Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag. She is a gleaming example, the highest and most revered woman of all, a queen whose queendom, based as it is equally on both virginity and motherhood, lends its regal honor to all women. Countless Christians have drawn strength and comfort from belief in her imperturbable sanctity. The example of her humility, compassion, and submission has been a motivating force in countless acts of grace, charity, and aid. She has inspired great art, music, architecture, and literature. At the same time, the very perfection of her sinlessness and submission can only make everyone else seem that much more sinful and willful by comparison. Because virginity was the outward symbol of Mary's spiritual perfection, the same standard has been applied to all women, with predictable results. Only one woman can possibly maintain Mary's standard perfectly. The rest are forever condemned to judgment.

  Finishing School

  As vital as the Church was to the Middle Ages and as vital as virginity was to the Church, virginity mattered to medieval culture in secular ways as well. Medically, magically, and of course socially, virginity was at issue in everyday medieval life. The power of virginity reflected in Mary's miracles or saintly legends was an indication of what people believed about virgins. Impervious to sin and all things demonic or satanic, virginity's supernatural properties came from its holiness. Virgin magic was the work not of the devil but of God. A whole realm of more or less magical practices involving virginity, ranging from the innocuous to the evil, existed in medieval Europe.

  The use of herbs, both medicinally and magically, was an everyday part of medieval life. Major European herbals deal frequently in virginity and virginity references. In them, for example, one often finds mention of an herb called "virgin's comfort," otherwise known as cicely (Myrrhis odorata), a hardy plant native to northwestern Europe and Scandinavia whose leaves and seeds taste of anise. Commonly recommended as a tonic for adolescent girls, it was supposed to ease menstrual discomforts and other "female problems." A different kind of female problem entirely could be alleviated by St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum). On August 20, St. John's day, virgin girls were supposed to hang sprigs of St. John's wort over their doors and tuck them under their pillows when they went to bed so that St. John would show them visions of their husbands-to-be in their dreams. The herb would additionally protect them from any demons that might attempt to take their virginities in the night. Some herbals also counseled that a virgin who worried about finding a mate should eat a bowlful of St. John's wort as a salad, dressed in oil, to ease her anxiety. Given what is now known about St. John's wort's effectiveness as an antidepressant, this seems like good advice.

  Alchemists likewise invoked the mystical properties of virginity to various ends. Sometimes virgins were involved as the source of an ingredient, as in the many alchemical recipes that call for the ashes of a virgin's burnt hair or which incorporate the urine of a virgin boy as a critical ingredient in a chemical reaction (urine was a common source for salts and ammonia in early chemical industries generally speaking). Other times the word "virgin" was applied to a compound that actually had nothing to do with virgins at all, appropriating the mystical power of virginity through naming the compound for it. One example is the frequently utilized "virgin's milk," in reality a solution of benzoin and water. Added to malt and gold powder, it made an ointment used in treating gout. If properly mixed with semen it would also supposedly generate homunculi, and was considered critical to the understanding of the Philosopher's Stone.

  The mystical virginal principle also holds an iconic place in the lore of the mythical unicorn, a staple of the medieval imaginary bestiary. A white horselike quadruped with a single pointed spiral horn, the unicorn was a fearsome beast capable of running would-be hunters through with a single toss of its terrible head. England's royal coat of arms featured a lion and a unicorn well before the accession of the Virgin Queen; two unicorns hold the crown in Scotland's. Evasive and fleet of foot, the unicorn was believed to be an unattainable quarry unless one had a virgin handy. Only a virgin's mystical purity could tame the creature's ferocious tendencies, and it would approach her and lay its head in her lap or upon her bosom with perfect gentleness. Legend has it that virgins were used as bait for unicorn traps. Seated in the middle of a circular fenced enclosure, the untouched feminine principle acted as bait for the untouchable masculine principle, the wild and deadly creature whose phallic sword emerges from his head. Trying to use a false virgin would end in either a fruitless hunt or in horror, for the unicorn was supposed to be able to tell, and would drive his horn through the heart of a woman who was only feigning virginity. Somehow, no unicorn was ever captured, though narwhal tusks brought home by sailors sometimes furnished "proof " that some had been in the past. The inability to catch them now could only have to do with a lack of properly virtuous virgins in such a corrupted age, and not, of course, with myth.

