, for all the patchwork she does, ultimately admits defeat in her
pursuit of the ‘real’ Grace Marks. As she writes, ‘the true character of the
historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’ (558). Likewise, the inner core of
the fictional Grace Marks remains frustratingly and tantalizingly untouch-
able. Fittingly, the novel ends with Grace sewing a Tree of Paradise quilt for
herself. A quilt only married women can display, Grace’s Tree of Paradise
publicly marks her apparently new sexual state; she is unexpectedly preg-
nant as well, another soon-to-be public sign of her sexual experience. Yet, as
much as the quilt suggests the successful penetration of Grace, it also seals
the secrets of the past and so both reveals and covers her hidden self. This
quilt may appear to be conventional, she writes Simon, but she will sew into
the pattern her own secret variations, which will be visible and meaningful
only to her. It is true; although she tells Simon (and us) how her quilt will be
different, she refuses to interpret those differences, and the quilt becomes
yet another of Grace’s ingenuously crafted masks.

NOTES

1 Rogerson (1998, 5).

2 Ibid. 6.
3 Rao (1993, 41–2). See Mycak’s study (1996) for a critical overview of this issue.
4 Brooks (1984, 37).
5 March (1997, 80).
6 March (1997, 75).
7 Ibid. 79.
8 Ibid. 80.
9 Anderson (1993, 1).
10 Ibid. 65.
 Quilting a Virginal Identity in Alias Grace 175

11 In In Search of Alias Grace (1997), Atwood discusses the process of writing this
novel: ‘I devised the following set of guidelines for myself: when there was a
solid fact, I could not alter it: long as I might to have Grace witness McDermott’s
execution, it could not be done, because, worse luck, she was already in the
penitentiary on that day. Also, every major element in the book had to be
suggested by something in the writing about Grace and the times, however
dubious such writing might be; but in the parts left unexplained – the gaps
left unfilled – I was free to invent’ (35).
This page intentionally left blank
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 INDEX

Abbott, Elizabeth, 3 26, 48, 89n12, 95; Brauronia, 15, 26,

abstinence, 6, 68 89n12; virgin goddess, 15, 105
adamatos, 14, 19, 25 ascetics, asceticism, 5, 9, 10, 109, 120
aedes Vestae, 71, 89n16 Atalanta, 16
Aemilia, 74, 87, 94n94, 94n96, 95n101 Athena, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
Aeschylus, 7, 9, 19, 23n33, 24, 26, 27, 18, 19, 20, 21n8, 22n19, 22n21,
34, 35, 36, 61n6, 92; Eumenides, 7, 22n25, 23n31, 23n33, 26, 27, 34–5,
19, 20, 23n33, 24, 25, 33, 34, 61n6; 44, 72, 89n12
Oresteia, 33, 92; Prometheus Bound, Augustine, 110, 115n38
25; Seven against Thebes, 7, 24, 25, Aurelia Severa, 88, 94n96
27, 28, 31, 35; Suppliant Women, 7, autonomy, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 20, 21n6,
24, 25, 31, 33, 35 168
agency, 6, 20, 34, 102, 110, 111, 112,
158, 160, 165, 168, 170 Bayle, Pierre, 150, 155n2, 155n13
Agnodike, midwife, 19 Beard, Mary, 66, 68, 73, 88nn6–7,
almah, 7 89n10, 89n13, 89n15, 90n40, 91n53,
Amazons, 16–17, 36 95n108, 96n112, 98n138
amenorrhea, 11, 42, 43, 44, 48, 55, Bernard of Clairvaux, 131, 132, 145n15
62n27 bisexual power, 12n7, 119
Anastasia, 107–8 boundaries, 17, 31, 70, 79, 80, 82,
androgyny, 9, 17 96n112, 132
Aphrodite, 4, 12n7, 13, 15, 20, 21n7, bride(s), 4, 9, 20, 21n13, 44–5, 55, 57,
117; bearded, 117; transgendered, 12 65n54, 84, 118, 130, 132, 133, 143; of
Apocryphal Acts, 10 Christ, 143
Arkteia, 26
armour, virgin’s, 9, 11, 17, 19, 23n34 Calame, Claude, 29, 36n2, 37n13
Arrephoroi, 22n21, 26 Callisto, 15, 21n12, 25
Artemis, 4, 7, 8, 13–19, 21n10, 22n13, celibate, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 143
 198 Index

