Medieval Virginities.

Dockray-Miller, Mary

Medieval Virginities. Edited by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xiv + 296 pp. $50.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

As the title of this collection suggests, "virginity" can no longer be examined as a singular entity. In the midst of the current wave of gender, women's, and sexuality studies currently washing over medieval studies, the editors have positioned "virginities" as a fruitful and interesting point of investigation for a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines. The essays collected here occasionally stray into theoretically dense jargon; the connections of their subjects with virginities are sometimes tenuous; the collection focuses exclusively on later medieval Insular and French virginities. These criticisms aside, however, the essays here provide engaging and even entertaining reading in a variety of fields not usually addressed in the more typical medieval studies essay collection.

The editors state in their introduction that they wish to present examinations of virginities in a range of disciplines, and in this objective they succeed admirably. While the collection includes some "more common literary and art-historical treatments of virgin women" (7), essays also examine male virgins, the legal status of virgins, alchemical theory and practices, representations of and beliefs about Jews, and some political implications of the virginity of the "body politic" on both sides of the channel.

The collection's introduction provides a useful review of the intersections between virginity studies and medieval studies in the past twenty years or so, making the important point that "virginity, removing individuals from the sexual economy, may function as a challenge to binary gender and heterosexuality" (3). Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, the grande dame of medieval virginity studies, receives accolades and gratitude throughout the collection (she also provides the conclusionary essay). The introduction also briefly connects medievalists' focus on virginities to popular culture; I suspect that this collection contains the only reference to Britney Spears in scholarly medieval studies.

The collection is most successful precisely in those areas that are not "common," to use the editors' term, and I will focus on some of those uncommon essays here. A number of them are more interesting for their overviews and contextualizations of those uncommon subjects than for the connections of those subjects with "virginities." Juliette Dor's essay on sheela-na-gigs is a good example: Her final connections between virginity and the sheela sculptures, with their grotesquely displayed genitalia, seem somewhat forced, but the overview of the sculptures is thorough and clear. While perhaps the sheelas "could figure as paradoxical signs for the powerful concept of virginity" (38, emphasis added), this essay will ultimately be useful to scholars and students for its sections that do not focus on virginity. Similarly, Jonathan Hughes's overview and description of medieval alchemical theory and practices should be required reading in any entry-level medieval studies course, although his theoretical connections between alchemy and virginity seem strained, especially at the end, where he equates an alchemical hermaphrodite to a virgin. Ruth Evans's essay contributes to the growing discourse about anti-Semitism in medieval Europe, but her discussions of the myths of male Jewish menstruation and Jewish desecration of the Eucharist will be read more for their informative analysis of texts than for the sometimes tenuous theoretical connections between representations of virginities and of Jews.

Jane Cartwright also ventures into less familiar territory with her examination of Welsh virginity tests (medical and legal as well as literary), detailing medical theory and practice from a number of manuscripts held in Welsh archives. Her discussion of uroscopy--the analysis and use of urine in diagnosis and treatment--will hold the attention of even the most jaded medievalist or overworked graduate student; the connections between uroscopy and virginity are stunning and, once explained, eminently sensible. In the spirit of deliberately vague film reviews that wish to avoid spoiling the viewer's pleasure, I will not reveal those connections here.

Equally spectacular are Kim Phillips's analyses of four legal aspects of female lay virginity--a type of virginity important in its expected loss rather than in its preservation. Phillips reminds us that most female, medieval "virginities" were intended to be "lost'--preferably on a parentally sanctioned wedding night. While scholars have tended to focus on devotional, religious virginity, Phillips focuses instead on "the fathers, mothers, communities, manorial lords and judges who took an interest in a maiden's virginity and sought ways to punish or compensate for its loss" (81). Most impressive is her connection between leywrite--the fine paid for lost virginity--and peasant/tenant resistance. Phillips establishes a pattern of the use of leywrite by feudal landlords to shame and sanction young women whose families resisted the landlord's taxes, fines, or policies.

John Arnold's essay takes up the interesting question of male virginity-what it is, and how can we confirm it? Arnold distinguishes between male chastity--a man's triumph over lust through will power--and male virginity, a quasimiraculous holy state in which lust is completely absent. Joanna Huntington provides further reflection on male virginity in her reading of the Lives of Edward the Confessor. The establishment of Edward's virginity was a multiyear process, and Huntington traces the fashioning of it through three Lives (an anonymous Life, Osbert of Clare's, and Aelred of Rievaulx's). Interestingly enough, she does not mention the Anglo-Norman Life by the anonymous nun of Barking, a Life that could have provided interesting gender perspectives on that author's (possible) virginity as well as her presentation of the virgin king's.

Wogan-Browne's "Response" to the collection appropriately praises each of the contributions before turning to "virginities" in contemporary culture; she uses Gray's Anatomy and other current medical texts to show that our own culture has many of the same anxieties about "virginities" that medieval cultures did. Medieval Virginities could have been more precisely titled (although Late Medieval Virginities in Insular and French Culture does not seem very marketable); its editors could have cut some gratuitous references to Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. But the core of its scholarship is precise, thorough, and interesting. The conveniently compiled bibliography at the end is enormously useful. This collection is a fine contribution to its field.

Mary Dockray-Miller

Lesley University