Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Julia Kelto Lillis demonstrates that 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 shift 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.
Virgin Territory Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity
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"Taking her cue from modern conceptions of virginity, Julia Kelto Lillis offers welcome correctives designed to stimulate discussion among scholars and a wider public. With a focus on the figure of Mary, Kelto 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, all centered on bodily, sexual, and anatomical virginity. By covering such a large territory, Julia Kelto 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