chastity/unchastity, 5, 8, 9, 10, 19, discipline/disciplined, 40, 73, 74, 83,

22n20, 66, 68, 69, 70, 79, 80, 83, 84, 97n132
86, 88, 94n97, 161, 162 divine, 4, 7, 13, 14, 17, 20, 35, 86, 101,
choregos, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37n9, 103, 104, 107, 112, 131, 132, 133, 136,
38n17 143, 145n17; bridegroom, 100,
Christ, 4, 10, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 145n17; constructs, 13, 14; family, 14;
116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, feminine, 101, 103; justice, 136, 137,
128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 143; lover, 132; motherhood, 14;
140, 141, 142, 143, 145n11, 145n17, parthenos, 17; presence, 131, 132;
145n19, 149, 150, 153, 154; body of, virgin, 7, 14, 20; wrath, 86, 138
134, 144, 145n11, 145n17, 145n19; divinity, 6, 9, 15, 102, 103, 119, 138;
bride of, 130, 143; crucified, 10, 116, androgynous, 119; kourotrophic, 15
119; human, 103; imitating, 107, 108; dolls, 6, 133–4, 140, 142
mother of, 4, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, Domitian, 74, 75, 87
138, 139, 140, 142, 149, 154; virgin Douglas, Mary, 7, 11n4, 66, 70, 90n33,
birth of, 107, 129, 149, 150, 153, 93n93, 96n112
154 dreams, 88n8, 154, 156, 157, 158, 162,
Claudia Quinta, 84, 87 163, 164, 169, 171
Clodia Laeta, 88
cloister/cloistered, 8, 9, 131, 159 Electra, 24
Clytemnestra, 24, 27, 33, 34, 38n23 Elizabeth I, 5, 7
Constantia, 100, 112, 113n2 emancipatio, 73, 99n145
Constantina, 112, 113n2 embodiment, virgins as, 9, 20, 37n11,
Cornelia, 74, 75, 87, 92n70, 94n94 67, 68–9, 72–3, 85, 118, 119, 166
crucifix, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122 Empress, 104, 105, 106, 109; Helena,
crucifixion, 103, 124, 125, 126n4, 106; Pulcheria, 104, 105, 106, 109
126n8, 131, 138, 143 enigma, 11, 156, 174
curse, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37n12, 38n16, epikleros, 14
139, 141 Erichthonius, 15, 19, 21n8, 153
Cyril, 103, 104, 105 Erinyes, 23n33, 24, 33–5, 36n1,
38nn22–3, 38nn22–3, 39n27, 39n30
Daly, Mary, 101, 113n3 Eudoxia, 105, 114n17
Danaids, 18, 24, 26, 31–3, 34, 38n19, Euripides, 18, 21n11, 24, 36, 93n82;
39n30 Bacchae, 93n82; Helen, 18;
Daphne, 16, 22n14 Hippolytus, 21n11
defloration, 46, 49, 55, 56, 62n26 Europa, 36n3
Demeter, 4, 19 Eusebius, 106, 114n23, 124, 125
devotio, 8, 81, 82–3, 97n127
devotion(s)/devotional, 107, 123, 125, Fabia, 87, 91n50
126, 126n8, 128–34, 136–8, 143, faith, 75, 80, 109, 128, 138, 142, 151–3
146n27 fasting, 11, 46
 Index 199

