Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and

Making Men in Late Antiquity 1st

Edition Michael Rosenberg
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/signs-of-virginity-testing-virgins-and-making-men-in-la
te-antiquity-1st-edition-michael-rosenberg/
i

Signs of Virginity
ii
iii

Signs of Virginity
Testing Virgins and Making
Men in Late Antiquity
z
MICHAEL ROSENBERG

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​084589–​6

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

For my father, Joshua Baruch Rosenberg, of blessed memory.

This is not the book that he wanted to write, but I think

he would have understood that, at its roots, I’m struggling
with the same questions.
vi
vi

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: Defining Virginity, Making Men 1

PART I. Testing Virginity in the Body

1. Virginity and Violence in Cross-​Cultural Perspective 21

2. Bloodied Sheets: The Biblical Nuptial Bed as Rape Scene 31

3. “Trustworthy Women” and Other Witnesses: Tweaking
Deuteronomy in Pre-​Rabbinic and Early Rabbinic Judaism 44

PART II. Testing Virginity through Faith

4. Doubts and Faith: Possible Alternatives in

Three First-​Century Jewish Authors 79

5. Struck by Wood, Struck by God: Virginity Beyond/​Despite

Anatomy 90
vi

viii Contents

PART III. Subjecting Virginity

6. Open Doors and Accused Brides: Subjectivity and

a New Standard for Virginity Testing in Rabbinic Babylonia 119

7. Impure Nuptials and Sex as Work: The Bavli’s Attempted

Divorce of Virginity from Violence 148
8. (De)Mythologizing the Hymen: Augustine, the Bavli, and the
Rejection of Force 182

Epilogue 207
Notes 215
Bibliography 289
Index 305
Index of Primary Sources 309
ix

Acknowledgments

If the only reward for the time I’ve spent on this book is the opportu-
nity to thank some wonderful people, it will have been worth it. To begin,
many institutions and teachers have been critical to my development as
a reader of text and cultures—​more than I can thank here. But particular
thanks are due to my teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS),
including Eliezer Diamond, Judith Hauptman, and Neil Danzig, and espe-
cially to Israel Francus, who taught me how to read for inconsistencies that
can point to a world of meaning, and who demonstrated a love for Tractate
Ketubot. Though my own love for this challenging and perplexing trac-
tate has developed in ways that are perhaps far from Prof. Francus’s own
research interests, it still takes its roots in Dr. Francus’s passion.
During my time at JTS, I was fortunate to be a recipient of the Wexner
Graduate Fellowship, a beneficence that not only freed me to explore
widely in my learning, but also put me in contact with outstanding schol-
ars and phenomenal thinkers working in a variety of fields. My debt to
the Wexner Foundation and to the members of WGF Class 14 is palpable.
I also benefited from a Hadassah-​Brandeis Institute research award, which
supported my early research on virginity testing in Rabbinic literature.
My doctoral advisor at JTS, Richard Kalmin, has been an incredible
resource, both patient and critical. When I decided not to turn my dis-
sertation into a book, for the time being, but rather to take one tangen-
tial point from it and spend years expanding it into the volume in front
of you now, he supported me and offered advice and guidance that went
beyond any reasonable expectation. His model of careful, critical research
coupled with the very best of scholarly kindness has been and remains an
inspiration to me.
Many of the ideas for this book first percolated in my head when I was
a rabbinical student at Yeshivat Ma’aleh Gilboa, on Kibbutz Ma’aleh Gilboa
x

x Acknowledgments

in Israel. My colleagues Aryeh Bernstein and Ethan Tucker were incredi-

ble conversation partners during that time, and I am thankful to the rashei
yeshiva of that wonderful institution of learning, Rabbis Yehuda Gilad,
Shmuel Reiner, and rosh ha-​yeshiva Rabbi David Bigman for welcom-
ing me into the environment of passionate inquiry that they have built.
During my time there, I learned much from all of them, and especially
from my rebbe there, Rabbi Dr. Elisha Ancselovits, who challenged me
from almost literally the first moment he met me to ask deeper and better.
Although I suspect he will disagree with much in this book, I know that
almost everything I write and teach requires the caveat: “This I learned
from my teacher, Rav Elisha.”
This book would not have come into being were it not for a partner-
ship in life and learning with my spouse, Miriam-​Simma Walfish. During
the academic year 2005–​2006, I was studying the laws of niddah, as well
as the tenth chapter of Tractate Niddah intensively; at the same time, she
was studying the first chapter of Ketubot. Our conversations that year—​
passionate, challenging, sometimes tearful—​led to the realization that
these two seemingly distant chapters were speaking to the same con-
cerns, and we cotaught this material at the National Havurah Committee
Summer Institute in 2007. I will have more to say about my personal debt
to Miriam-​Simma below, but her role in the formation of the ideas in this
book demands thanks in its own right.
In recent years, I have been blessed to be part of a wonderful crew
of scholars curious about, perplexed by, horrified at, and otherwise fasci-
nated by constructions of female virginity in antiquity. Jennifer Collins-​
Elliott, Julia Kelto Lillis, Caroline Musgrove, and Melanie Webb have been
some of my most valued conversation partners, pushing and critiquing
me, and helping me to remember why this (to some, strange choice of)
research project is important. Our week together at the Oxford Patristics
Conference in 2015 and the workshop we participated in there was one of
the most thrilling and compelling academic experiences I have ever had.
I am incredibly thankful for your colleagueship.
For nearly the entirety of my time working on this book, I have been
blessed to teach at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. My
colleagues here are an inspiration as well as valued conversation partners.
In particular, I want to thank my dean, Sharon Cohen-​Anisfeld, who made
possible a semester of teaching leave at a critical moment in my writing,
without which this book might never have been finished. It meant much
xi

Acknowledgments xi

more work for her—​and my colleagues—​to pick up the slack, a sacrifice

on their parts that I recognize and appreciate.
During that semester off, I wrote huge amounts of this book at CafeNation,
my only source in the Boston area for decent Americanos and a good playlist
over the speakers. To the excellent baristas there: you were probably wonder-
ing what I was working on there all day, every day. Here it is.
A much-​abridged version of ­chapter 5 is set to appear in volume 80 of
Studia Patristica; I am thankful to Peeters Publishers for permission to
reproduce here.
Cynthia Read and Drew Anderla of Oxford University Press have been
wonderful to work with, ushering this process through with utmost pro-
fessionalism, even when I may have been a wee bit neurotic and asked too
many questions. Thank you (and apologies).
Many people have read drafts of part or all of this book, and I am
grateful for their critical feedback (and probably guilty of not having
taken as much of their advice as I should have): Rachel Adelman, Chaya
Halberstam, Richard Kalmin, Jane Kanarek, Joshua Kulp, Julia Kelto Lillis,
Adele Reinhartz, Barry Walfish, and Miriam-​Simma Walfish.
I am grateful for the superb and critical readings I received from the
Press’s reviewers, Christine Hayes and Andrew Jacobs. Their criticisms have
significantly improved this book with regard both to the content of its claims
and to its clarity, for which not only I, but also the reader is thankful. It has
become a kind of boilerplate to say that, where the author has not followed up
on reviewers’ suggestions, it is to the book’s detriment; nonetheless, I feel that
acutely here. In some cases, constraints of time and space have prevented me
from taking them up on their suggestions; in others, it is the scholarly sin of
stubbornness. But throughout, their comments challenged me and engaged
my work in ways that represent academic discourse at its very best.
I am embarrassed by the good fortune of my family and the support
that they give me. My in-​laws, Barry Walfish and Adele Reinhartz, pro-
vided substantive advice about this project, practical advice about how to
get it from my head to a published book, and, crucially, time off from pick-
ing the kids up at school that allowed me to make tangible progress. I can’t
imagine having completed this without your help.
My mother, Chaya Rosenberg, will never appreciate how much she has
given me, both in the process of writing this book, but more generally in
life—​because her love and generosity is so overflowing that she simply
takes it for granted. To be sure, she has been an incredible support in
xi

xii Acknowledgments

helping with child care, especially during the summers of 2013–​2015, but
her influence goes well beyond that. She has always encouraged me to
pursue my passions—​even when she might have preferred that they led
me in other directions—​because her support is simply unqualified and
unlimited. Whatever I produce in the world—​including but not limited to
this book—​is thanks to you.
Miriam-​Simma Walfish has been a partner at work and at home, my
sharpest critic and fiercest defender. I know the depths of my good for-
tune that I have found someone who shares my values and commitments
with whom to build a life together. My children, Nehemia David and Adira
Hana Rosenberg Walfish, are very excited to see this book come out—​both
because they are happy for me, and because they are eager for conversa-
tions at the dinner table to focus less on Augustine and Shmuel and more
on Pokémon. During the editing of this manuscript, Miriam-​Simma and
I were fortunate to welcome our third child, Shia Nahum Eliezer into the
family as well. I happily assign the blame for any typos to his well-​timed
birth. I hope that someday my children will live in a world in which gentle
masculinity is not subversive, but rather, an ideal that folks of all genders
simply take for granted.
xi

Abbreviations

When discussing texts from the Tosefta, Mishnah, and the Palestinian
and Babylonian Talmuds, I cite according to the format “bKet,” where the
initial lowercase letter refers to the corpus (t = Tosefta, m = Mishnah,
p = Palestinian Talmud, and b = Babylonian Talmud), and the capitalized
abbreviation refers to the specific tractate, according to the following:
Bek Bekhorot
Ber Berakhot
BK Bava Kama
BM Bava Metzi‘a
Ed ‘Eduyot
Git Gittin
Hag Hagigah
Hul Hullin
Ket Ketubot
Kid Kiddushin
MK Mo‘ed Katan
Nid Niddah
Pes Pesahim
San Sanhedrin
Shab Shabbat
Yev Yevamot
Zev Zevahim
Translations of Rabbinic passages are my own, based on editions as cited
in the notes, though citations of biblical verses, including those contained
in Rabbinic passages, follow the new Jewish Publication Society (NJPS)
edition (or are based on it with slight modifications), unless otherwise
noted. Translations from the Gospels are taken from the New Revised
Standard Version (NRSV) unless otherwise noted.
xvi

xiv Abbreviations

References to editions of early Christian works make use of the following

abbreviations:
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
GCS Die Greicheschen Christlichen Schriftsteller
PL Patrologia Latina
xv

Signs of Virginity
xvi

Since I am a gynê [wife/​woman-​not-​maiden] I did not suffer now.

Long ago another man educated me, taking my virginity as his pay-
ment. But when Chloe wrestles with you in a bout like this, she will
scream and she will cry and she will lie in a large pool of blood as if
slain. You should not fear the blood, but . . . bring her to this place,
so that even if she cries aloud, no one will hear, and even if she weeps
tears, no one will see, and even if she is bloodied, she may wash her-
self in the spring. And remember that it was I who have made you
an anêr [husband/​man-​not-​boy].1

Rav Samuel b. Oniya said in the name of Rav: “A woman forms a

covenant only with the one who makes her into a vessel, as it says:
For He who made you will espouse you [bo‘alayikh]—​His name
is ‘Lord of Hosts’ (Isa. 54:5).”2

For Samuel said: “I can penetrate many virgins [betulot] without

causing bleeding”. . . . Samuel is different, for his manhood/​potency
[govreih] is great.3

My seed [semen] is a hundred times more fertile.4

Why fill the bedchamber with a swarm of deities. . . . For the goddess
Virginensis is there, and the father-​god Subigus, the mother-​goddess
Prema, the goddess Pertunda, and Venus, and Priapus. . . . Would
not Venus alone have been equal to the task? For her name is said
to be derived from the fact that it is not without force [vi non sine]
that a woman ceases to be a virgin. . . . And certainly, if the god-
dess Virginensis is present to unfasten the virgin’s girdle; and if the
god Subigus is present to ensure her husband will be able to sub-
due [subigere] her successfully; and if the goddess Prema is there to
press her down [premere] once she has submitted, so that she will
not struggle—​then what is the goddess Pertunda doing here? Let
her blush and go forth; let the husband himself have something to
do. It is surely dishonorable for any but him to do the act which is
her name.5
1