  Not all magical contexts for virginity were as symbolic or figurative as a vial of virgin's milk or stories of the unicorn hunt. The quality of invulnerability associated with virgins, including their supposed immunity (often repeated in saints' legends) to attacks by the devil and other dark forces, was "borrowed" by using the body parts of virgins in various applications. In accounts of thieves' magic dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, outlaws from Germany east to Russia were said to make magical candles that incorporated the rendered fat of dead virgins. By burning the fat of virgins—whether the virginal bodies in question were to be obtained by violence or merely grave robbery is not mentioned—the thieves would generate a variety of magical effects. Some reports say that these were "soporitic" candles, guaranteed to put everyone who was in the household being robbed to sleep so that the thieves could work undisturbed. Other writers claim that thieves used these candles to render themselves invisible, especially when robbing churches. A related bit of thieves' magic involved using the severed hand of a virgin as a candleholder to produce similar effects, although, not everyone insisted upon a virginal hand as their "hand of glory," since the hands of hanged men were also used in the same way.

  Because virginity was indissolubly linked with the body, the bodies of virgins were believed to be indissolubly permeated with the power of their virginity in much the same way as the bodies of saints were believed to be repositories of sanctity. This was even true of virgins' blood, and it is in a wash of virgins' blood that we find the story of what is probably the grisliest verifiable medieval virgin magic: the all-too-literal bloodbaths of the mad Hungarian countess Erzsebet Báthory. Báthory was born in 1560, well over the chronological border into the Renaissance, but her obsession with virgin magic was sufficiently savage, feudal, and arcane as to make a fitting capstone to a list of medieval virgin magics.

  The daughter of a powerful aristocrat, Báthory was reputedly a casually cruel person even as a young woman, and particularly vain. At fifteen she was married off to a wellborn professional warrior and installed as the mistress of the castle at Csejthe, an isolated keep in the rural Carpathian mountains in what is now Romanian territory. A bored teenager with a husband who spent the better part of the year off fighting wars, she had a penchant for the occult and the sadistic, and a reasonable sum of money to burn. As the years went on she developed a reputation for entertaining guests who were learned in arcane disciplines like alchemy and, some sources say, sorcery as well. Reports that she had developed a taste for torturing peasants imprisoned for debt surfaced even before her husband died in 1604, but it was only after that date that Báthory's sadism reached its virginal nadir.

  In a vain attempt to restore her lost youth and beauty, she latched on to the idea that bathing her skin with the blood of virgins would make her young again. The first victim, or so the legend has it, was Báthory's own chambermaid. Many more followed, hung upside-down from rafters by their ankles just as butchers hang animals for bleeding, before their throats were slit. Báthory bathed in and sometimes drank th
e blood of her victims, continually desperate for the renewed youth that somehow never arrived. Stories of dubious veracity and thoroughly rococo detail—a golden goblet from which Báthory was supposed to have drunk blood, the silver talons she used as a torture device, her opulent bathtubs for blood bathing, and quite a bit more besides—have accompanied her legend. Supposedly they also fill the pages of her notoriously inaccessible diaries, which are the property of the Hungarian government and are reputed to be stored in state archives in Budapest.

  The countess, with a small handful of accomplices, supposedly killed six hundred virgins by the time they were caught and brought to justice in 1611. Before that, however, they operated without interference. Initially preying on the region's female peasants, they later set themselves up as a (fatally literal) finishing school for the daughters of the aristocracy as a means of luring in new victims. The finishing school approach brought them under investigation, and soon the matter was taken to regional authorities.