father/fathering, 9, 16, 17, 20, 24, 27, gyne, 13, 18, 40, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 56,
30, 31, 32, 33, 57, 71, 72, 73, 80, 84, 61n16
85, 91n50, 94n100, 95n108, 98n145,
102, 103, 109, 117, 128, 131, 132, 138, Handbook for Gregoria, 107, 108, 111
143, 149, 153, 154 hearth, 9, 13, 19, 20, 23n37, 69, 89n16
Fathers, Church, 109, 154 heaven/heavenly, 77, 100, 107, 109, 112,
fecundity, virginal, 8, 16, 18, 19, 20, 26, 132, 135, 137, 139, 140, 143, 155n13;
35; latent, 26; potential, 16, 18 Queen of, 112, 140
fertility, 12n7, 18, 19, 23n30, 31, 36, 40, Hecate, 7, 14, 21n4, 21n6
71, 96n118, 118, 119 Helena, Empress, 106
Floronia, 84, 86, 93n94, 96n111 Hera, 4, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21n12, 22nn28–9
Fortuna Muliebris, cult of, 83, 86 Heraia, 17
Foucault, Michel, 23n40, 64n42 heresy, 113n10, 155n13
Franchot, Jenny, 8, 9, 11n5 hermaphrodite, 81
freedom, 9, 71, 115n38 heroines, 4, 10, 111, 115n45, 157
Furies, 33–4, 153 Herophilus, 53, 54, 64n45
Hesiod, 14, 16, 20, 26, 92n63; Theogony,
Gaius, 90n38, 91n47, 91n52, 95n107 14
Galen, 53, 54–8, 60n1, 63n33, 64n40–1, Hestia, 7, 8, 13, 14, 20, 23nn37–9
64n43, 65n50, 65n56 hieros gamos, 18
Gallicanus, Passion of, 100, 101 Hippocrates, 36n4, 53, 58, 59, 60n2,
gaze, male, 16, 17, 41, 110, 131 63n33, 64nn40–1
gender, 9, 10, 11, 21n7, 22n22, 40, 54, Hippocratic: Aphorisms, 41, 51, 53, 59;
55, 60n4, 89n13, 101, 102, 104, 106, Diseases IV, 47, 59; Diseases of
110, 119, 120, 123, 125, 146n27 Women I, 42–3, 47, 50, 59; Diseases
gendered, 5, 7, 9, 12n7, 17, 54 of Young Girls, 44, 46–7, 49, 52, 59;
genderless, 40–9, 57 Eight Months’ Child, 40, 59;
Gilbertus Angelicus, 57, 58, 65n55 Epidemics, 42, 49–53, 58, 59, 63;
Giovaninni, Maureen J., 90n30, 90n32 Nature of the Child, 41, 42, 44, 47,
Girard, René, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 59; Superfetation, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52,
82, 85, 92nn61–4, 92nn66–7, 92n72, 60
92n74, 93nn78–9, 93n81, 93n85, Homer, 44, 92n63, 154; Iliad, 44;
93n88, 93n91, 96n116, 97n122, Odyssey, 44
97n125, 97n131 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 13, 20,
goddess(es), 4, 9, 11, 13–21, 21n7, 35, 21n7
153 Horatia, 79, 94n100
godhead, 136, 145n17 household, 9, 19–20, 35, 40, 57, 67, 68,
gods, 12n7, 13, 14, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 69, 89n15, 112, 166
36n3, 77, 80, 82, 83, 95n103, 124, Huet, Daniel, 6, 149–55, 155nn3–4,
149, 153; bisexual, 12n7 155nn8–10, 155n13
guardianship, 13, 26, 31, 37n7 hymen, 48, 56, 63n29, 155
 200 Index

