Virginity is commonly considered a clear-cut quality. However, as we learn in U.’s study, it has not always been defined in simple biological terms; from antiquity onwards, it has been culturally determined. This is especially true in the case of sacral virginity, which is characterised by an act of consecration. U. sets out to demonstrate that within both pagan and Christian ideas of virginity in late antiquity one finds striking variances. She observes that the notions of virginity were caught somewhere between fixed and flexible definitions and that the criteria by which virginity could be confirmed or denied were subject to constant discursive negotiations, which involved demarcating borderlines. The fixed reference point was the idea of a physical virginity, epitomised by the body of a young, aristocratic woman with no experience of sexual activity. Many of the concepts of virginity are paradoxical, such as widowed virgins, married virgins or male virgins. Such borderline virginities challenged popular concepts of virginity, but equally served to consolidate norms.
The long-held notion of a diametrical opposition between a purely physical virginity of the Vestals in pagan Rome and a newly developing spiritual form in Christianity is untenable according to U. Instead, she believes that they merged in the form of ‘Roman virginity’, which informed both secular and spiritual, pagan and Christian concepts. In the Church Fathers’ writings on virginity, one finds polemical intentions and rhetorical design, which aim at the establishment of normative ideals and values. They aimed at proving Christianity's superiority over pagan culture by creating differences in similar phenomena. U. breaks away from well-established interpretative patterns adopted from the sources, detaching herself from the parameters set up by the virginity propagandists Ambrose and Jerome. In the wake of the cultural turn her approach points to a cultural framing common to the pagan and Christian conceptions in late antiquity. U.’s work joins recent research on the fourth and fifth centuries in emphasising the continuing communication between paganism and Christianity. U. manages to go beyond the model of Mary, which tends to dominate historical and contemporary theological concepts of virginity. The source base U. relies on is wide, including authoritative theological writings, other literary texts in prose and poetry, but also epigraphic material. As a result, she successfully illuminates the polyphony within the discourse.
One need only look at the Latin word virgo to see that it is a variable term. U.’s interpretations, which take into account the historical addressee, expound that the Church Fathers’ juxtaposition of the Vestals with the Christian virgins pandered to a sceptical upper-class audience, whom they wanted to win over to the ideal of virginity. In contrasting the Vestals and the Christian virgins, Church writers used recurring topoi.
Among the elements of virginitas open to varying interpretation, U. identifies social status, age and symbolism expressed in clothing (Chapter 2). In classical Rome, sacred virginity was closely linked to social status, since it was open only to free and freed women. Also, the women Ambrose and Jerome were in contact with attest to the connection between virginity and nobility. The substitution of real nobility by a metaphorical one ultimately did not surmount social differences.
The age at which the decision to lead a life of virginity should be made was subject to discussion as well. Generally, in contrast to the Vestals, whose captio took place in childhood, marriageable age was regarded as the ideal earliest date for Christian virgins. The right way to dress and to move was discussed both by pagans and Christians. Thus, the effect of Christianisation was not to shift the whole focus onto one's inner life. The tendency towards a more flexible understanding of the term can be attributed to the Church Fathers’ attempt to establish virginity as a concept open to the largest possible number of people.
The chapter on gender (Chapter 3) deals with the negotiations about whether virginity should be seen as an exclusive quality of women or could also be attributed to men. While some Church writers compared the ascetic life of virginity to the asexuality of angels and concluded that virginity abolished gender boundaries, others objected. The soteriological effect of virginity was also ascribed to men. Nevertheless, even if the fact that virginity was important for salvation led to the term being used in a broader sense, the notion of virginity remained bound to the female body, meaning that men could do no more than imitate female virginity.
In Chapter 4 U. tracks the boundaries of virginity ex negativo: how did one determine the loss of virginity? When tackling this problem, the Church Fathers differentiated between physical and spiritual virginity. It is striking that the seemingly most obvious solution to this problem, physical detection, scarcely played a role. Concerns about the reliability of this method prevailed. The differences between pagan (Symmachus) and Christian (Damasus) beliefs can be illustrated by the divergent sanctions against the loss of virginity. Both interpret the incident as a crime against divinity (incestum), but the different recommendations as to the atonement for the offence reveal different views: the fallen Christian virgins are not penalised, but urged to repent. What was most decisive in the Christian assessment of somebody's loss of virginity was the question of their will, or to be more precise, whether they had acted deliberately. The spiritual dimension thus allowed for a flexible definition of virginity.
U. draws the final conclusion that despite the permanent tendency in late antiquity to extend sacral virginity by making its boundaries more flexible, the concepts of sanctified virginity in the end never completely got away from the fixed idea of the young, aristocratic, morally impeccable woman without any sexual experience.
U.’s comparative approach, which questions the Christian authors’ teleological construction of their own superiority over pagan culture, is very welcome. However, some fundamental differences between the pagan and Christian religions could have been pointed out more precisely. The religion of the Romans was a complex phenomenon that included very different coexisting notions of the religious. This was acknowledged in antiquity by Varro in his conception of the theologia tripertita. Many of the phenomena that U. deals with belong to the realm of state religion (theologia civilis), while others are rather in the field of philosophical reflection (theologia naturalis). Depending on which of these areas the literary or inscriptional treatment of virginity is to be attributed to, a very large or just a slight difference between pagan and Christian conceptions may emerge. The execution of pagan rites aiming at formal correctness differs greatly from the Christian emphasis on the importance of leading a pure inner life. On the other hand, pagan texts, in which the gods are able to look into human conscience and human behaviour is judged by the moral imperatives a person adheres to (Seneca the Elder), clearly bear a Stoical hue. In this case, Christian and pagan ideas are much closer to each other. The question of necessary differentiations arises for Christianity as well. If U. maintains that Christians ascribed to the virgins a comparable role for the well-being of society as the pagan Romans, she must also deal with Augustine (De civitate Dei), whose aim was to separate religion from political and social prosperity. We have good reasons to doubt that the Christian virgins were considered to be protective of the community to the same extent as the Vestals in pagan Rome were.
In no way do these comments aim to criticise U.’s lucid and highly stimulating work. Instead, they are designed to give pointers on how her ideas might be built upon. One of the great merits of this study is that it underlines the fact that today's research must beware of making historical patterns of interpretation its own. The book will give many important impulses to those working in the field of late-antique religiosity, in particular because of its comparative perspective.
