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The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.
From an acclaimed author in the field, this is a compelling study of the origins and history of the disease commonly seen as afflicting young unmarried girls. Understanding of the condition turned puberty and virginity into medical conditions, and Helen King stresses the continuity of this disease through history,depsite enormous shifts in medical understanding and technonologies, and drawing parallels with the modern illness of anorexia. Examining its roots in the classical tradition all the way through to its extraordinary survival into the 1920s, this study asks a number of questions about the nature of the disease itself and the relationship between illness, body images and what we should call‘normal’ behaviour. This is a fascinating and clear account which will prove invaluable not just to students of classical studies, but will be of interest to medical professionals also.
From Classical Antiquity to the present, virginity has been closely allied with power: as someone who chooses a life of celibacy retains mastery over his or her body. Sexual potency withheld becomes an energy-reservoir that can ensure independence and enhance self-esteem, but it can also be harnessed by public institutions and redirected for the common good. This was the founding principle of the Vestal Virgins of Rome and later in the monastic orders of the middle ages. Mythical accounts of goddesses and heroines who possessed the ability to recover their virginity after sexual experience demonstrate a belief that virginity is paradoxically connected both with social autonomy and the ability to serve the human community. Virginity Revisited is a collection of essays that examines virginity not as a physical reality but as a cultural artefact. By situating the topic of virginity within a range of historical 'moments' and using a variety of methodologies, Virginity Revisited illuminates how chastity provided a certain agency, autonomy, and power to women. This is a study of the positive and negative features of sexual renunciation, from ancient Greek divinities and mythical women, in Rome's Vestal Virgins, in the Christian martyrs and Mariology in the Medieval and early Modern period, and in Grace Marks, the heroine of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace.
An important contribution to the historical study of sexuality and the growing feminist literature on the state
Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.
This book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.
In this book the author presents in detail the mysteries that adorn the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit... Mary, the Woman who gives life to the one who gave life to Her, the Mother who engendered the Being who engendered Her, the Woman who engendered her Own Being, The one who existed before all existence, The one who gave Being to the Creator of everything, the one who locked up the Immense and Infinite God in her breasts, the One who locked up in her guts who does not fit in the whole world, the one who held in her arms the one who supports everything, the one who had the obligation to exercise vigilance over the One who sees everything, The one who took care of the Being who cares for everyone, The one who touched the confines of the One who has no end, the Word made Woman, to be Mother and Wife of God, Our Lady of the Holy Trinity of the Holy Spirit, Her Own Being, that is God. En este libro el autor presenta detalladamente los misterios que adornan a la Virgen María y al Espíritu Santo... María, la Mujer que da la vida a quien le dio la vida a Ella, la Madre que engendró al Ser que la engendró a Ella, la Mujer que engendró su Propio Ser, La que existía antes que toda existencia, La que dio el Ser al Ser creador de todo, La que encerró en sus Senos al Inmenso e Infinito Dios, Aquella que encerró en sus Entrañas a quien no cabe en todo el mundo, La que sostuvo en sus brazos al que todo lo sustenta, La que tuvo obligación de ejercer vigilancia sobre El que todo lo ve, La que tuvo a su cuidado al Ser que cuida de todos, La que tocó los confines de Quien no tiene fin; el Verbo hecho Mujer, para ser Madre y Esposa de Dios, Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad del Espíritu Santo, su Propio Ser, que es Dios.
This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.
This women-centred approach to analyzing the different impacts of the pandemic on women and men, and how HIV/AIDS function as a paradigm for other women's issues. Questions addressed include: what is the relationship between AIDS and women's health, sexuality and socio-economic status?; is there a feminist agenda on AIDS?; how have women been portrayed in discourse about the epidemic?; are women living with the virus treated differently from men?; and what activities put women at risk'.
Although the theme of bloodied nuptial sheets seems pervasive in western culture, its association with female virginity is uniquely tied to a brief passage in the book of Deuteronomy detailing the procedure for verifying a young woman's purity; it seldom, if ever, appears outside of Abrahamic traditions. In Signs of Virginity, Michael Rosenberg examines the history of virginity testing in Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship of these tests to a culture that encourages male sexual violence. Deuteronomy's violent vision of virginity has held sway in Jewish and Christian circles more or less ever since. However, Rosenberg points to two authors-the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud and the early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo-who, even as they perpetuate patriarchal assumptions about female virginity, nonetheless attempt to subvert the emphasis on sexual dominance bequeathed to them by Deuteronomy. Unlike the authors of earlier Rabbinic and Christian texts, who modified but fundamentally maintained and even extended the Deuteronomic ideal, the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine both construct alternative models of female virginity that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity. Indeed this vision of masculinity as fundamentally gentle, rather than characterized by brutal and violent sexual behavior, fits into a broader idealization of masculinity propagated by both authors, who reject what Augustine called a "lust for dominance" as a masculine ideal.