Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body.

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Virginity Revisited is a collection of essays about virginity’s cultural meanings through the ages. It is edited by Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher, and includes contributions by Anne Geddes Baily, Kate Cooper, Ilse Friesen, Ann Ellis Hanson, Eleanor Irwin, Thomas Lennon, Holt N. Parker, and Jenifer Sutherland, as well as by the editors themselves. The emphasis is on configurations of virginity in early Christianity and the ancient world.

As the editors, and most of the contributors, recognize, virginity has been connected with power, although not always in obvious ways, in Western culture for millennia. The essays in this book show that discourses about virginity usually have less to do with the individual who preserves her chastity than we might think. Virginity, rather, has most often been a symbolic or actual source of power for institutions and societies. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the virgin, or at least virginity, becomes public property of a sort. Fletcher discusses this with reference to the virgin choruses in Aeschylus. Her article is one of the four excellent articles on the ancient world that begin the book. These are followed by chapters about virginity in the medieval period, and the book ends with Anne Geddes Bailey’s excellent contribution about Atwood’s Alias Grace.

While it is somewhat strange that the book is not more balanced in its focus on different historical periods, it remains an excellent contribution to a fascinating topic.