Hypermnestra, 33 160, 161; of virgin choruses, 27, 30,

hysteria, 26, 36n4, 78 31, 32, 34
laws, 21n13, 71, 72, 77, 79–80, 84, 86,
icon, 5, 6, 101, 106, 111, 112, 129 91n49, 92n69, 95nn103, 108, 128,
iconography, 125 144n8, 152, 155n7; magical, 71, 77;
Ignatius, Bishop, 104, 108, 113n13 Roman, 72, 79–80, 84, 86, 92n69,
imitatio, 6, 106–9, 115n35, 115n38 95n103, 95n108; sacred, 21n13
impiety, 94n97, 95n103 legal, 9, 25, 27, 31, 37n7, 66, 71, 72–3,
impregnable, 82 79–80, 91n50, 91n54, 115n38
incarnate/incarnation, 9, 27, 38n25, 72– legal entities, 37n7
4, 82–3, 102–3, 107–8, 130, 154 legal precedent, 115n38
incest, 76, 80, 83, 96n118 legal status, 9, 37n7, 66, 72–3, 79–80,
incestum, 77–83, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93n87, 91n50; ambiguous, 79; unique, 66,
94n94, 95n101, 96n111, 96n118 72
independence, 5, 7, 13, 14, 18 legends, 10, 19, 36, 93n86, 117, 120,
innocence, 44, 45, 57, 68, 87, 88, 118, 122, 124, 126n4, 136, 137, 144n3
149, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, Liberata, 117, 119, 121, 122, 125,
170; sexual, 44, 45, 57, 149, 162, 170 127n18
inscrutable, 157, 162, 164 Licinia, 84, 87, 91n50, 95n101, 96n118
intact, 4, 5, 7, 8, 68, 70, 73 liminal, 7, 11, 14, 16, 44, 85
intercession, 100, 106, 112, 120 love, 3, 4, 16, 21n12, 74, 100, 109, 125,
intercourse, 20, 26, 37n8, 42–4, 46, 48– 136, 159, 163
9, 54, 58, 68, 79, 87, 134 lovers, 5, 15, 21n7, 87, 88, 90n32, 131,
inviolability, 11, 67, 71 132, 134, 158
Io, 16, 22n14, 26, 31, 32
Iphigenia, 37n6 Macrina, 19
Madhavi, 4, 5
Jesus, 5, 100, 101, 103, 104, 112, 132, madness, 26, 47
138, 142, 146n27; docetic, 104; Madonna, 178
historical, 103; intercessor, 112 Madonna, la, 70, 72, 168
Jews, 140–3, 148n50 magic, 8, 67, 71, 83, 85, 139, 140;
Joan of Arc, 5, 9, 10–11, 23n34 contagious, 71; imitative, 71;
Julian the Apostate, 56, 100, 112 sympathetic, 67, 83, 85
magical, 34, 66, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 81,
kanephoroi, 16, 17, 26, 89n12 82, 85
korai, 25, 36n1 maidens, 7, 9, 16, 24–30, 32, 40, 44,
kourotrophos, 15, 21n10 159–60; choruses, 9, 24–30; sacrifice,
kyrios, 13, 26, 27, 31, 37n7 74
Marcia, 87, 95n101, 96n118
language, 27, 30–2, 34, 37n12, 38n16, margins/marginal, 7, 24, 75, 76, 77, 84,
62n24, 110–12, 132, 133, 151, 157, 85, 91n46, 93n82, 117
 Index 201

Marian: devotion, 129, 134, 136; misogyny, 83, 101–2, 116

imagery, 129; piety, 101, 129 Monk, Maria, 9, 11n6
Mariology, 104, 105 Mulvey, Laura, 110, 115nn40–1
marriage, 3, 8, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, mystics, 133, 136, 145n11
21n3, 22n27, 23n30, 25, 26, 27, 32, myth/mythical/mythological, 4, 8, 14,
33, 35, 36, 36n2, 36n4, 44, 47, 53, 58, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21n3, 24, 25, 26, 31, 36,
61n17, 65n54, 66, 68, 71, 84–5, 87, 36n3, 37n8, 38n17, 67, 74, 76, 79,
88, 90n32, 97n132, 98n145, 105, 89n8, 92n56, 94n97, 119, 150, 153,
117–18, 145n17, 171; age for, 53, 66; 155
avoided, 117; bonds, 33; manus,
97n132, 98n145; resistance to, 23n30, Nausicaa, 44
117; sacred marriage ritual, 18, Nestorius, 102–6, 113nn9–10, 114n17
22n27; unconstrained by, 16 nubile, 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18, 26, 27, 44, 58
martyrdom, 100, 107–8, 111, 125 nuns, 8, 9, 159
martyrs, 4, 9, 100, 101, 104, 107–9, 111, nymphe, 45
113n1, 114nn29, 114nn32–3, 118,
125, 127n18, 154 oath, 13, 15, 97n128
Mary, Virgin, 4, 5–7, 11, 18, 100–6, 107, omens, 77, 83
109, 111, 112–13, 114n24, 116, 119, Opimia, 84, 86, 93n94, 94n96, 96n111
125, 128–31, 133–8, 140, 142, 143, Oppia, 77, 78, 86, 93n87, 94n94
145n17, 146n27, 149; autonomy of, 5; orthodoxy, 150, 155
belief in, 149; expression of the Ovid, 16, 22n18, 85, 90n31
Divine Feminine, 101; intercessor,
100, 112; sexual purity of, 5; as pagan, paganism, 58, 100, 103, 107, 112,
Theotokos, 101–6, 129; virginal body 113n10, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155n13
of, 6; virgin birth of, 6 paides, 41
Mary Magdalene, 102, 123 Palladium, 69, 73
masculine females, 9, 16, 17, 33, 35, 49, Panathenaic festival, 17, 19, 22n21, 26
73, 91n54, 117 parthenios, 37n8, 63n29
maternal, 5, 6, 15, 19, 21n8 parthenos, partheneia, 7, 11, 13–18, 20–
matrons, 68, 83–6, 105, 108 1, 21n2, 21n12, 23n38, 25–7, 37n8,
McClure, Laura, 35, 37n10, 38n22, 40–58, 60n2, 61n16, 62n20, 63nn28–
38n24, 39n29 9, 63n32
medieval, 6, 10, 110, 111, 115n38, 117, Passion of Gallicanus, 100, 101, 112
118, 120, 124, 126n4, 126n6, 132, 135 patria potestas, 73, 91n44, 98n145
metaphor, 23n34, 23n37, 36n2, 61n13, patriarchal/patriarchy, 4, 7, 8, 14, 16, 20,
69, 71, 107, 116, 136, 156–8, 160, 170 33, 53, 85, 111, 119
miasma, 32, 80 Pausanias, 15, 16, 18
Middle Ages, 116–17, 122, 125, 126, penetrate/penetration, 16, 17, 20, 43,
126n8, 127n10, 128, 129, 131 46, 48, 56, 69, 70, 79, 80, 82, 85, 158,
Minerva, 149, 153 163, 174
 202 Index