Introduction
Defining Virginity, Making Men

Despite its title, this book is not really about female virginity.1 It is
not even about testing virginity, nor the even more careful formulation
of “men’s constructions of [testing] female virginity”—​though at various
points in the process of writing it, I have thought about it in all of these
ways. At its core, this book is about cultural constructions of men’s sexual-
ity as ideally aggressive, and how those constructions are reflected in, and
produced by, male definitions of women’s virginity. Specifically, I argue
that the model of virginity presented in Deut. 22:13–​21, in which a bride’s
virginity on her wedding night is asserted or denied on the basis of blood-
ied nuptial sheets, is intimately connected to a sexual culture that valo-
rizes male sexual aggression. In a society that prizes female virginity, this
bloody marker necessarily encourages males to engage in penile-​vaginal
intercourse on their wedding nights in ways most likely to produce such
bleeding.
This Deuteronomic model for testing women’s virginity dominates
among both Jewish and Christian interpreters in the first four centuries of
the “Common Era.”2 Only two truly significant exceptions to this pervasive
presentation of female virginity exist: Babylonian Rabbis3 beginning in
roughly the mid-​fourth century ce and continuing through the redaction
of the Babylonian Talmud (a period that students of Rabbinic literature
generally think of, and that I will regularly refer to, as the second half of
the amoraic period),4 and Augustine of Hippo.
I have grouped late amoraic Babylonian Rabbis and Augustine together,
but their responses to earlier traditions about testing female virginity and
male sexuality are quite different from each other. For Augustine, the very
2

2 Introduction

notion that virginity is something physical, something that can be read in

a person’s body, is laughable. Augustine deviates from the Deuteronomic
model of testing virginity by removing virginity entirely from the realm
of the physical. The Babylonian Rabbinic texts that I analyze, by con-
trast, maintain the biblical assumption that a woman’s virginity can be
attested to by her body. Rather than mocking anatomical virginity as does
Augustine, they exchange one anatomical model of virginity for another.
I will argue, however, that both Augustine and these Babylonian Rabbis
radically disrupt earlier notions of women’s virginity in ways that also
serve to undermine preexisting ideals of men as sexually aggressive.
Babylonian Rabbis, even as they continue to prize female virginity, empha-
size other markers of this virginity, almost to the point of rendering blood
on the sheets legally irrelevant, and thereby attempt to rescind the earlier
encouragement for men to engage in more vigorous—​that is, violent—​
penetrative intercourse. What is more, a variety of legal and nonlegal texts
of this period actually encourage gentleness as the marker of male sexual
prowess.
Augustine similarly continues to prize female virginity; however, he
rejects the notion that the physical rupture (or any other trait) of a woman’s
body has any relevance to her virginity, which is fundamentally a spiritual
state. Augustine’s view is in keeping with his broader conceptualization
of ideal sex as sex that is thoroughly subject to the will, denying lust—​a
notion that for Augustine has both sexual and military-​political connota-
tions. In this regard, Augustine resembles the Babylonian Rabbis, disdain-
ing the image of a sexually aggressive male as an ideal man. The North
African Catholic bishop and the Rabbinic sages of western Mesopotamia
are far more similar than we might have expected.
Augustine and the Rabbis of late antique Babylonia are similar in
another way as well: both are radical outliers in their respective traditions,
rather than “natural” outgrowths of preexisting trends. Both break with
what came before them, and both are relatively uninfluential on later inter-
preters and legal authorities in their respective traditions. In the case of
the Babylonian Talmud, this total reversal of received traditions is more
obvious—​we see little development in thinking about virginity testing
in earlier Rabbinic texts, and to the extent that we do, it is a strengthen-
ing in amoraic Palestinian sources of Deuteronomy’s idea that virginity
manifests through the bloody remnants of aggressive penetration. The
Babylonian Talmud thus represents a seemingly unprecedented break
with pre-​Rabbinic and earlier Rabbinic traditions.
3

Introduction 3

The radical nature of Augustine’s break with the past is less imme-
diately apparent, since, as I will describe in ­chapters 5 and 8, it is pos-
sible to read Christian sources in a teleological way, with faith-​based,
rather than anatomical, aspects of virginity first implied in the Gospel
of Matthew and then becoming more and more central, at the seeming
expense of anatomical testing of chastity. In light of this background,
one might understandably read Augustine as simply representing the
apotheosis of this development. However, I will argue that such a read-
ing of the sources misses two vital points. First, Augustine, unlike late
antique Syriac authors or Ambrose of Milan, completely displaces the
Deuteronomic model, rather than simply subjugating it rhetorically to
virginity-​expressed-​through-​faith. This move represents a difference in
kind, and not only of degree. Secondly, the uniqueness of Augustine is
evident through his relative lack of influence on later Christian texts. As
is the case in Rabbinic culture following the Babylonian Talmud, after
Augustine, Christian texts and practices by and large return to a more
“mixed” discourse in which the forensics of Deuteronomy continue to
loom large.
To be clear at the outset: my argument in this book is primarily about
discourse—​that is, what ancient authors say, and how those words might
have affected how their readers/​hearers thought about male sexual aggres-
sion and female virginity. These effects are significant irrespective of
whether grooms in biblical Israel, or Roman Palestine, or fourth-​century
Babylonia ever actually looked for blood on their nuptial sheets. Men hear-
ing Deuteronomy 22, or the Protevangelium of James, or the Palestinian
Talmud, would have been influenced in their thinking about how to “be
a man,” even if blood-​stained sheets had become (or always had been) a
dead letter. Thus, most of the time in this book, I will not consider whether
these texts tell us something about the actual lived experience of Christians
and Jews in late antiquity.
There will be moments, however, where analyzing the effects of a par-
ticular discourse requires considering explicitly the social setting in which
that discourse would be heard. A particular discourse will have a differ-
ent effect on its listeners depending on what those listeners’ social real-
ity looks like. To take an example from ­chapter 3: if the lived experience
of matriarchs in a community suggests to them that evidence of genital
rupture often correlates with a bride’s wedding-​night experience, then dis-
courses that invest female elders with the power to assess young wom-
en’s virginity will affect grooms’ thinking about female virginity differently
4

4 Introduction

from cultures in which the social realities are different. Thus, at certain
junctions I will take time to assess those lived realities and the assump-
tions that they would have supported.
Moreover, as I will discuss more below, in some cases the discursive
effects of a particular text may prove enlightening even as the social his-
torical effects on women in antiquity could have been deleterious; in such
cases I will do my best to draw the reader’s attention to these damaging
consequences. My primary focus, however, will be on the implications of
the way ancient Christian and Jewish authors speak about female virginity
for their constructions of ideal male sexuality.

Masculinity and Aggression in Late Antiquity

Greek, Roman, and Christian Masculinity
Foundational to my argument in this book is the recognition that tests
of women’s virginity are imbricated with cultural constructions of mas-
culinity. In ­chapter 1, I will argue that, across cultural divides, when men
construct female virginity and tests to assess it, they are simultaneously
constructing—​and reflecting—​their own notions of male sexuality as ide-
ally aggressive. This book thus stands in the stream of studies in the last
nearly forty years that have endeavored to analyze ancient and late antique
constructions of masculinity. In the wake of groundbreaking studies by
Kenneth J. Dover and Michel Foucault, scholars have begun to appreciate
the ways in which cultures define and redefine what constitutes mascu-
linity or ideal malehood. This scholarship points to the common cultural
ideal of masculinity as a kind of sexual dominance—​a dominance both
of the self and of others. Thus, as in the boast that appeared in the epi-
graph, a continent Church Father such as Jerome can describe himself as
decidedly manly—​his “seed” as “a hundred times more fertile.” Similarly,
Lycainion can describe herself, following her description of first-​time
penetrative intercourse as a rape scene, as having made Daphnis into a
man. Though to twenty-​first-​century eyes, Jerome’s statement may appear
ironic, or Lycainion’s shocking, the history of masculinity makes clear that
these sentiments fit into a several-​centuries-​long development of Greek,
Roman, and Christian ideals of manhood.
The historiography of masculinity begins in a fundamental sense with
two works of the late 1970s and early 1980s: Kenneth J. Dover’s Greek
Homosexuality, and the final two volumes of Michel Foucault’s three-​
volume History of Sexuality.5 Both scholars emphasized the central role
5

Introduction 5

of penile penetration in Greek and Roman culture. To be a proper man,

Dover and Foucault both point out, is not only to penetrate others, but
to do so in a way that asserts superiority and domination.6 The work of
John Winkler, as well as that of David Halperin, followed in the footsteps
of these two scholars—​especially Foucault—​and developed more fully the
tandem of domination and penetration as a male ideal in classical and late
antique literature.7
Foucault, building on the earlier work of Paul Veyne, also pointed to
an apparent increasing stringency regarding sexual matters in the first
two centuries of the Common Era. Rather than attribute a newfound sex-
ual prudishness to the rise of Christianity, as was then common to do,
Foucault connected this development to the rise of the care of the self,
the application of sophrosyne, manly self-​control, to sexual matters: to be
a man is to be able to control one’s own desires.8 It would be easy to take
this emphasis on sophrosyne as a subversion of dominant ideals of mas-
culinity as active and aggressive, but to do so is an error. As Dover writes,
“[O]‌bdurate postponement of any bodily contact until the potential part-
ner has proved his worth . . . insistence on an upright position . . . denial
of true penetration. In Greek eyes . . . this was the antithesis between
the abandonment or the maintenance of masculinity.”9 Or, in Foucault’s
words: “The penis thus appears at the intersection of all these games of
mastery: self-​mastery . . . superiority over sexual partners . . . status and
privileges.”10 That is, for all of its variety over the years, masculinity in
Greek and Roman eyes resulted from exhibiting self-​control and thereby
never allowing oneself to participate passively in a sexual encounter with
someone of lower status, be they woman, boy, or slave. Such a model of
male sexuality indeed coheres with much of the biblical, early Jewish,
Rabbinic, and Christian texts about virginity testing that I analyze in
this book.
But something truly subversive appears to have begun in the first cen-
turies of the Common Era.11 Judith Perkins describes this time as a per-
iod of competing discourses of the self, with one model—​the one that
will eventually be central in Christian self-​conceptions—​presenting the
self as suffering and enduring.12 Brent Shaw, in an article discussing
early Christian texts as well as not-​specifically Christian Jewish texts that
would nonetheless become important to early Christians, depicts a simi-
lar development and explicitly links it to gender. Studying works such as
4 Maccabees, the Testament of Joseph, and the Pauline letters, Shaw notes
that men in these texts are valued precisely for their passivity and ability
6

6 Introduction

to suffer. Shaw further draws our attention to the extreme heresy of such a
gender depiction in the world of the early Roman Empire:

What is stated here is so ordinary that it might escape notice—​so

understated that it might be dismissed. It is a subtle part of a move-
ment or shift that constitutes a moral revolution of sorts. Praises
of active and aggressive values entailed in manliness (andreia) by
almost all other writers in the world of the Maccabees could easily fill
books. The elevation to prominence of the passive value of merely
being able to endure would have struck most persons, certainly
all those spectators, as contradictory and, indeed, rather immoral.
A value like that cut right across the great divide that marked élite
free-​status male values and that informed everything about bod-
ily behaviour from individual sexuality to collective warfare: voice,
activity, aggression, closure, penetration, and the ability to inflict
pain and suffering were lauded as emblematic of freedom, courage,
and good. Silence, passivity, submissiveness, openness, suffering—​
the shame of allowing oneself to be wounded, to be penetrated, and
of simply enduring all of that—​were castigated as weak, womanish,
slavish, and therefore morally bad.13

Whether pre-​Constantinian Christian authors similarly blur the dominant

definitions of femininity is more ambiguous.14 But in any event, this sub-
versive gender-​bending in the depiction of ideal manhood became more
complicated when the Roman Empire became Christian. Both Shaw and
Virginia Burrus make clear that Christian portrayals of passive, enduring
men as manly were political acts of resistance. As Shaw writes of a depic-
tion of Roman manliness in Jerome, Roman scripts of masculinity served
to assert Roman power: “This was not just an act of bare physical violence
or coercion. It was also the sexual assertion of a social order.”15 Thus, when
Christians become the beneficiaries, rather than the preferred victims, of
imperial power, gendered political resistance becomes a dicier endeavor,
and women in post-​Constantinian Christian texts increasingly look like
classical Roman heroines.16
Perhaps precisely because of this newly traditional depiction of
the Christian virgin, these same authors can continue to portray ideal
Christian men in classically feminine terms—​the discourse of the suffer-
ing, patient self described by Perkins and Shaw. But when male Christian
authors living in a Christian Roman Empire portray themselves thus, they
7

Introduction 7

at the same time assign to themselves classically male powers. Consider

Burrus’s description of Ambrose of Milan’s justification of his writing
public treatises: “[Ambrose] represents his own struggles to align the act
of writing with the virtue of modesty, and to conjoin the assertive claims of
a sublimated phallic sexuality with the empowering receptivity of a femi-
nized submissiveness.”17 Burrus helpfully summarizes her findings:

To state the thesis in general terms: post-​Constantinian Christianity

lays claim to the power of classical male speech; yet at the same
time late ancient Christian discourse continues to locate itself in
paradoxical relation to classical discourse through a stance of femi-
nizing ascesis that renounces public speech.18

In considering Christian authors of late antiquity, I will highlight a related

“paradoxical relation” to female virginity and its verification, a wavering
between classical notions of men as penetrators and women’s bodies as
appropriate for—​indeed, destined for—​penetration, and models of sexu-
ality that trouble those classical notions by devaluing the significance of
men’s penetrating female bodies for asserting their subjectivity.