  Following two Royal tribunals, two of Báthory's female accomplices were burned at the stake and her male accomplice was beheaded. Báthory herself, by reason of her aristocracy (and perhaps due to the fact that her cousin Stefan had become king of Poland), was instead sentenced to house arrest. She died in custody aged fifty-four, looking every minute of it.

  The Lord's First Night

  Báthory's example was both ghastly and unique, but it was by no means unheard of for a noble to have an interest in the virginity of those he or she ruled. This was never a matter of the nobility attempting to impose a code of morality upon the peasantry. There was an entire Church for that. Aristocratic concern for the virginity of peasants was economic. The people who lived on and worked a noble's land were an economic resource whose productivity was of vital concern. Part of that productivity involved their own reproduction: sex, marriages, and the resultant babies who would form the next generation of workers all came into the purview of the noble who managed a given territory.

  For this reason, the nobility in many regions developed systems of imposing fines or taxes on sexual activity that put the economic interests of the lord at risk. Canon (church) law and the institution of confession and penance existed to punish lapses in morality. Secular punishments, such as the type of fine known in middle Welsh as amobr and in middle English as leyrwite, on the other hand, were leveled against serfs who had disobeyed sexual rules concerning things like premarital and extramarital liaisons. In addition to fines imposed on sexual miscreants, taxes were also levied on marriages, especially those that involved a marriage between serfs of two different landowners. Like other feudal laws, these were rarely implemented uniformly, and while some nobles were more than fair about them, others used them abusively.

  It is here, at the intersection of marriage, sexuality, and the economic exploitation of peasants by the nobility, that we find the roots of one of the most enduring virgin-related myths of Western history, the myth of the jus primae noctis, or "right of the first night," also referred to as the droit du seigneur (right of the lord) and sometimes as the droit du cuissage (right of the leg) or the jus cunni (the right of the cunt). The myth of thejus primae noctis holds that it was the automatic right and privilege of a feudal lord to take the virginity of any woman living in his domain, and specifically to deflower virgin brides. As described, it is the ultimate in symbolic theft, and a violation not only of secular law but church law as well. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a single act that could more effectively give an impression of a corrupt, exploitive, cruel, and callously selfish nobility. Perhaps that's why people had to invent the jus primae noctis.

  This is by no means to say that aristocrats never laid claim, either consensually or by rape, to the virginity of women beneath them. Saying that the jus primae noctis was a myth is not the same as denying that sexual abuses of power took place. But acknowledging that sexual abuse took place is a very different thing from claiming that a particular sexually abusive practice was either customary or, as the word jus (law) implies, an aspect of the formal and legally extenuated rights of the nobility as a class. The former is a given. The latter is a myth.

  Given how important virginity was to medieval culture, it seems likely that had the practice of the lord of the manor deflowering every virgin on her wedding night actually existed, someone would have recorded it somewhere. As it stands, the earliest reference we have to any form of this supposed custom dates from 15.26, in a text that attributes it as having been practiced by a medieval Scottish king. Unfortunately, the king in question is nowhere to be found in any records that date from earlier than 1526: he was apparently invented because someone wanted a bogeyman.

  The market for aristocratic bogeymen has been rather brisk since the 1500s, given the number of jus primae noctis tall tales that appeared since that time. Take for example the story related throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the formation of the free town of Montauban, a city in the Toulouse region of France. The story related how monks of the Abbey of Saint-Theodard, located in Montauriol, adjacent to the territory that became Montauban, had become greedy and power-mad, going so far as to enforce the droit du seigneur over the women of Montauriol. Montauriol's serfs eventually rebelled against this treatment, the story goes, by fleeing the abbey's lands and founding the free town of Montauban.

  In reality, nothing of the kind ever happened. A charter of foundation for the free town of Montauban exists, dated 11 October 1144. In it, one Alphonse Jourdain, comte de Toulouse, established the city and charged its inhabitants with the responsibility of building a bridge over the River Tarn. Jourdain wanted a bridge, some of his serfs wanted independence. The deal was straightforward and honest.