Penthesileia, 16 priestess, 5, 15, 66, 69, 76, 89n21

peplos, 18, 22n21, 26, 37n6 privileges, 14, 37n7, 73, 91n54; Vestals’,
pharmakos, 8, 75, 82, 83 73, 91n54
Piaget, Jean, 6, 133–4, 137, 140, 145n21, prodigium/prodigy, 8, 69, 77, 80–3, 86,
146n25, 147n43 93n87, 95n111, 96nn111, 115
piety, 10, 101, 106, 113, 118, 125, 129, puberty, 18, 25, 40–3, 46, 48, 60n3,
131, 138 61n9; rites, 18, 25
Pindar, 29, 61n18 Publilia, 84, 87, 98n142
Plebeian Chastity, cult of, 84, 86 Pulcheria, Empress, 104–6, 109, 113,
Pliny, 69, 71, 75, 81, 86, 87, 92n59, 114n17
92n71, 92n73, 94n94, 94n101, punishment, 28, 74, 80, 83, 85, 96n118,
97n125 97n129, 128; of Vestals, 74, 80, 83,
Plutarch, 26, 66, 68, 81, 82, 84 96n118, 97n129; of wives, 85
Plynteria, 18 purity, 5, 18, 68, 165, 168; and fertility,
poisoning, 83–5, 86, 87, 97n131, 18; sexual, 5, 68
98n139, 132, 99n149 Puttana, la, 70, 79
polis, 25, 27, 31, 34–6, 39n30
polluting/pollution, 20, 32, 34, 74, 80, rape, 8, 28, 30, 33, 36n3, 79, 80, 88,
81, 96n112 94n97, 120, 126n1; as metaphor, 28,
pomerium, 69, 82, 97n126 30
Pomponia Rufina, 88, 94n96 resistance, 8, 16, 23n30, 56, 158; of the
Pontifex Maximus, 66, 69, 71, 73, 76, virgin, 8, 16, 23n30
80, 83, 90n27 Rome, 5, 8, 53–4, 57, 66–71, 73–5, 77,
Postumia, 86, 94n96 78, 82, 83, 84, 89n13, 89nn15–16,
potency, virginal, 4, 7, 14, 25, 31; 93n84, 93n86, 96n118, 128, 130, 132;
renewed, 4 survival dependent upon virgins, 5, 8,
Potnia Therôn, 17 69, 71, 73, 74, 82; Vestal Virgins as
power, 3–8, 10, 12n7, 14–20, 21n6, 24, symbols of, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 82,
26, 28, 31–6, 69, 71, 73, 76, 78, 101, 83, 89n16
102, 109, 111, 119, 130, 134, 136, 138, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 11
139, 157–8, 160, 161, 168, 170;
bisexual, 12n7, 119; generative, 19; sacrifice, 15, 22n13, 29, 74–5, 77, 78,
magical, 76; Roman, 69, 73; spiritual, 80–6, 87, 96n118, 97n126, 108, 112,
101, 138; supernatural, 109; virginal, 114n24, 124, 142; of martyrs, 108; of
4–8, 10, 14–21, 26, 28, 31–6, 69, 71, Vestals, 74–5, 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,
73, 119, 123, 130, 136 86, 87, 96n118, 97n126
prayer, 27–30, 32–3, 37n7, 38n16, 100, St Agnes, 100, 112, 124
112, 123, 143; virgins’, 27–30, 100, St Julia, 124, 125
112; women’s, 37n7 St Kümmernis, 117–20, 122, 126n8
pregnancy, 26, 42–3, 47, 49, 55 St Ontkommer, 10, 117, 119, 123–5
 Index 203