Rabbinic Masculinity: An Imperial Divide

In his book Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention
of the Jewish Man, Daniel Boyarin introduced Rabbinic literature, roughly
contemporaneous with the authors studied by Burrus, into this conver-
sation about the construction of masculinity in late antiquity. Boyarin
argues that in Rabbinic texts we find a particular stream of thinking that
specifically extols gentleness and the avoidance of force as the marker of
the ideal Jewish man. Unlike the paradigmatically aggressive and pene-
trating Roman, the ideal man in these passages is praiseworthy precisely
for his vulnerability—​a vulnerability often depicted specifically as pene-
trability. Like Shaw and Burrus, Boyarin describes gender-​bending as a
kind of resistance to Roman gender norms. But, Boyarin claims, unlike
his cognate in early Christian texts, this particular Rabbinic male is neither
emasculated nor desexualized through his vulnerable presentation, but
rather remains decidedly physical and sexual. In Boyarin’s words, “The
Rabbis . . . provide a uniquely different exemplum of this oppositional
form of masculinity in that they, like ‘philosophers,’ did not regard vio-
lence as enhancing of or definitional for masculinity,” even as “for [the
8

8 Introduction

Rabbis], being philosophers (i.e., students of Torah) did not entail entering
into a eunuchlike state.”19
The Babylonian Rabbinic legal developments regarding virginity tests,
which valorize sexual activity that does not leave physical marks on a female
partner, fit this paradigm perfectly, setting side by side male gentleness
with sexual activity. Indeed, Samuel’s statement from the opening of this
introduction, in which the Babylonian sage presents himself as capable of
penetrating “many virgins” without producing any bleeding, depicts this
Rabbinic male as at one and the same time nonviolent and hypersexual.
Samuel describes with glee his sexual prowess, but his boast is precisely
about his ability to penetrate while leaving no mark, as it were—​not the
sort of boast that we are likely to hear in an American men’s locker room,
and one that contradicts the core assumptions about female virginity that
lie behind Deut. 22:13–​21. Indeed, Samuel finds a nearly perfect foil in the
statement attributed by Rav Samuel b. Oniya to Samuel’s contemporary,
Rav, also included at the start of this introduction, in which a marital cove-
nant can be formed only when a man penetrates a woman, thereby (trans)
forming her. Rav represents the earlier model in which to be a man meant
to change another’s body and thereby mark it as his own. Samuel, by con-
trast, revels in his ability to have sex without changing the other’s body.
The anonymous editor of the Talmud picks up on Samuel’s inver-
sion of masculinity and highlights it. Samuel’s potency/​manhood (the
overtones of the related Aramaic word gavra—​“man”—​are too obvious
to ignore) is directly tied to this ability to engage in sexual relations that
do not rupture or wound. Samuel is thus at one and the same time a
sexual(ized) male, and a male who is proud of his ability to avoid making
a violent mark on his sexual partner(s)—​in other words, an exemplar of
Boyarin’s Rabbinic male.20 Virginity testing provides us with a corpus of
primarily legal texts that express similar cultural work to the narratives
discussed by Boyarin.
Rabbinic texts about virginity testing also highlight an aspect of
Boyarin’s depiction of Rabbinic masculinities that, while often alluded
to in Unheroic Conduct, Boyarin himself does not focus on, and which
he at times even denies: the uniquely Babylonian provenance of the
Rabbinic preference for male gentleness.21 Boyarin repeatedly notes that
the Rabbinic preference for the gentle male is only one depiction of mas-
culinity among many in the Rabbinic corpus, but he does not view it as
tied to a particular place or moment in Rabbinic culture.22 The texts that
he analyzes in Unheroic Conduct (and in Boyarin’s earlier book on gender
9

Introduction 9

and sexuality, Carnal Israel), however, are almost all Babylonian passages
from the Babylonian Talmud.
Similarly, the marker of female virginity that implicitly discourages
vigorous male sexual activity appears in Rabbinic literature only in the
Babylonian Talmud.23 Furthermore, careful source criticism makes it clear
that this trend likely originates, or at the very least only becomes a signifi-
cant voice in Rabbinic conversation, in the mid-​fourth century ce and later.
This model of marking female virginity and its consequent encourage-
ment of male gentleness is indeed thus only one possibility among several
found in Rabbinic literature. But we can—​and should—​be more precise
than that: this one stream among several in Rabbinic literature is distinc-
tive of fourth-​century and later Babylonian Rabbinic texts. Describing that
setting with this level of specificity allows us to think more critically about
the possible factors that allowed for and/​or caused such a legal-​cultural
innovation to develop.24
Naming the trend that Boyarin describes in Unheroic Conduct as late
and Babylonian is important for several reasons. First of all, rather than a
“somewhat discordant chorus” of ideas about masculinity, we find in the
Babylonian Talmud a historically identifiable moment of change. Taking
note of the uniqueness of Babylonian Rabbinic attitudes to virginity test-
ing allows us to ask with greater clarity, What allowed for (or perhaps even
caused) the surprising Babylonian departure from models of verifying
female virginity that encouraged sexual violence, replaced by those that
promoted gentleness in sexual activity?
Additionally, identifying explicitly the late Babylonian provenance
of the Rabbinic preference for gentleness in sexual activity also high-
lights the fact that, though it certainly is only one voice among several in
Rabbinic literature, it is a voice that holds a particular pride of place. That
is, the Babylonian Talmud became the most studied and referenced text in
Rabbinic Jewish communities. Thus, it should not surprise us that Boyarin
finds that this Rabbinic ideal of masculinity also appears as a significant
trope in the yeshiva culture of modern Europe. When the Ashkenazi men-
tsch and yeshiva bokhr, to whom Boyarin points as modes of resistance to
Western European norms of masculinity, entered the beis medrash to sit
down and study, it was not the Mishnah or Palestinian Talmud that they
encountered, but rather the Babylonian Talmud—​or as they might have
called it, “the Talmud,” so total was its hegemony. It was thus necessar-
ily that work’s models of masculinity that would have been most likely
to inform their own (not necessarily conscious) thinking about what it
10

10 Introduction

means to be a (Jewish) man. As Boyarin usefully puts it, “The Talmud,

as the canonical text of Ashkenazic culture . . . provided the cultural mod-
els and resources around which the self-​representation of a gentle, reces-
sive, nonviolent masculinity could crystallize under specific material and
historical conditions.”25 The only emendation I offer is the reminder that
“Talmud” here is shorthand for the Babylonian Talmud. But that descriptor
may well turn out to be crucial in understanding what motivates or allows
for such a significant shift in thinking about male sexual violence.
Locating the preference for gentle, sexual men in Babylonia also pro-
vides an important corrective to an argument Michael Satlow has made
regarding Rabbinic masculinity. Satlow argues that Palestinian Rabbinic
literature presents a view of masculinity that is very much in keeping with
Greco-​Roman, and in particular with Stoic, notions of manhood. That is,
to be a man in Palestinian Rabbinic texts very often means to be capable
of controlling one’s emotions and desires. This construction of manhood,
Satlow continues, works hand in hand with the construction of Torah
study as a fundamentally male activity; only those who display manly self-​
control can engage in the sacred act of Torah study. When the tradition of
gendering Torah study as male reaches Babylonia, however, Satlow main-
tains that the Babylonian author/​editors, lacking the cultural context of
masculinity as sophrosyne, transformed Torah study into their own concep-
tion of manliness, namely, a violent and militaristic vision of the Torah as
battleground and study partners as combatants.26
Satlow’s depiction here is nearly opposite mine (as well as, I would
maintain, the implicit argument of Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct).27 The
model of manly self-​control, on the face of it, is less violent than the mil-
itaristic images of the Babylonian Talmud with its warriors engaged in
“the war of the Torah.” Satlow thus sets up Babylonian Rabbinic culture as
the more aggressive of the two primary Rabbinic communities, misunder-
standing the traditions about masculinity that they received from Palestine
and thus turning the most prized activity in Rabbinic male culture into a
violent one. What is more, the model of manliness as self-​restraint that
Satlow sees in (Palestinian)28 Rabbinic literature is far from resistant to
Roman norms; as Satlow points out, this construction fits perfectly with
dominant Roman fictions.29
I disagree with Satlow’s description for three reasons. The first is a
theoretical problem: Satlow’s scheme assumes a relationship between
Palestinian and Babylonian Rabbinic texts that is far too unidirectional,
with traditions leaving Palestine for Babylonia, where they are received and
1

Introduction 11

then transformed. But in truth, the pathways of traditions between these

two Rabbinic centers were surely far more dynamic than this model allows
for.30 Secondly, while Satlow wants to locate Rabbinic interest in sophrosyne
in Palestine—​which, on the face of it, given its location in the Roman
empire, makes sense—​the texts he cites as examples of this phenomenon
are nearly always Babylonian.31 Thus, Rabbinic interest in masculine self-​
control appears most prominently specifically in Rabbinic Babylonia—​a
finding that, in light of more recent studies about the reception and influ-
ence of non-​Rabbinic sources from the Roman East actually makes a great
deal of sense.32 Last, Satlow’s depiction of Babylonian Rabbinic texts as vio-
lent by comparison with their Palestinian counterparts takes those images
too quickly at face value. For example, Satlow reads the classic story of
Torah study about Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish, two study partners
who end up dead as a result of their verbal violence, as depicting manly
Torah scholars as scholastic warriors.33 Such a reading, however, ignores
the clear implication that the violence ascribed to these two Torah scholars
led to their demise. It may portray two classic (perhaps not coincidentally,
Palestinian) Rabbinic heroes as Torah soldiers, but the story does so pre-
cisely in order to critique this production of Torah as a field of battle.34 In
other words, Torah as battleground may indeed be a common trope in
Rabbinic texts (both Babylonian and Palestinian), but it is precisely in the
Babylonian Talmud that we find this male aggression implicitly, but none-
theless clearly, critiqued.
Locating the development of an ideal of the gentle male as arising spe-
cifically in Rabbinic Babylonia is thus important for understanding the
history of Rabbinic masculinity. Doing so requires a certain amount of
source-​critical and philological work, and a good deal of c­ hapters 6 and 7
are devoted to precisely that kind of analysis. Of course, readers who are
not specialists in Rabbinic literature may want to gloss over some of the
technical details of these arguments in those chapters.
I have one more reason for focusing on the uniqueness of this model
in Rabbinic literature, which is that doing so sets the Babylonian Talmud
alongside an equally lonely author from the Christian world: Augustine
of Hippo. In ­chapter 8, I will argue that while Augustine’s predecessors
(and, alas, his successors as well) left us conflicted and paradoxical ideas
about the importance of male penetration and female penetrability in con-
structing women’s virginity and men’s masculinity, Augustine provides a
unique approach that turns our gaze away from the action and passivity of
men’s and women’s bodies respectively. As Foucault puts it, for Augustine,
12

12 Introduction

“the main question is not . . . the problem of penetration: it is the prob-

lem of erection.”35 What is more, Augustine’s constructions of ideal
males and female virginity fully embraces male sexuality in a way that
makes the waffling of, for example, Ambrose or Jerome, seem downright
Manichean—​an appellation that was indeed hurled at them by authors
such as Jovinian in response to their own anatomical definitions of Mary’s
virginity.36 Augustine thus looks surprisingly like the Babylonian editors
of the Talmud, imagining ideal men as sexual but not lustful, penetrating
women without violently piercing them.37

Two Overdetermined Terms:

“Virgins” and “Hymens”
Although relatively little has been written about the means of testing wom-
en’s virginity, a great deal has been said already about the valuation of
female virginity in a variety of cultures and throughout history. In particu-
lar, two questions have arisen that, at first glance, appear more important
to the work of this book than they in fact turn out to be, both of which
deal with ambiguity around common terms. The first is the difficulty in
translating words from a variety of languages that line up, partially or (and
this is indeed the question) fully with the English “virgin.” The second is
the meaning—​and indeed, the very existence—​of a physical structure now
called the “hymen.”

