Menacing virgins
Subtitle: representing virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
By: edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie.
Contributors: Kelly, Kathleen Coyne.; Leslie, Marina.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Newark [Del.]; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
Subjects: Literature, Medieval -- History and criticism.; European literature -- Renaissance, 1450-1600 -- History and criticism.; Virginity in literature.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-240) and index.