  Not all the fictions that have reinscribed this myth pretend to historical truth, however. Many, in fact, were intended as entertainment. From the seventeenth century to the present, the idea of the jus primae noctis has been used as a brilliantly engaging plot device. In the drama and opera of the eighteenth century, in fact, the motif became a literal classic through the successes of both Beaumarchais's play Le mariage du Figaro (1775—1778) and the opera Le none di Figaro, which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in 1786 to an Italian libretto adapted from the Beaumarchais original by the inimitably witty Italian Lorenzo da Ponte. These two works, probably the apogee of the jus primae noctis theme, are merely the best known.

  It is no coincidence that the best-known dramas featuring the jus primae noctis date from the late eighteenth century. The rising tide of anti-aristocratic and anti-imperial sentiment in Enlightenment France all but demanded it. To invoke the jus primae noctis was to invoke a recollection of every unrighteous imposition or abuse from above, no matter how small. As a rallying cry it was hugely effective. Almost any hardworking but impoverished paysan could imagine himself a defenseless virgin whose only personal treasure had ruthlessly been taken by some greedy aristocrat, and so the myth of the jus primae noctis fanned the flames of revolution. In historical fact, however, the "lord's first night" never existed save in the minds of those who believed it did.

  *It should be noted that we know that the sexual consummation of these marriages was sometimes but not always postponed for several years due to the youth of the brides. For example, although Edmund Plantagenet, second son of Henry III of England, was married to the ten-year-old Aveline de Forz at Westminster Abbey in 1269, the marriage was not consummated until 1273, when the groom was a robust twenty-eight and the bride had finally turned fourteen.

  *The nature of the relationship between the author of the document and Jesus himself has been the subject of long controversy. Explanations that allow for the existence of Jesus's brothers and sisters, mentioned in the Bible, but that also allow for Mary's perpetual virginity have been many and varied.

  CHAPTER 10

  To Go Where No Man

  Has Gone Before

  The "Flos Virginis," so much coveted by the Europeans, is never valued by these savages.

&
nbsp; —John Lawson

  IN THE NATURAL COURSE of events the Queen is of an age where she should in reason and as is woman's way, be eager to marry and be provided for," wrote Baron Pollweiler, a negotiator visiting the court of the twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. Pollweiler was in England attempting to broker a marriage agreement between Elizabeth and the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Charles of Austria. "The natural and necessary inference from all this is," he continued, "either that she has married secretly, or that she has already made up her mind to marry someone in England or out of it and . . . is postponing matters under the cloak of Your Imperial Majesty's son, my gracious master. For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable."

  For all intents and purposes, the Baron was right. In a country whose monasteries and convents had been abolished by Elizabeth's father Henry VIII in 1539, and in which she herself had firmly reestablished Protestantism as the state religion, it was indeed inconceivable that a woman should wish never to marry. Yet, as we know, Elizabeth remained unmarried to the end. By dint of savvy political maneuvering, a blend of sincere and Machiavellian religiosity, and simply being beyond the reach of too much secular or religious strong-arming, she reigned for forty-five years as that most inconceivable thing—a public, powerful, and thoroughly secular virgin.

  Despite the legion biographies, films, and fictions about her, the docu-mentable facts of Elizabeth's anomalous life make her a difficult subject for the historian of virginity. We do not know and cannot say, for example, whether she was "really" a virgin in the sense of never having sexual relations with any partner at any time. There were as many rumors that she was in some way physically deformed and unable to engage in intercourse as there were that she had borne bastards by her longtime confidant Robert Dudley, Master of the Queen's Horse and later Earl of Leicester. No evidence of any of this has been found; indeed there is no documentary evidence of her sexual existence at all. What there is to work with is her enormous and often self-conscious legacy. It is more than slightly ironic that, despite the gallons of ink that have been spilled on the subject, what is known about the virginity of the Virgin Queen is little more than what she herself said in 1559: "in the end this shalbe for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a Queene, having reygned such a time, lyved and dyed a virgin."