“Virgins”
Both the Hebrew word betulah and its Greek counterpart parthenos have
been subject to debate with regard to their meaning. When a text refers to
a betulah or a parthenos, is the author’s intent—​or the imagined reader’s
assumption—​to mean something like “a woman who has not previously
engaged in sexual intercourse” (leaving aside the additional ambiguity of
what counts or does not count as “sexual intercourse!”), or does it mean
more broadly something like “young woman” or “unmarried woman”?
Cases in the Hebrew Bible where betulah refers to a stage of life rather
than a sexual status clearly exist.38 At other times—​most significantly
for my work here, in Deuteronomy 22—​the word surely references sex-
ual status.39 The meaning of parthenos is similarly relevant to this study
because of its application to Mary in both Matthew and the Protevangelium
of James.40
13

Introduction 13

In truth, this ambiguity is far from unique to the Hebrew betulah

and the Greek parthenos. Similar unclarity attends to words such as the
German Jungfrau, and even the English “maiden,” all of which can refer
to a stage of life or a sexual history. This cross-​cultural linguistic slippage
simply reveals an assumption on the part of biblical (and, more generally,
premodern) authors and readers: most of the time, to be a young, unmar-
ried woman would mean to be free of previous sexual encounters of some
sort or another. In the words of Tikva Frymer-​Kensky, “The ambiguity
and variability of the term arises from the basic cultural assumption that
young marriageable women are virgins.”41 In any event, although when-
ever attending to a text that involves one of these words we must be careful
not to make assumptions about its meaning, in nearly all of the examples
that I cite, the intended focus on a woman’s sexual history will be clear.
The only exceptions will be some of the passages from the Hebrew Bible
that I analyze in c­ hapter 2; I will consider those cases on an individual
basis in the course of my analysis.

“Hymens”
Just as the ambiguous meaning of words such as betulah and parthenos
appears relevant but turns out to be fundamentally a distraction to the
argument of this book, so too the question of “the hymen” has divided
historians of medicine and would seem essential to my study but, in
the end, should not sidetrack us. Here we can trace the debate back to
a groundbreaking analysis by Giulia Sissa, which appears both in her
article “Maidenhood without Maidenhead: The Female Body in Ancient
Greece,” and part 2 of her book Greek Virginity.42 Sissa argues that though
Western moderns take for granted the existence of a distinct organ that
somehow “stands guard” at a woman’s virginity, such thinking is a con-
struct that appears no earlier than late antiquity. In particular, Sissa points
out that Greek and Roman medical literature make no reference to any
independently recognized membrane covering or otherwise surround-
ing female genitalia; the only such reference appears in the work of the
second-​century Greek author Soranus of Ephesus, who mentions “a thin
membrane [that] grows across the vagina, dividing it, and that this mem-
brane causes pain when it bursts in defloration or if menstruation occurs
too quickly,” but Soranus discusses it only as something the existence of
which is a “mistake to assume.”43
14

14 Introduction

Ann Ellis Hanson has argued against Sissa’s sweeping claim, contending
instead that the view Soranus decries as “a mistake” was indeed a “pop-
ular anatomy which sees the uterus of the young girl as sealed off” and
which appears as well in the Hippocratic Diseases of Young Girls.44 Looking
to depictions of women’s bodies not only in medical literature but also
in amulets and literature, Hanson argues that the virginal “seal” does in
fact appear in evidence from the Greek world.45 Yet in a recent disserta-
tion, Julia Kelto Lillis brings us back in part to Sissa’s paradigm, carefully
demonstrating that the imagery of a woman’s body as a sealed enclosure
with a distinct “hymen” protecting her virginity, so often taken for granted
in interpretations of early Christian authors, does not appear in Christian
texts until the mid-​to late fourth century.
We can easily get lost in this debate about how precisely ancient and
late antique authors (as well as our best possible reconstructions of their
readers) understood the anatomy of virginity. My argument in this book,
however, does not depend on how one comes down on the question of
whether a “virginal seal” was part of ancient writers’ conception of wom-
en’s bodies. Soranus, in explicitly rejecting such a presentation, writes
that “[the vagina] possesses furrows held together by vessels which take
their origin from the uterus. And when the furrows are spread apart in
defloration, these vessels burst and cause pain and the blood which is usually
excreted follows.”46 In other words, even Soranus, in denying the existence
of an independent organ called the “hymen,” still assumes that the loss
of virginity is accompanied by bleeding and pain. As Simon Goldhill puts
it, “What is important . . . is what he takes for granted, what he sees as
‘usual,’ what he is setting out to explain: the spilling of blood and the pain
of defloration.”47
Whether the early Jewish, Rabbinic, and Christian authors I analyze
in the coming chapters imagined virginity as marked by—​or even con-
stituted by—​the existence of a hymen is immaterial for my purposes.48
Rather, my argument is that texts that not only set up female virginity
as a desideratum for males in their marriage partners, but also establish
postcoital bleeding as that standard, inherently incentivize men to pene-
trate more aggressively. This consequence holds true whether that bleed-
ing is perceived as the result of a rupture of the hymen or, as Soranus
would have it, the bursting of blood vessels in the furrows of a vagina.
Nonetheless, so as to steer clear of the debate, I will avoid using the term
“hymen” to refer to postcoital bleeding unless context makes clear that a
distinct membrane is intended.
15

Introduction 15

A Methodological Caveat
One final note is necessary here before beginning the actual work of
this study. Scholars of Rabbinic literature have now long been harried by
two enduring and related debates. The first has to do with the editing of
Rabbinic texts. What, if anything, can we determine about the editorial
and redactional history of texts such as the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the
two Talmuds? When studying a work such as the Mishnah, generally dated
to the early third century, but which regularly cites sages of the second cen-
tury and occasionally claims to relate the views of figures who lived prior to
the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, can we uncover earlier
versions of the text embedded within the final product and thus make
claims about developments in thinking about some topic? Or must we be
satisfied with discussing only what the final redactors left us?
The second, related problem is this: how reliable, if at all, are attribu-
tions in these various texts? Unlike the Christian texts that I will study
in c­ hapter 8, Rabbinic texts do not offer us a claim of authorship. And
unlike even the anonymous Christian works considered in ­chapter 5,
Rabbinic works are clearly the work of a collective authorship while claim-
ing to transmit the views of specific, earlier sages. When a statement in
the Babylonian Talmud, for example, is attributed to the third-​century
Babylonian sage Samuel, can we assume that such a figure with such a
name indeed said these words? Or, at the very least, that such a view has
some meaningful connection to the thinking of (at least some) Babylonian
sages of the third century generally?
The minimalist school is most famously and significantly represented
by Jacob Neusner, who has argued that Rabbinic texts reveal the hands of a
strong editor, and that as such, all that can be done is to date works to their
final redaction and assume that the statements and ideas contained within
them are representative of the period in which that redaction occurred.
Although some traditions may have been preserved, one cannot speak
meaningfully of being able to discern anything about the periods prior
to the redaction of any given text.49 At the other extreme, we can look to a
scholar such as David Rosenthal, who claims to be able to discern entire
pericopae (or protopericopae) embedded in the work of later editing in the
Babylonian Talmud.50
My argument in ­chapters 6 and 7 follows in a scholarly tradition that
falls somewhere in between these two poles, not assuming perfectly
faithful transmission of earlier opinions and redactions, but nonetheless
16

16 Introduction

operating with the premise that attention to a host of factors can help us
to pull apart a talmudic passage and determine where development has
occurred.51 That said, I hope that even those readers whose assumptions
about the viability of this sort of source-​critical work are more minimalist
will still be able to accept the basic outlines of my argument. In particular,
though I will date the rise of sexual gentleness as a Rabbinic desideratum
for men to the late fourth century on, I will make my case in such a way
that even a scholar more inclined toward Neusner’s views will recognize a
Palestinian-​Babylonian divide, even if the internal dating of this develop-
ment within Babylonia would remain impossible.

Outline of the Book

This book is divided into three parts. Part I, which comprises three
chapters, begins with a consideration of virginity testing in a cross-​cul-
tural perspective, then moves on to treat the biblical underpinnings of
Rabbinic and Christian virginity testing and some early interpretation
thereon. Chapter 1 sets the scene for the remainder of part I by demon-
strating the ways in which virginity testing and male sexual aggression
have generally come hand in hand. My argument continues in ­chapter 2,
where I set the bloody sheets of Deuteronomy 22 in their biblical context
and, by reading them both independently and alongside the attempted
rape scene of Genesis 19, I highlight the violence inherent in this descrip-
tion of virginity testing. I then turn in ­chapter 3 to a number of texts of
both the Second Temple period as well as Rabbinic works of later antiq-
uity. All of these works reinterpret the bloody sheets of Deuteronomy 22;
however, I argue that these differences reflect juridical concerns about
the reliability of the biblical standard, rather than deeper doubts about
the very notion of locating female virginity in a physical body. In these
non-​Christian Jewish works, Deuteronomy’s presentation of female vir-
ginity as a trait best measured through the body’s response to trauma
goes unchallenged.
Part II is composed of two chapters and considers works that hint at
an alternative conception of female virginity. In ­chapter 4, I analyze three
first-​century texts originating in three distinct Jewish communities, each
of which leaves open the possibility of an alternative standard for testing
virginity. Josephus and Philo both gloss over the details of Deuteronomy
22 in their respective paraphrases of the biblical pericope. However, I will
argue that this omission is likely not indicative of a meaningful departure
17

Introduction 17

from the Deuteronomic paradigm in the case of Josephus; by contrast,

there is reason to believe that it may signal something larger for Philo,
though here too, we must read a great deal into his silence. In any event,
the Gospel of Matthew, which depicts a kind of testing of Mary’s virginity,
produces a viable alternative to Deuteronomy that will become significant
in later Christian texts. In ­chapter 5, I consider a number of these Christian
texts, alongside the decidedly non-​Christian Mishnah. I argue that the
appearance of a vaginal examination in the Protevangelium of James should
be understood as part of the work’s “Jewish” nature, reflecting a kind of
shared heritage with the authors of the Qumran texts. Furthermore, both
the Mishnah and the Protevangelium share important traits, betraying
some amount of anxiety regarding earlier Jewish ideas of anatomical vir-
ginity. Anonymous Syriac poetry of the fifth and sixth centuries reveals
an increased emphasis on nonanatomical standards for female virginity.
However, despite the increasing significance of virginity-​ as-​
expressed-​
through-​faith in the Christian texts (and, at least, anxiety about anatomical
virginity in the Mishnah), the Deuteronomic depiction of female virgin-
ity as something reflected in the body is never displaced in these works
and remains an important, if not central, mode of thinking about female
virginity.
Part III, which spans c­ hapters 6 through 8, is the heart of this book.
I consider two (sets of) authors—​the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine
of Hippo. I argue that these authors produced a body of work regarding
virginity testing that represents a radical (and short-​lived) departure from
earlier biblically influenced thinking about female virginity. In ­chapter 6,
I analyze in detail a surprising Babylonian development and argue that this
new standard for establishing—​or denying—​a bride’s virginity reverses
the biblical model and its encouragement of aggressively sexual men,
replacing it with a glorification of gentle Rabbinic men. Chapter 7 looks at
two cases from the Babylonian Talmud that are not directly about virginity
testing in order to show that the shift I demonstrate in ­chapter 6 is part of a
larger project of redefining the kind of man desired. In ­chapter 8, I turn to
Augustine of Hippo, first setting him in the context of the Latin Christian
traditions that he inherited. Cyprian and Ambrose, like the Protevangelium
and late antique Syriac authors, share a perhaps surprising amount with
earlier Jewish authors, most notably a concession to (and, in the case of
Cyprian, even endorsement of) the use of physiological examinations to
assess a woman’s virginity, coupled with a certain level of conflict about
the relative merits of this anatomized virginity. Augustine, by contrast,
18