St Uncumber, 117, 119 93n82, 96n113, 111, 126n6, 130, 149;

St Victor, 129–31 Vestals’ legal status, 9, 66, 68, 72–3,
St Wilgefortis, 10, 116–19, 121, 122, 77, 79; virginal, 6, 8, 13, 15, 20, 25–7,
124, 125, 127n18; bearded female, 49, 53, 91n50, 149
10 Strega, la, 70, 79
saints, 18, 100, 101, 106, 109, 110, 116– suspicion, 8, 79, 91n46, 101, 102
20, 123–5, 126n8; transvestite, 117; Syrinx, 16, 22n14
virgin, 18, 100, 117, 118, 119, 124
Sappho, 16, 37n9, 44–5, 63n32 taming, 11, 25, 27, 34
scapegoat, 8, 74, 97n132 Tarpeia, 79, 85, 94n100, 97n126
sexual attraction of the virgin, 16 Tertullian, 108, 114n28
sexual enigma, 156 Thecla, 19
sexual identity, 6, 16, 17, 157, 163, 168 Theophilus, 136–7
sexual impurity, 67, 80 transvestism, 9, 18, 117, 126n6
sexual independence, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20, Tuccia, 86, 94n96, 96n111
23n38 Turner, Victor, 71, 88n4, 90n34, 92n66,
sexual potency, through virginity, 4, 8, 96n113
15, 17, 18
sexual purity, 5, 6, 18, 20, 68, 149 unchastity, of Vestals, 69, 74, 79–80,
sexual renunciation, 3, 4, 7, 74, 118, 94n94, 94n97
129, 131 undefiled bodies, 66
sexual status, 8, 9, 68; ambiguous, 8, 9 unpenetrated, 69, 70, 82, 85
Sissa, Giulia, 7, 11n2, 23n38, 37n8, unpossessed, 9
63n29, 65n49 untamed, 14, 25, 35
Sommerstein, Alan, 36n1, 38n23, Ursuline convent, 9, 11
38n26, 39n27
Sophia, 102 venerated/veneration, 5, 18, 109,
Sophocles, 24, 25, 36, 95n108; female 115n38, 116, 117, 119, 122
choruses of, 24, 36 Venus, 84, 86, 87, 119; bearded, 119;
Soranus, 54–7, 64n45, 64n48, 65n49 Obsequens, 84, 86; Verticordia, 84,
speech, 7, 27, 29–35, 37n10, 38n25, 50, 86, 87
61n6, 139; female, dangerous, 7, 31– Vergine, la, 70, 72, 79
3, 34, 37n10; female, taming, 27, 29, virginal, 5–11, 13, 18, 20, 23n39, 26, 35,
31, 33, 37n10 49, 159, 160, 166, 169, 172; au-
Staples, Ariadne, 23n39, 66, 68, 88n2, tonomy, 5; body, 5, 6, 8, 11, 23n39,
88n6, 89n14, 90n38, 90n41, 91n43, 49; energy, 8; fecundity, 16, 18, 19,
91n48, 91n50, 91n54, 93n90, 95n109, 20; heroines, 10
96n114, 96n118, 97n123 Vita Macrinae, 23n36, 58
status, 6, 8, 9, 25–7, 49, 53, 66, 72–3, 75, Volto Santo, 116–18, 120, 122, 126n4,
76, 77, 79, 82, 89n8, 91n48, 91n50, 126n8
 204 Index

