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How and why did virginity come to play such a crucial part in the
Christian Church in the formative and defining period of Late
Antiquity? Sissel Undheim analyzes the negotiations over what
constituted virginity and assesses its socio-religious value in
fourth-century Rome by looking at those at the very margins of
virginity and non-virginity. The Church Fathers' efforts to
demarcate an exclusively Christian virginity, in contrast to the
'false virgins' of their pagan adversaries, displays a tension
that, it is argued, played a larger role in the construction of a
specifically Christian sacred virginity than previous studies have
acknowledged. Late fourth-century Christian theologians' persistent
appraisals of sacred virgins paved the way for a wide variety of
virgins that often challenged the stereotype of the unmarried
female virgin. The sources abound with seemingly paradoxical
virgins, such as widow virgins, married virgins, virgin mothers,
infant virgins, old virgins, heretical virgins, pagan virgins, male
virgins, false virgins and fallen virgins. Through examining these
kinds of 'borderline virgins' as they appear in a range of textual
sources from varied genres, Undheim demonstrates how physical,
cultural and cognitive boundaries of virginity were contested,
drawn and redrawn in the fourth and early fifth centuries in the
Latin West.
How and why did virginity come to play such a crucial part in the
Christian Church in the formative and defining period of Late
Antiquity? Sissel Undheim analyzes the negotiations over what
constituted virginity and assesses its socio-religious value in
fourth-century Rome by looking at those at the very margins of
virginity and non-virginity. The Church Fathers' efforts to
demarcate an exclusively Christian virginity, in contrast to the
'false virgins' of their pagan adversaries, displays a tension
that, it is argued, played a larger role in the construction of a
specifically Christian sacred virginity than previous studies have
acknowledged. Late fourth-century Christian theologians' persistent
appraisals of sacred virgins paved the way for a wide variety of
virgins that often challenged the stereotype of the unmarried
female virgin. The sources abound with seemingly paradoxical
virgins, such as widow virgins, married virgins, virgin mothers,
infant virgins, old virgins, heretical virgins, pagan virgins, male
virgins, false virgins and fallen virgins. Through examining these
kinds of 'borderline virgins' as they appear in a range of textual
sources from varied genres, Undheim demonstrates how physical,
cultural and cognitive boundaries of virginity were contested,
drawn and redrawn in the fourth and early fifth centuries in the
Latin West.
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