18 Introduction

radically departs from his predecessors, thoroughly removing female vir-

ginity from the realm of the anatomical and placing it entirely in the juris-
diction of the will.
The book concludes with an epilogue considering the medieval fate of
the innovations of Augustine and the Babylonian Talmud, which at the
same time serves as a reminder of the importance of understanding what
produced these singular approaches to female virginity. I conclude with
some thoughts on how the fundamentally historical work of this book
might, I hope, be useful in the contemporary construction of a feminist
masculinity.
19

PART I

Testing Virginity in the Body

20
21

Virginity and Violence in

Cross-​Cultural Perspective

Although the diversity of forms that it has taken is wide-​ranging, the

phenomenon of testing a woman’s virginity appears in a host of cultures
and literatures. Orienting ourselves in the range of modes for virginity
testing highlights a number of aspects of Jewish and Christian models that
we might not otherwise pay sufficient attention to. First of all, despite com-
mon Western assumptions to the contrary, the idea that genital rupture,
marked through bleeding or lacerations, is a useful marker of a woman’s
virginity is actually a fairly unusual phenomenon, perhaps even unique to
Deuteronomy and its intellectual descendants. Although what we might
term “medical” tests for virginity appear in various settings, they generally
do not involve examination of sheets or a woman’s genitalia. In any event,
far more common than any kind of medical test is the ordeal, in which a
woman must prove her virtue through some dangerous or magical test.
Although these ordeals are quite different in their form from the bloodied
sheets of Deuteronomy, they nonetheless very often highlight the violence
of virginity testing in nearly all of its forms.

The Surprisingly Biblical Nature

of Bloodied Sheets
It is far too easy for moderns—​both those who consciously accept tra-
ditional views and those who work actively to subvert patriarchal struc-
tures—​to take for granted genital bleeding as the classical standard for
female virginity. The realization, then, that virginity tests that claim to
judge a woman’s sexual history based on wedding-​night bleeding are
2

22 Testing Virginity in the Body

rare or nonexistent outside of cultures influenced by biblical texts is

striking. Although the prizing of female virginity is not unique to the
Hebrew Bible, neither is it universal;1 more important, even in societies
that assert the importance of female virginity, tests designed to establish
or disprove a woman’s virginity, where they appear, display a remarkable
diversity. Outside of cultures influenced by the Hebrew Bible, bloodied
sheets rarely if ever appear.2
The far-​reaching influence of the Hebrew Bible on the modern world,
however, has meant that blood and bloodstains resulting from genital rup-
ture are the virginity test best known to contemporary readers. Kathleen
Coyne Kelly catalogues numerous examples of the ongoing power of the
Deuteronomic trope in contemporary American culture. Thus, for exam-
ple, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez, writing about a character’s
first sexual encounter, refers to the “bloody ceremony” and the “rose of
honor on the sheet”;3 the character Cher in the movie Clueless reframes
the notion of virgin as “hymeneally challenged”;4 an anonymous contrib-
utor to Kelly’s website described a story in which her father brought her
to a hospital to be tested for “the possibility of intercourse.”5 The “red
apple” ritual in Armenia, which assumes bleeding as a sign of female vir-
ginity, has been contested in recent years, but its very contestation bears
witness to the continuing influence of Deuteronomy’s picture of female
virginity.6 Examples of the assumption that lacerations and/​or bleeding
somehow “prove” or mark a woman’s virginity in modern Western culture
abound. As Kelly writes, representations in popular culture of virginity
and virginity lost “tend to go unexamined, because they are so pervasive
and ubiquitous.”7
A less well-​known virginity test, but one that I will argue in c­ hapter 3
is intimately connected with the bloodied sheets of Deuteronomy 22, is
the phenomenon of women performing a vaginal examination to testify
to the “virginal” state of a woman, sometimes a bride before her wedding,
but also often women who have committed to lifelong chastity whose
(physical? moral?) integrity has been called into question. Although this
practice is, unfortunately, not unknown in the twenty-​first century,8 prob-
ably its greatest ongoing significance in Western culture is as part of the
legend of Joan of Arc, who was subjected to such exams as part of her tri-
als.9 Yet the practice is clearly legible even to twentieth-​century American
readers; Kelly directs our attention to a similar exam in the 1959 film A
Summer Place, which she proceeds to analyze productively (and necessar-
ily disturbingly).10
23

Virginity and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective 23

In light of the widespread use of both bloodied sheets and midwives’

examinations in postbiblical communities, the absence of such measures
of virginity in other settings is quite startling. To begin with, although legal
rulings in the Hebrew Bible generally and the book of Deuteronomy in
particular very often find cognates—​identical or similar—​in other Ancient
Near Eastern texts, the use of postcoital bleeding to testify to a bride’s vir-
ginity is unique. Female virginity is clearly prized in ancient Mesopotamian
texts, but no physical test of this virginity appears in that corpus.11 Rather,
when male judges in these texts are interrogating a woman’s sexual sta-
tus, they rely on a woman’s own claims about her sexual status in the
form of oaths.12 I will return to consider the use of oaths below, but for the
time being, I want only to highlight what appears to be the uniqueness of
Deuteronomy’s anatomical appraisal of a woman’s virginity.
The distinctiveness of the biblical test of female virginity is paralleled
by the ongoing singularity of the continued use of this model in postbibli-
cal authors. Although many texts written by Christians in Latin and Greek,
as early as the second century, mention the practice of midwives’ examina-
tions (see c­ hapters 5 and 8), no evidence of such a practice exists in non-​
Christian Greek and Roman texts. Roman legal texts, despite extensively
discussing sexual crimes and explicitly requiring vaginal penetration for
someone to be guilty of such a crime,13 provide no indication as to what
constitutes “evidence” of such an act.14 The total absence of descriptions of
physical tests of virginity suggests that when postbiblical Jewish and early
Christian authors discussed bloodied sheets or midwives’ examinations of
virginity, they did so primarily under the influence of Deuteronomy and
not the dominant Roman culture.
This impression from silence finds some possibly affirmative evidence
as well in a line from the novel Leucippe and Clitophon, likely composed
in second-​century Alexandria or thereabout by an author named Achilles
Tatius. One of the story’s protagonists, a young girl named Leucippe,
stands accused by her mother of unchastity upon finding a man in her
daughter’s bedroom. Leucippe cries out exasperatedly, “What more can
I say? What kind of proof would satisfy you that I’m telling the truth? If
there is a virginity test, I’ll take it.”15 Leucippe’s desire for a defense—​“if
there is a virginity test”—​suggests that no such test exists. Her mother’s
response perhaps muddies our understanding of this passage (“That’s all
we need now, for everybody to know about our disgrace!”), since it may
imply not a lack of means to test a girl’s virginity, but rather, a lack of a
test that would satisfy the girl’s mother. But in any event, as I will note
24

24 Testing Virginity in the Body

below, the novel later resorts to a test that has nothing to do with the body
of the accused. Thus, it seems more likely that the sort of virginity test
familiar to contemporary Western readers simply was not on the minds
of the characters in and readers of Achilles Tatius’s novel. Although the
trope of lost virginity attested to by blood or lacerations is so common in
contemporary American culture (and Western society more generally) that
one might well take it for granted, its lineage appears to be closely tied to
Deuteronomy 22 and its reception.

Other Medical Exams

Bloodied sheets and vaginal examinations are unusual; however, other
methods of examining a woman’s body to assess her sexual history do
appear elsewhere. Thus, for example, a number of Greek and Latin writ-
ers refer to the “increase in size of the young girl’s neck and a consequent
change in the quality of her voice” as a sign of previous sexual experience.16
This increased size of the neck likely results from the confluence of two
ancient medical assumptions: that sexual intercourse widens the vaginal
canal or cervix, and that the female body is symmetrical, with the neck the
upper, mirror image of the vaginal canal. Yet it is the neck specifically, and
not female genitalia, to which these ancient writers look for evidence of
sexual activity.
Medieval European medical texts, alongside continued reference
to genital rupture, present other anatomical tests of virginity. The late
thirteenth-​/​early fourteenth-​century work De secretis mulierum, composed
by a student of Albertus Magnus, introduces urinalysis, stating that “clear
and lucid” urine testifies to unsullied chastity.17 The thirteenth-​century
Italian surgeon William of Saliceto invokes a similar, though also clearly
distinct, test: examining the sound a woman’s body makes and the time
that it takes her to urinate, with “a subtle hiss” and a longer episode indi-
cating virginity.18
The combination of the hissing sound and the slower rate of urina-
tion suggests that this test, like the measuring of the neck, derives from a
notion that virgins have narrower vaginal canals.19 Indeed, the author of
De secretis mulierum states explicitly that when a woman’s vagina “becomes
so widened that a man can enter there without any pain to his member,”
it “is a sign that the woman was first corrupted.”20 This interest in vag-
inal narrowness is instructive in the context of this book because of its
central role in c­ hapter 6, where I will argue that the Babylonian model,
25

Virginity and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective 25

by directing grooms’ focus away from blood and toward vaginal narrow-
ness, encourages gentleness and deliberation in the sexual act. Thus, the
statement in De secretis mulierum that vaginal widening occurs specifi-
cally because “the male member is exceedingly large and inept,”21 which
seems to make male transformation of a female body a negative—​and
avoidable—​consequence of heterosexual penetrative intercourse (“exceed-
ingly large and inept”), provides a useful point of comparison for my anal-
ysis of the Babylonian Talmud, where I find a similar correlation between
vaginal narrowness as a standard of virginity and a disdain for aggressive
male penetration.
Of course, as both Ann Ellis Hanson and Kelly point out, the “most bla-
tant”—​and only reliable—​test of virginity (if we can indeed call it a “test”)
is pregnancy.22 That is, only pregnancy makes clear that a woman has
indeed engaged in some sort of penetrative sexual intercourse.23 But even
the phenomenon of pregnancy generated a genre of virginity tests with
a shakier medical basis. Thus, Hanson describes the ancient belief that,
upon successful insemination, the uterus would immediately close over
the seed, thus providing evidence of previous sexual activity long before a
woman began to show. Unfortunately for any parties interested in discern-
ing a particular woman’s sexual status, this state of the closed uterus was
discernible only to the pregnant woman herself, thus rendering it useless
for establishing virginity (though introducing a particularly striking case
of subjectivity into this discourse).24

Ordeals
Until now I have considered various methods of examining a woman’s
body to make a claim about her sexual history. But when we focus on
those texts available to us from classical and late antiquity (as opposed to
those from the later Middle Ages), the most prominent means of testing
virginity do not look to virgins’ anatomy at all.25 Rather, we find virginity
tests based not on the physical traits of a woman, but instead on her abil-
ity to survive some ordeal or to perform some particular task. The Greek
historian Herodotus, for example, describes a community in what is now
Libya in which every year, during a festival celebrating the virgin goddess
Athena, the young women of the community would be divided into two
groups to attack each other with sticks and stones, with only those surviv-
ing deemed true “virgins.”26 Here virginity is read not through a wom-
an’s anatomy, but rather through divine providence; neither a woman’s
26

26 Testing Virginity in the Body

genitalia nor any other aspect of her anatomy is significant in determining

her sexual status.
A less gruesome test, but one that also looks outside of the virgin’s
body for its evidence, appears in the Facta et dicta memorabilia of the first-​
century historian Valerius Maximus. Valerius reports that a consecrated
virgin by the name of Tuccia, accused of “impurity,” grabbed hold of a
sieve, called upon Vesta for support, and thereby carried water in the sieve
from the Tiber to Vesta’s temple.27 Yet another ordeal comes to us from
the third-​century Roman author Aelian, who describes the sacred virgins
of Lanuvium.28 The maidens of the place would enter a cave in the forest
blindfolded to serve cakes to a snake. If the cakes were accepted, the tested
woman was proved a virgin; if, however, the ants crushed the cakes and
then removed the debris, she was determined to be a “false” virgin.29
Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the genre, the Greek romance novel
of the Second Sophistic in particular frequently features ordeals as tests
of virgins’ chastity. I have already mentioned the dramatically conspicu-
ous absence of a virginity test early in the narrative of the novel Leucippe
and Clitophon. Later in the novel, however, Leucippe is again accused of
unchastity; this time, she is indeed tested, sent ominously into Pan’s cave
(though the precise danger is not made explicit). Shortly after entering,
however, “a melody began to be detected, and it was said that never before
had such delicate music been heard.”30 Thus is her virginity proved with-
out any examination of her body.31
So too in Heliodorus’s novel An Ethiopian Story, written anywhere from
the mid-​third to mid-​fourth centuries, in which, fascinatingly, both a boy
and a girl are tested by means of a gridiron on which the candidates to be
sacrificed must walk, those who have known sexual intercourse are ruled
unfit, “allocated to Dionysos and the other gods,” rather than to the Sun
and Moon. The male protagonist of the story “passes” the test, that is,
proves himself worthy to be sacrificed; the female protagonist, Charikleia,
also does so, but in truly spectacular fashion. After putting on her Delphic
robe “woven with gold thread and embroidered with rays . . . she let her
hair fall free, ran forward like one possessed, and sprang onto the gridi-
ron, where she stood for some time without taking any hurt.” The crowd
marvels “that she had preserved pure and undefiled a beauty so far sur-
passing that of humankind . . . the greatest ornament to her beauty was
chastity.”32 In these Greek novels of late antiquity, girls’ and women’s vir-
ginity is repeatedly tested—​in both senses of “to test”—​but never through
the examination of her physiology, but rather through the successful
27

Virginity and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective 27

managing of an ordeal. This phenomenon is consistent with Greek and

Roman texts of other genres.
Looking for ordeals as virginity tests can bring us back to the Ancient
Near East as well. As I noted above, Jerold Cooper has demonstrated that
testimony is the only clearly discernible mode of proving virginity in
Mesopotamian law. He also points out the great fear and trembling that
inhered in the notion of a false oath in the Ancient Near East; for a woman
to take a formal legal oath testifying to her own virginity may have indeed
carried with it the sort of panic and sense of testing “virtue” as is implied
in the ordeals described above.33 In other words, though our evidence for
virginity testing of any kind is scanty, ordeals were perhaps more promi-
nent in the cultural context of Deuteronomy and clearly so in the world in
which Rabbinic and early Christian texts were authored.
Even in postbiblical societies under the influence of Deuteronomy, in
which bloodied sheets and midwives appear regularly, ordeals still occur
alongside the biblical models as a means of testing a woman’s virginity.
According to a medieval German folk belief, if a woman goes near a bee-
hive and comes away unstung, her virginity has been proved.34 In the
Middle English romance Floris and Blauncheflur, the Sultan of Babylon
tests prospective brides’ virginity by means of a magical fountain, the
water of which will “scream out as if it were completely mad and become
red as blood” should a woman with previous sexual experience place her
hands in it.35
Indeed, Rabbinic literature itself includes one such ordeal as a test of
women’s virginity. At bYev 60b, discussing Moses’s instructions to the
returning soldiers from the Israelite massacre of the Midianites, the anon-
ymous voice of the Babylonian Talmud asks, “How did they know [which
women had ‘known men’ and which had not]?”36 Rav Huna b. Bizna reports
in the name of Rabbi Simeon Hasida that “they passed them before the
high priest’s frontlet; any whose face turned green, she was known to be
fit for intercourse.” Given the context—​those girls who are “fit for inter-
course” will be put to the sword—​this magical test displays the classic
traits of an ordeal to prove virginity.

Virginity Tests, Symbolic Violence, and

the Violence of (“Taking”) Virginity
Following Kelly, I have until now divided these tests into two sorts: “med-
ical tests” and “ordeals.”37 I will return to Kelly’s distinction in my
28

28 Testing Virginity in the Body

consideration of the Protevangelium of James in ­chapter 5. But I now want

to consider these virginity tests via a different criterion, one based not on
their means, but rather on their effects: do they encourage, or discourage,
male physical violence as a component of sexual activity in general and ini-
tial sexual experience in particular? Certainly, when we consider the effects
of virginity tests based on either vaginal bleeding or the existence of lacera-
tions, we should be acutely aware of the connection between this initial act
of penetrative intercourse and such violence. As I have argued above, if
the only way to attest to a woman’s virginity is through her bleeding or her
otherwise showing visible signs of previous bleeding, then a groom intent
on “knowing” that his bride was a virgin is more likely to engage in sexual
relations that will wound her.
But virginity can be violent even where there are no bloody sheets and
no literal wounding. Thus, for example, Kelly directs our attention to the
way in which the Sultan’s fountain in Floris and Blauncheflur, with its water
turning red and its screams when touched by a false virgin “impersonat[es]
the young woman at the precise moment of penetration.”38 Herodotus’s
description of the Libyan festival pitting two teams of virgins against each
other similarly connects violence and blood—​in this case, the actual blood
of death—​with proof of virginity. And the German belief in the power
of bees to establish a woman’s virginity through their stinging (or lack
thereof) certainly carries the connotations of penetration and violence in
the form of the bees’ stings.39 In testing virginity through methods that
highlight violence against women, these ordeals suggest that the construc-
tion of virginity as something that can be verified or disproved, kept or
lost, is nearly always tied up with images of aggression and violence.
And indeed, both in antiquity and more recent times, virginity and its
“loss” is very often portrayed as violent, even when it is not specifically
being tested. Consider the passage that appeared at the opening of the
introduction, from the second-​century Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe.
The male protagonist, Daphnis, eager to consummate his relationship
with his beloved Chloe, but unable to because neither he nor she under-
stands the mechanics of intercourse, has just been “educated” by his expe-
rienced neighbor Lycainion, who has offered him a real-​life practicum, as
it were, as a means of convincing him to sleep with her. Following their
coupling, she warns him that, unlike the experience that he has just had
with her, his first sexual relations with Chloe will be marked by Chloe’s
“scream[ing]” and “cry[ing],” that she will “lie in a large pool of blood as
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
supposed to be the happy owner of nine wives, and the others had
almost as many.
The eldest daughter of the Maharajah was about fifteen. She very
often came to see me, in company with nine or ten other girls of the
same age, of whom more than half were royalties. The Senaputti
used to bring them, and they loved running all over the house,
examining everything. They liked most of all to go into my bedroom
and try on my clothes and hats, and brush their hair with my
brushes, admiring themselves in my long looking-glass. They used
to be very much surprised to find that my dresses would not meet
half-way round their waists.
The Senaputti generally waited in the drawing-room talking to my
husband. After the party had explored my room, we used to rejoin
the others, and take them all out into the garden, allowing them to
pick the flowers, and decorate each other, and then my husband
would photograph them. They were always amused with the
monkeys and rabbits, the latter particularly, as those animals are
wholly unknown in Manipur. In fact, these Manipuri children were
very much like any other children in their delight at seeing new
things. They liked going into the dining-room when the table was laid
for dinner, and asking us what all the knives and forks and spoons
were used for; and they enjoyed sitting on the sofas and in the big
armchairs, ‘just like the Memsahib,’ they said.
Once we had a water-party on the lake in the grounds. The big
pink water-lilies were in full bloom, and we had about five boats
crammed with these children and some of the little princes, and we
all pelted each other with water-lilies and got very wet, and enjoyed it
immensely. Of course it was always a drawback not being able to
offer them anything to eat or drink, as their caste forbade them
taking anything of the sort; but we used to give them flowers, and
Japanese fans, and beads, and those kind of things, with which they
were very delighted. Some of the Manipuri girls are very pretty. They
have long silky black hair as a rule, and fair complexions, with jolly
brown eyes. They cut their hair in front in a straight fringe all round
their foreheads, while the back part hangs loose, and it gives them a
pretty, childish look. They dress very picturesquely in bright-coloured
striped petticoats fastened under their arms, and reaching to their
ankles. Over this a small green velvet zouave jacket is worn, and
when they go out they wear a very fine muslin shawl over their
shoulders, and gold necklaces and bracelets by way of ornament.
Very pretty these little damsels look as you meet them in twos and
threes along the road going to their dancing-lessons, or to market or
temple. Every child is taught to dance in Manipur. They cease when
they marry, but up till then they take great pride in their nautches.
The Manipuris do not shut up their women, as is the custom in
most parts of India, and they are much more enlightened and
intelligent in consequence. As soon as a woman marries she puts
back her fringe; but no other restrictions are laid upon her. They do
not marry until they are fifteen, and I have seen girls of seventeen
unmarried. From going so often through the bazaar in the evenings, I
got to know several of the women very well, and they liked my
coming and having a chat with them. I learnt all their little troubles
and anxieties—how so-and-so’s baby was teething and generally
ailing, and how someone else’s had grown an inch, or who was
going to be married, and who had died. I liked talking to them, and I
learnt a good deal of the language by doing so.
 CHAPTER V.
Trips to the Logtak Lake—Beautiful scene on the lake—Tent pitched on an island
in it—The Pucca Senna accompanies us—Crowds collect to see us—Old
women dance—Natives laugh at my riding habit—Moombi—Steep ascent—
Chief of the village threatens us—Unpleasant quarters—Wet condition and
hostile reception—My husband teaches the Prince English.

From April to the end of October was the rainy season in Manipur,
and from October till the end of March the weather was as perfect as
could be, very cold, and yet bright and sunshiny, with never a drop of
rain to trouble one. All our winter went in camp. We used to go out
for a month at a time, and then return to the Residency for a few
days before starting out again in another direction. We generally
managed two trips to the Logtak Lake. This lake lay to the south of
the valley, a day’s journey by boat, or two days’ if one rode. We
preferred the boating. We used to start off early in the morning and
ride about fifteen miles, where the boat would wait for us, with all our
luggage packed in one end of it, and a well-filled lunch-basket to
keep us going by the way. These boats were long and narrow, and
were called ‘dug-outs,’ because each one was hollowed out of a
single tree. We spread the bottom with lots of straw, and put rugs
and pillows on the top, and then lay down on them and found it very
comfortable.
About five in the evening we arrived at the mouth of the river, and
had generally to wait some time there to allow the wind, which
always got up in the evenings, to subside, as the lake was too rough
to cross while it was blowing. Even when we did cross, two hours
later, the waves kept breaking into the boat, and we had to set to
work to bale the water out. I don’t think I shall ever forget the first
time I saw the lake. We did not arrive till late, and the moon was high
up in the heavens, shedding a glorious silvery light on the broad
expanse of waters, and making the islands, each one a small
mountain in itself, appear shadowy and far off. Far above our heads’
flew strings of wild geese going off to feed, and uttering their strange
hoarse cry as they flew. Here and there as our boat shot past some
sheltered nook or tiny islet two or three ducks would paddle out,
scenting danger, and curious water-birds would rise from the
swampy ground and noiselessly disappear in the far distance. But
the stillness on all around us, and the beautiful lake, whose surface
the now dying wind still gently ruffled, had a great effect upon one’s
imagination, and I was quite sorry when we shot through a narrow
creek and came suddenly upon the camp.
Our tents were pitched on one of the largest and most beautiful
islands, under a big tree, and at the end of a long village, which was
built picturesquely on the shore of the lake. The villagers and our
servants came down to help us out of our boats with torches and the
inevitable bugler, who played us up to our tent in grand style. We
were very glad to get in and find an excellent dinner awaiting us, and
still more pleased to get to bed. Every day we used to start out at six
in the morning, before the mist had cleared—I in one boat, and my
husband in another—and creep round the little islands after duck,
and we generally returned with a large bag.
In two days once my husband got eighty-two ducks and thirty
geese. He did great execution with an eight-bore he had, and
generally knocked over half a dozen or so at a time with it. Duck-
shooting is very exciting, and hunting wounded birds a lengthy
operation. They let you come quite close to them, and you think you
have got them safely, when they suddenly dive under your boat and
appear again yards off; and by the time you have turned your boat
and gone after them again they are still farther away. I never liked it
when we had caught them and they used to be consigned to my
husband’s boat, as I could not bear to see them killed. Sometimes
they were so tame that we let them alone, as it seemed butchery to
shoot them.
One year when we went to the Logtak the Pucca Senna (the
Maharajah’s third brother) asked if he might come too. We were very
pleased to have him, so he arrived, and every day he went out
shooting with us, and as he was a good shot he made a welcome
addition to our party. He shot everything he could see, whether it
was game or not, but he shot well. We sent all the birds we could not
eat up by boat to Manipur for the Sepoys of our escort, who were
very grateful for them. We stayed a week the time the Pucca Senna
was with us, and he came on afterwards on a tour along the
southern boundary of the valley to some very curious places, where
they had never seen an English lady before, and where the people
exhibited the greatest curiosity and excitement over my advent. We
were always coming upon crowds collected at different places on the
roads, who had journeyed many miles to see me. They all presented
us with a few eggs or fowls, as the case might be, in the hope that
the presentation of them would delay us, and that they would be able
to get a good view of me.
Sometimes, instead of giving us anything, they brought four old
women to dance before us, and we would come upon them suddenly
over the brow of a hill and find them jumping about on the other side
like so many old monkeys for our edification. We were, of course,
obliged to stop and look at their exertions, and present them at the
end of the performance with rupees. They always came round me
and touched my clothes and hands, and seemed to be surprised
when I turned up my sleeve and showed them that my arm was
white too, like my hands. My clothes caused much curiosity. It was
the time then of large dress-improvers, and they had seen me
walking out at one village we stopped at in a fashionably-made
costume, with at least three steels in it.
The next day I went out on my pony in a riding habit, followed by
the usual crowds. We stopped for a few minutes, and I saw our
interpreter in fits of laughter over something. I asked my husband
what the man was laughing at, and after a little persuasion the
interpreter told us that the villagers wished to know what I had done
with my tail! At first I had no idea what they meant, but after a little
while they explained, and then I discovered that they had imagined
the fulness at the back of my dress had concealed a tail, and they
could not understand why the habit looked different. We were very
much amused, and when we got back to the camp I showed some of
them the steels in my dress. They thought it a very funny fashion
indeed.
 We went away the next day, much to their disappointment, to a
place a long way off in the hills, and had a number of queer
adventures. The Manipuris told us that this place, called Moombi,
was about eighteen miles distant, so we started very early. I
commenced by riding, but before we had gone very far the hills
became so steep that I got into my long chair and was carried by
Nagas. My husband had to walk, and so did Prince Pucca Senna,
much to his disgust, as he was a very lazy individual, and never
cared to use his legs much. This time there was no help for it, so he
puffed and blew as he came up the hill, and said he felt very ill
indeed. It must have been thirty miles instead of eighteen, and it was
very tiring. I had to hold on to the arms of my chair to keep myself in
it at all, and the road got worse and worse, until at last I had to take
to my hands and knees too, as by this time the rest of the party were
crawling up on all-fours like a string of ants.
We got to the top at length, and were going on up to the village,
which was a few yards ahead, when a message came down from the
chief of the village, sent by one of his slaves, saying that if we came
any farther he would shoot at us. This was rather alarming at the end
of a long and tiring march. The messenger went on to say that they
had built a grass hut for us a little below the place we had halted at,
and that no one would molest us if we stayed there, but we were not
to go into the village. I think if we had had a sufficient armed force
with us that my husband would have gone on, but as we were only
travelling with a small escort of Manipuris, who seemed much more
inclined to run down the hill instead of up it, we agreed to remain in
the hut they had built for us, to which we then proceeded.
 TRIBESMEN OF MANIPUR.

There was no mistake about its being a grass hut. It was built of
green grass, something like pampas grass, with flowery tops which
they had not cut off, but left to wave in a sort of archway over our
heads. The roof was very light and airy, and full of large spaces to
allow of rain or hail entering the abode if the weather were stormy.
The floor was covered with loose, ungainly-looking planks, thrown
down anyhow all over it, and if you trod on the end of one suddenly,
it started up at the other end like a seesaw. Fortunately we always
took a small tent with us to be certain of shelter in case any of the
arrangements should fall through, and we had it on this occasion.
We soon unpacked it, and got a place on the side of a hill cleared,
and began putting it up, hurrying over it as fast as we could, as the
clouds were gathering up all round us, and we knew rain was
coming.
Long before we had finished erecting it, however, the storm broke.
I have rarely seen such a storm. The wind blew so strongly that it
needed all our forces to hold on to the tent-ropes to prevent the
whole being blown down the hill on to the top of the unfortunate
prince, who, by the way, was housed below us in a wretched grass
shed, a copy of ours, only very much smaller. The thunder and
lightning were dreadful, as the hills around us re-echoed every peal,
and the lightning shone out so vividly in the darkness which had set
in. At length the wind went down somewhat, and we adjourned to the
hut for dinner, where we sat under one umbrella with our feet on the
bath-tub turned upside down, and our plates in our laps. The rain
poured meanwhile through the so called roof, and the nodding grass-
tops dripped on to our heads. We got to bed about two in the
morning, when it cleared up, and the stars came out, as it were, to
mock at us for the general soppiness of ourselves and our
belongings. We did not dare inquire for the well-being of the prince.
Streams of water we knew had rushed down the hillside quite
powerful enough to carry his hut away.
Next morning very early one of his followers came up to say that
his master had not been able to sleep all night, as his house had
been swept away and many of his valuables lost; and that he
presented his salaams to the Sahib and the Memsahib, and hoped
that we did not intend remaining in so horrible a place.
It had been our original intention to stay at Moombi three days, but
our wet condition, coupled with the hostile reception from the chief,
decided us to make a move down the hill. First of all, though, my
husband insisted that the chief should come down and pay his
respects to us, which, to our great surprise, he did after a little
persuasion, bringing his three wives and a number of followers, all of
whom were armed with guns of very ancient design, with him. They
wore very few clothes, and were not pleasant-looking men, and the
women were all very short and dumpy-looking, and, oh! so dirty.
They presented us with eggs and melons, and the wives gave me a
curious spear and some baskets of rice. My husband asked them
what they meant by greeting us with such an alarming message the
night before, to which they replied that they had made a mistake,
and did not mean that they would fire on us. We found out
afterwards that they thought we were coming to collect some
revenue which they had owed to Manipur for some time and refused
to pay, and that they were afraid we intended marching into their
village and forcing them to pay.
My husband hauled the chief (who, by the way, called himself a
Rajah) over the coals for it, and told him that he was to come into
Manipur, where the revenue case would be inquired into; but we
parted very peaceably after going up to the village by the chief’s own
invitation, where we inspected the outside of his house. It was
fenced all round with strong stakes, and on the top of each stake
was a head, and more than one of them unmistakably human skulls.
Whether the original owners of them had died natural deaths, or
whether they were trophies of war, we did not inquire. There were
some beautiful elephants’ tusks in the chiefs veranda, and some
fine-toned Kuki gongs, one of which he presented to us. We left with
many expressions of affection from the Rajah of Moombi and his
wives, but we were very glad when we found ourselves at the foot of
the hills leading up to his kingdom, and solemnly made a vow never
to return there again. We visited the iron wells on our way home.
There are about seven of them, and it was very interesting watching
the men at work.
My husband amused himself in the afternoons by teaching the
prince English. He used to read out of a queer old spelling-book,
filled with words that one would really never use. One sentence was
—that is to say, if one could call it a sentence—‘an elegant puce
quilt.’ Now, I don’t think his highness would ever have used either
word, but it amused me greatly to hear him trying to pronounce
‘quilt’; it developed into ‘kilt,’ and never got any farther. I laughed so
much that I had to beat a hasty retreat. There was one expression
the prince did learn, and that was ‘good-bye’; but it was a little
embarrassing to meet him on arrival and be welcomed by a shake of
the hand and a solemn ‘good-bye.’ It rather damped one’s ardour.
He never could understand that it was a farewell salutation, and not
a general greeting.
 CHAPTER VI.
Society at Manipur—Band of the Ghoorkas—The bandmaster—His peculiar attire
—The regiment ordered away to our regret—Worse news—We are ordered to
leave—Parting views—Mr. Heath appointed—Son of the Tongal general—His
good and bad qualities—Magnificent scenery—The Ungamis—Their
quarrelsome character.

