Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages by Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Henry Lovelich’s Merlin and Saynt Greal, the Middle English prose Merlin ) fit into Ingham’s scheme of colonial loss and mourning? Are nonArthurian examples of this ‘‘colonial genre’’ equally enmeshed in ethnic and gender negotiations? How do Welsh writings from this period bear witness to regional and sovereign identifications? How do the French sources of English romance (e.g., La queste del saint graal, La mort le roi Artu) grapple with these same issues? How does postcolonial theory help distinguish these various cultural particularities from the commonalities preserved in translation? Finally, Ingham’s argument that psychoanalysis reveals the fantasmatic structures of history brings to mind Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation , 1399–1422 (see my review in The Medieval Review, 10 July 1999). Ingham and Strohm both attend to the structures of desire that shape prophecy, legitimation, and the psychic force of sovereignty; both rely on Slavoj Žižek and Ernst Kantorowicz in theorizing the sovereign body (although neither addresses Žižek’s own use of Kantorowicz). If this comparison weakens Ingham’s arguments about the generic specificity of sovereign fantasy, it also suggests that her reading strategies illuminate generalized cultural anxieties. Sovereign Fantasies is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that addresses a number of important issues concerning the methodologies of literary history and the forces that have shaped present-day archives. Michelle R. Warren University of Miami Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. x, 197. $85.00 Instead of a broader survey of the meaning of virginity in literature, Kathleen Kelly has chosen an intriguing focus for her book: the medieval preoccupation with testing virginity. Informed by constructivist feminism, the book demonstrates that even virginity testing, a quintessential locus for the belief that the body can be empirically known, is in fact culturally constructed. Kelly examines the slippage between the ‘‘abstract idea’’ of virginity and its anatomical figurations to argue that 414 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:20 PS REVIEWS ‘‘the many attempts to fix virginity in/on the body are inevitably compromised by recourse to metaphors and metonyms—tropes which make visible not only virginity’s constructed character, but its gendered and heterosexualized nature as well’’ (p. 11). The book seeks to trace an ‘‘archeology of virginity’’ by surveying a range of materials dating from the classical period through the Middle Ages, but the central focus is on hagiography and romance from the European Middle Ages. In her first chapter Kelly examines a wide range of classical and medieval medical treatises and patristic texts from Soranus (second century A.D.) to pseudo-Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century). Arguing from the implicit assumption that her readers will believe the hymen to be a clear physiological mark of virginity, she shows that, in fact, it was not the hymen but the condition of the uterus that was seen as evidence for virginity in early classical writing. Although the hymen is mentioned in works of medieval medicine, she demonstrates that it was only one among many tests for virginity. In contrast to medical writers, patristic writers saw virginity as a spiritual rather than physical condition, but despite these beliefs, tests of virginity were performed throughout the Middle Ages in ecclesiastical court and elsewhere. According to Kelly, the sheer variety of ways to test virginity ‘‘calls into question the idea of a stable, readable and knowable female body’’ (p. 18). In her second chapter, Kelly focuses primarily on the Legenda aurea and the tales of Agatha, Agnes, and Lucy in her examination of a range of hagiographical tales of near-rape. She argues that this genre originated in the second to fourth centuries, when the Christian church was under ‘‘particular assault’’ by the Roman Empire. Depiction of the act of rape itself is also absent in later hagiographical narratives, she concludes, because it is too threatening to the church, since the inviolate female virgin’s body ‘‘came to function as the most apt homology between the self and the institutionalized church’’ (p. 42). Perhaps Kelly’s most persuasive argument is in...