Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.
Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
"Taking her cue from modern conceptions of virginity, Julia Kelto Lillis offers welcome correctives designed to stimulate discussion among scholars and a wider public. Lillis lays out the territory of meanings associated with female virginity in the late ancient world to demonstrate that it meant many different things."—Susanna Elm, Sidney H. Ehrman Professor of European History, University of California, Berkeley
"Virgin Territory provides detailed analyses of a wide variety of Christian and ancient Mediterranean texts across different discourses, each centered on bodily, sexual, or anatomical virginity. By covering such a large territory, Lillis teases out numerous local maps, revealing how early Christian authors conveyed very different ideas about what virginity of the body and virginity of the soul are and how these individual conceptualizations changed over time."—Sissel Undheim, Professor of Religion, University of Bergen
"Metaphorical, discursive, diagnostic, and ultimately impossible to define, women's virginity was a major fixation in late antiquity. Lillis captures the full complexity of this deeply imagined condition. It is undoubtedly the most refined and sophisticated understanding of this important topic to date."—Maia Kotrosits, author of The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity
290 pp.6 x 9
9780520389014$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Dec 2022