When we first went to Manipur we had a certain amount of society,

as it was then the headquarters of a Ghoorka regiment, which was
stationed four miles away from us, at a place called Langthabal; not
a pleasant spot by any means, as it had only been roughly cleared
for a cantonment, and the roads about it were little better than paths.
The officers lived in huts made of bamboo, and the walls had a thin
covering of mud on the outside, which some of the more enterprising
inmates had painted with whitewash, making them look a little more
like the habitations of civilized folks. Some of the huts had very pretty
gardens round them, but small, of course, though the flowers there
seemed to do twice as well as ours did in the Residency garden. We
saw a good deal of the officers in the 44th Ghoorka Rifles, the
regiment there when we arrived. They used to come in for polo twice
a week, and to what I was pleased to call my ‘at home’ every
Thursday, when we played tennis and had the Maharajah’s band
from four o’clock till six.
This band was composed of Nagas, and it was wonderful to hear
how easily they learnt English music. Waltzes and any dance music
came easiest to them, and they kept excellent time; but they could
manage anything, and I have heard them play difficult selections
from the great masters without a mistake. Their bandmaster was
very talented. As a young man he had gone to Kohima to be taught
by the bandmaster of the 44th Ghoorka Rifles, and he had a natural
ear for music, and could even sing a little. He used to get very
impatient at times when the bandsmen were more stupid than usual,
and on one occasion he took to beating them, and they refused to
work any longer under him. They were imprisoned, and many of
them beaten, but at last, after a great deal of persuasion, backed by
a few rupees, they were induced to begin again, and the bandmaster
promised to cease from castigating them whenever they played a
wrong note.
I shall never forget my first introduction to the bandmaster. He
arrived dressed in what he called his ‘Calcutta clothes,’ of which he
was immensely proud. They consisted of a white frock coat, made in
a very old-fashioned way; black broadcloth continuations, rather
short and very baggy; a red-corded silk waistcoat, with large white
spots, and tie to match; turn-down collar and ancient top hat,
constructed in the year 1800, I fancy. He had a small peony in his
button-hole, and last, but not least, patent-leather boots stitched with
white and covered with three rows of pearl buttons. He carried a light
cane, surmounted by the head and shoulders of a depraved-looking
female in oxidized silver as a handle. He showed this to me with
great pride, and really it was a marvellous machine, for when you
pressed the top of her head attar of roses came out of her mouth
and nose, and if you were anywhere near you were covered with that
pungent liquid. It was very difficult to avoid laughing at this curious
get-up, and when he had safely embarked on a long overture from
‘William Tell,’ I disappeared for a few minutes to give vent to my
amusement. He was quite a character, and always afforded me a
weekly surprise, as he seldom appeared in the same clothes twice
running, and his wardrobe seemed as endless as it was select.
Being able to have the band when we liked was very pleasant. It
brought the officers over from Langthabal once a week at any rate,
and we always rode out to see them every week. We were very gay
there in those days, and we used to have dinner-parties, and I
enjoyed the change of going to the mess to dinner now and then. Of
course the four miles’ journey there was a little trying. The Manipur
roads never admitted of driving, so I used to be carried in a long
chair by hospital Kahars, and my husband used to ride. It was
terribly cold coming back late at night, and often very wet, but we did
not mind that very much to get an outing occasionally.
 Terribly sorry we were when the decree went forth that we were to
lose the regiment. We knew that they might go any day, and a Chin
expedition cropped up in the winter of 1888, which took our only
neighbours off on the warpath. We were very depressed at the idea
of losing them, but perfectly desolated when a letter came saying
that we ourselves were to go to another station. We were out in
camp when it arrived, and I never shall forget the hopeless silence
that fell upon us both at the news. We had counted upon being
safely installed at Manipur for three years at the least, but, alas! a
number of senior men were coming out from furlough, and had to be
provided with districts before the juniors. We had taken so much
pride in the place during our ten months’ residence there that we
were very loath to go. We talked it over, trying to find some way of
getting out of leaving, but came to the conclusion there was none.
That was in December, but we did not really leave until February, as
the officer who was to relieve us had to come a long distance from
the other side of the Assam Valley, and he took as long as he
possibly could in coming, being as loath to take the place as we
were to give it up. Sadly we walked round our gardens, noted the
rose-trees only lately arrived from Calcutta, which we had been
counting on to make the place beautiful during the coming year, and
gazed mournfully at the newly-made asparagus-bed that we hoped
would have fed us in three years’ time. I almost felt inclined to
destroy everything, but my husband was more magnanimous, and
even went as far as to say he hoped Mr. Heath (our successor)
would enjoy it all.
We made the most of our last two months in Manipur. Two
shooting expeditions to the lake, and a journey to Cachar for the
Christmas race-meet, occupied most of our remaining time; but, like
all things, it came to an end—all too soon for us—and one morning
the guns boomed out a salute to our successor. It was a case of ‘Le
roi est mort. Vive le roi!’ The same elephants, covered with the same
crimson coverings, welcomed him in the identical manner that they
had welcomed us. The red-coated Chupprassies hastened to pay
their respects to the new Sahib and attend to his wants, heedless of
those of the old Sahib, and I think we both felt then what leaving the
place would really mean to us.
 Mr. Heath was much impressed by all the glories prepared for him,
but he had not been in the house very long before he told us how
much he disliked coming to Manipur. He hadn’t a good word to say
for it, and I felt very sorry for him, as he really seemed to dread the
loneliness terribly. Lonely it certainly was, and the outlook was worse
for him than it had been for us, as we had each other, and the
regiment was four miles off. He had no one. I knew well how the
solitude would weigh on him before many days were over. It had
been dreadful work for me at times, when my husband was kept in
the office till late in the evening, and I had to amuse myself as best I
could from eleven in the morning until dinner-time. There were no
books or papers to be got under three weeks or a month’s post, and
then one had to buy one’s books, as there was no going to a library
for them. So I felt very sorry for poor Mr. Heath, as he seemed far
from strong into the bargain. However, I did my best to cheer him up
by taking him all round the gardens and over the house, and
showing him that, as far as the place went, he could not wish for a
better.
Then we went for a walk through the bazaar and on to the polo
ground, and eventually, when we returned in the evening, he
seemed in a happier frame of mind, and the band playing whilst we
were at dinner cheered him up considerably. But next day, when the
time came for us to depart, he was very gloomy, and as I was worse
myself, I could not put on a pleasant outward appearance. It was
very hard to leave the place, having to bid good-bye to all our pets,
leaving them in the hands of the servants who might or might not
look after them. I took the three little monkeys with me, as I would
not part with them, and they were travellers already, as they had
come to Manipur with us. My husband did suggest letting them loose
in a large grove of mango-trees not far from the Residency that was
filled with monkeys which we often used to go and feed with rice and
plantains, but I knew how they fought amongst themselves, and how
the big ones bullied the little ones, so I preferred taking my three with
us. I took a last walk round the grounds, and almost directly after
breakfast our horses came to the door and we had to make a start.
All the servants that were remaining behind came and bid us good-
bye, and some of the red-coated Chupprassies gave us little
presents of dried fruits and nuts. We rode out of the place very
slowly, but as soon as the quarter-guard gates had closed behind us
we put our ponies into a gallop, and never stopped till three or four
miles lay between us and the Residency, and neither of us spoke
much for the rest of the ten that limited our journey that day.
We were going to a place over two hundred miles away called
Jorehat, in the Assam Valley, near the Brahmapootra, and to get to it
we had to pass through Kohima, in the Naga Hills, ninety-six miles
from Manipur. It was my first visit there, and I enjoyed the eight days’
journey to it immensely. We were accompanied as far as Mao Thana
(the boundary between the Manipur state and Kohima) by the eldest
son of the Tongal General.
Before going on, I think some description of the latter officer will
not be amiss, especially as he has played so important a part in the
late rebellion. He was an old man, nearer eighty than seventy I
should think, taller than the average Manipuri, and marvellously
active for his age. He had a fine old face, much lined and wrinkled
with age and the cares of state which had fallen upon him when he
was quite a young man, and had in no wise lessened as his years
increased. He had piercing black eyes, shaggy overhanging white
eyebrows, and white hair. His nose was long and slightly hooked,
and his mouth was finely cut and very determined. He was fond of
bright colours, and I never remember seeing him in anything but a
delicate pink silk dhotee, a dark coat made from a first-rate English
pattern, and a pink turban, and when the orchids were in bloom, he
seldom appeared without a large spray of some gorgeous-hued
specimen in the top of his turban.
The Tongal always reminded me of an eagle. He had the same
keen, rugged expression and deep-set, glowing eyes. Few things
happened without his knowledge and consent, and if he withheld his
approbation from any matter, there would invariably be a hitch in it
somewhere. He was credited with more bloodshed than any man in
the kingdom. If a village had misbehaved itself, raided on another, or
refused to pay revenue or do Lalup, the Tongal would travel out to
that village and wipe it off the face of the earth. Men, women, and
children were cut down without the slightest compunction. Few
escaped, and these travelled away and joined other villages; but
every house and barn and shed was burnt, pigs and fowls destroyed,
and ruin and devastation reigned where prosperity and plenty had
held sway before. I believe in later years restrictions were brought to
bear upon the Manipur durbar which prevented such wholesale
slaughter; but in earlier days the Tongal had, as he expressed it,
‘nautched through many villages’ in the style described, and brought
desolation into many a hillman’s peaceful home.
If he had his faults, he had his virtues also. He was very
enterprising, fond of building bridges, and improving the roads about
the capital. Like the Senaputti, he was a keen soldier, enjoyed
watching good shooting, and had been in his younger days a first-
rate shot himself. He was an obstinate old man, and it was very
difficult to get him to listen to any proposition if it did not please him
at the outset; but when once he had promised to get anything done,
he did not go back from his word, and one knew it was reliable. He
lived in a large house some distance to the south of the palace, with
his family. Of these, only two sons were of any importance—the
eldest, called Yaima, and the second son, a very handsome young
fellow, named Lumphel Singh. The latter was perhaps the most
influential, and my husband always said he thought that he would
take his father’s place in the state when anything happened to the
old man. Lumphel was the favourite aide-de-camp of the Maharajah,
and he was the officer in charge of the hundred and twenty-eight
miles of road between Manipur and Cachar. At durbars he used to
stand behind the Maharajah’s chair with a very magnificent uniform
covered with gold lace, and a gold turban.
Yaima, the eldest brother, was not good-looking at all, but a nice
young fellow, and very hard-working. He came with us on our
journey to Kohima at the time of which I write, and was very obliging,
and ready to put himself out in any way in order that we might be
comfortable, which, considering that we were departing, as we then
thought, for good from the place, was very courteous on his part. We
were very sorry to part with him at Mao Thana.
The scenery on the road between Kohima and Manipur is
magnificent. Some of the hills run as high as nine thousand feet, and
yet until you are within three days’ journey of Kohima the road is
almost level, winding in and out along a narrow valley. Forests of oak
abound the whole way, and in the cold weather the trees lose their
foliage, making it look very English-like and wintry.
Sometimes you find yourself riding along a narrow path which
skirts round the side of a steep hill, while below you is the river, clear
and blue and deep, with an occasional rapid disturbing the calm
serenity of its flow. The hills around are studded with villages, and
peopled by various tribes. The Nagas in the immediate vicinity of
Kohima are perhaps a finer race than any hillmen to be found in
Assam. They are called Ungamis, and are very fine men, most of
them six feet high at least, broad shouldered, and powerfully built.
Their dress is curious, and quite different to any of the Nagas about
Manipur. It consists of a kind of very short kilt made of coarse black
cloth, trimmed with three or four rows of shells like cowries. In old
days, before Kohima was as settled and quiet as it is in these days,
these rows of shells are said to have borne a meaning—a man who
had never taken a human head was not allowed to sew them on to
his kilt. For every head taken they affixed so many cowries, five or
six at a time, as the case might be, and a warrior with three rows on
his kilt was considered a great gun indeed.
The Mao Nagas were Ungamis, and used to be rather a handful
for the Manipuris to manage. They were always getting up feuds with
the villagers over the border, and the Manipuris were very often
afraid of hauling them over the coals for it, for fear of getting the
worst of the fray. We stayed two days at Kohima on our way to
Jorehat, and travelled after leaving there through the Namba forest
to the next station, called Golaghat. We took eight days to do this bit
of our journey, as the weather was delicious, and we wanted to make
the most of our time on the road, being in no hurry to arrive at our
destination. This Namba forest covers an enormous area. It extends
hundreds of miles each side of the road, which is constructed right
through the middle of it. The scenery is wonderful. High forest jungle
rises each side of you as you ride along. Here and there you come
across a river, whose sandy banks show the footprints of many a
wild beast. Bears, tigers, leopards, and elephants swarm in the
jungle around, but one seldom sees anything more exciting than a
harmless deer browsing by the wayside, or a troop of long-tailed
monkeys crossing the road. It is all very wild and beautiful, and when
we eventually came to the end of our eight days’ march through the
Namba, and reached cultivated regions once more, we were quite
sorry. We stayed two days at Golaghat, the first station reached after
leaving the forest, and then proceeded to our new subdivision,
arriving there at the end of three days.
 CHAPTER VII.
Short stay at Jorehat—My husband appointed to Gauhati—Value of the bearer in
India—His notions and mine not always in harmony—Arrive at Gauhati—
Illness and death of Mr. Heath—Presentiments—My husband returns to
Manipur—I remain at Shillong—Delicious climate.

There is no necessity to give a detailed account of the time spent

between our leaving Manipur and our return there. It extended over a
period of some ten or twelve weeks only. Instead of remaining at
Jorehat three months as we had at first expected, we were there
only ten days, just long enough to get everything unpacked and
stowed away, when a telegram came from Shillong, ordering my
husband to another station called Gauhati, on the Brahmapootra. As
it was a better appointment, he accepted it, but it was very hard work
having to start off on the march again before we had had time to rest
ourselves after our long journey from Manipur. That wonderful
domestic whom we could never do without in India, the bearer, soon
repacked all our things.
Why haven’t we someone like a bearer in England? He is a perfect
godsend in the shiny East. He is valet to the Sahib, makes the beds,
dusts the rooms, cleans the lamps and boots, and is responsible for
all the performances of the other domestics. If they fail to do their
duty, or break your furniture or crockery, you scold the bearer. If one
of your horses goes lame or gets out of condition, the bearer knows
of it very soon, and if your cook sends you up anything nasty for
dinner, or the butter is sour or the milk turned, your bearer is
admonished. No doubt he lectures the other servants for their
misdeeds, and takes many gratuities from them, varying in bulk, for
pacifying his irate master or mistress. He generally gets on amicably
with the whole establishment, but sometimes he makes an enemy of
one or other of the servants, and ructions are as constant as they
are noisy. The two bearers (for they generally hunt in couples) that
we had had been with my husband for many years. They were both
very excellent servants, though the elder of the two gave himself the
airs and graces of a Maharajah.
My advent into the menage did not please him at all. Well he knew
that his little sins of omission and commission, so easily perpetrated
in a bachelor establishment, would all vanish and be things of the
past when a Memsahib came out from Belat[6] to rule the roost.
Many a battle have I had with Mr. Moni Ram Dass, as my husband’s
chief factotum was called, before I could get him to see that my way
was not his way sometimes. For instance, on one occasion shortly
after my arrival in India I found him airing the whole of my husband’s
wardrobe in my drawing-room at an hour when visitors were
certainties. Now, there are some garments in a man’s outfit—and in
a woman’s, too, for that matter—which, with the best intention in the
world, could never be made to look fitting ornaments for a lady’s
drawing-room. I expounded this theory to the bearer on this
occasion, but it was some time before I got him clearly to understand
that his master’s wardrobe was to be confined to the limits of the
dressing-room and back veranda; and when he did carry off the
garments in question, it was with an expression on his face of severe
displeasure at my want of taste in not considering them in the light of
ornaments to my drawing-room. One virtue in this estimable
individual certainly was worthy of all praise: he knew how to pack.
When we were leaving Manipur, he had packed all our belongings,
and on our arrival at Jorehat, after a long, rough journey, we found
everything in perfect order, and not even a cup broken. He repacked
our things when we had to leave there again, and took them himself
to Gauhati, saving us all the trouble of having to look after our heavy
baggage ourselves, and enabling us to follow on in comfort some
days later.
It was beginning to be hot when we arrived at Gauhati early in
April, and I dreaded having to spend the hot season in the plains. It
was to be my first experience of great heat, as the summer before in
Manipur we had never needed punkahs, and on the hottest day we
ever had, the thermometer registered only 87°.