Warner, Marina, 11, 12n9, 101, 111, well-dressing, 18

113n4 widows, 7, 42, 44, 68, 86, 107, 135
weakness, 40, 60n4, 70, 79, 88n3, 93n82, wild/wildness, 8, 14, 16, 17, 25, 28, 33,
124, 163; perceived female, 40, 60n4, 35, 36
70, 79, 88n3, 93n82 witches/witchcraft, 21n6, 66, 70, 77–9,
weaving, 9, 11, 17, 22n20–1, 22n26 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 93n92, 98n141
 PHOENIX SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUMES

1 Studies in Honour of Gilbert Norwood edited by Mary E. White

2 Arbiter of Elegance: A Study of the Life and Works of C. Petronius Gilbert

Bagnani

3 Sophocles the Playwright S.M. Adams

4 A Greek Critic: Demetrius on Style G.M.A. Grube

5 Coastal Demes of Attika: A Study of the Policy of Kleisthenes C.W.J. Eliot

6 Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus, and Origen John M. Rist

7 Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism J.A. Philip

8 Plato’s Psychology T.M. Robinson

9 Greek Fortifications F.E. Winter

10 Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery Elaine Fantham

11 The Orators in Cicero’s ‘Brutus’: Prosopography and Chronology G.V. Sumner

12 ‘Caput’ and Colonate: Towards a History of Late Roman Taxation Walter

Goffart

13 A Concordance to the Works of Ammianus Marcellinus Geoffrey Archbold

14 Fallax opus: Poet and Reader in the Elegies of Propertius John Warden

15 Pindar’s ‘Olympian One’: A Commentary Douglas E. Gerber

16 Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices: The History of a

Technology John Peter Oleson
17 The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius James L. Butrica
18 Parmenides of Elea Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction
edited by David Gallop

19 The Phonological Interpretation of Ancient Greek: A Pandialectal Analysis

Vít Bubeník
20 Studies in the Textual Tradition of Terence John N. Grant

21 The Nature of Early Greek Lyric: Three Preliminary Studies R.L. Fowler

22 Heraclitus Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary edited by

T.M. Robinson

23 The Historical Method of Herodotus Donald Lateiner

24 Near Eastern Royalty and Rome, 100–30 BC Richard D. Sullivan

25 The Mind of Aristotle: A Study in Philosophical Growth John M. Rist

26 Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149 BC to 50 BC Michael Alexander

27 Monumental Tombs of the Hellenistic Age: A Study of Selected Tombs from the
Pre-Classical to the Early Imperial Era Janos Fedak

28 The Local Magistrates of Roman Spain Leonard A. Curchin

29 Empedocles The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an
Introduction edited by Brad Inwood

30 Xenophanes of Colophon Fragments: A Text and Translation with a

Commentary J.H. Lesher
31 Festivals and Legends: The Formation of Greek Cities in the Light of Public
Ritual Noel Robertson

32 Reading and Variant in Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and Their
Manuscript Sources Wade Richardson

33 The Excavations of San Giovanni di Ruoti, Volume 1: The Villas and Their
Environment Alastair M. Small and Robert J. Buck

34 Catullus Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary D.F.S.

Thomson

35 The Excavations of San Giovanni di Ruoti, Volume 2: The Small Finds

C.J. Simpson, with contributions by R. Reece and J.J. Rossiter
36 The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus Fragments: A Text and Translation
with a Commentary C.C.W. Taylor
37 Imagination of a Monarchy: Studies in Ptolemaic Propaganda R.A. Hazzard
38 Aristotle’s Theory of the Unity of Science Malcolm Wilson

39 Empedocles The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an

Introduction, Revised edition edited by Brad Inwood

40 The Excavations of San Giovanni di Ruoti, Volume 3: The Faunal and Plant
Remains M.R. MacKinnon, with contributions by A. Eastham, S.G. Monckton,
D.S. Reese, and D.G. Steele

41 Justin and Pompeius Trogus: A Study of the Language of Justin’s ‘Epitome’ of

Trogus J.C. Yardley

42 Studies in Hellenistic Architecture F.E. Winter

43 Mortuary Landscapes of North Africa edited by David L. Stone and Lea M.

Stirling
44 Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body edited by Bonnie
MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher