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The Price of Virtue for the Medieval Woman: Chastity and the Crucible of the Virgin

ABSTRACT This article distinguishes the gendered identity of virtue for medieval women in a detailed account of the significance of their chastity as a private monetary concern and a public mark of respectability. Private chastity was guarded against loss of familial fortune, and public chastity was tested in gruesome displays that guarded against cuckoldry. Whole narratives are devoted to admonitions to virgins and deadly chastity tests; these narratives signify a mystical ordeal that women endured to prove themselves virtuous because the only virtue afforded women rested in the hymen. In medieval hagiography, women who chose a life of saintly virginity, mostly to escape the marriage bed, often become virgin martyrs to their chastity. The women who endured torture and death for the sake of their religious devotion offer a public and entertaining spectacle. The article contains information concerning the various chastity tests in the Middle Ages, symbolic of martyrdom and purity that translates from a guildsman’s wife to Milton’s Eve, as the Renaissance ushers in a shift from the physicality focus of the feminine body image as it relates to intactness to the spiritual locus of the fall and the continuous degradation of virtue for all women for centuries.