Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Elizabeth's odd-woman-out example does, however, shed some useful light on what the culture of Western virginity was like from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: a tumultuous time, rife with discovery and reform. Recall that Vesalius had only finally isolated the hymen in the mid—sixteenth century, and scientific approaches to virginity were undergoing a general renovation. In the realm of religion, Reformationists and Counterreformationists, with Protestant and Catholic versions of sexual law, grappled for the minds and bodies of believers. Even the globe was changing, as explorers traversed the world and discovered "virgin" continents where the maps had formerly said "here there be dragons." Those engaged with the iconography, the ideology, and the physical reality of virginity were all alike obliged to go where no one had gone before.

  Perhaps more than any other single force, Protestantism had changed the face of virginity in Europe. Putting marriage first and abandoning monasticism and celibate clergy, Protestantism flipped the Roman Catholic Church's emphasis on virginity neatly on its head. Where Roman Catholic doctrine had stated that virgins received 100 percent of heaven's rewards, while the married could expect only 30, Protestant theology set forth the principle that all godly believers would partake equally in heaven regardless of their sexual or marital status. Martin Luther was particularly vociferous on the subject of marriage, pointing out that neither lifelong virginity nor clerical celibacy was called for in the Bible, claiming that few people were naturally inclined toward either one, and contending that the result of requiring celibacy of people who were not inherently given to it was to encourage illicit sexual relations. Even the Pope, Luther claimed, had "as many concubines as Solomon." Himself a former Augustinian monk married to a former nun, Katharina von Bora, and the father of six children, Luther practiced what he preached when it came to placing a high priority on marriage and family.

  Protestant enthusiasm for marriage and family was contagious among all Christian rank and file,' including Catholics, the lion's share of whom were, of course, married. Unsurprisingly, this met with stern disapproval from Rome. As part of the Council of Trent (1545—1563), the Roman Catholic Church's Counterreformation assembly called in response to the emergence of Protestantism, the Church issued the treatise De sancti matrimonii. De sancti matrimonii stood as the central Catholic document on marriage and sexuality until the Vatican II assembly of the mid—twentieth century. Among its other doctrinal points, it threatened with excommunication any Catholic who claimed, a la Luther, Calvin, and other Protestant thinkers, the heresy that marriage was preferable to virginity.

  In the Council of Trent's reminder of virginity's supremacy we see a Christian laity whose world view had been thoroughly scrambled by the sudden appearance of Protestantism, and a Catholic establishment that was struggling to cope with the blow. It is difficult, from our vantage point in a world where Protestant denominations are as numerous as ice cream flavors, to empathize with the degree to which the Reformation transformed Christianity. With a nod to the preceding chapter, however, it may help to consider the nature and the magnitude of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, at least in regard to virginity.

  The Fall of the Sacred Virgin

  Protestantism had no place for consecrated virginity and thus no place for nuns or convents. Some priests, monks, and nuns abandoned their positions, their celibacy, and their Catholicism as Protestantism gained presence and power, but neither Luther nor his early followers had anything close to the clout it required to actually close down monasteries or convents. Some later closed their doors due to attrition or the Protestantization of the territory in which they stood, and the presence of nuns and convents shrank dramatically in the parts of Europe that became majority Protestant. Only in England, where Henry VIII single-handedly forced the conversion of the entire country to an Anglican church not beholden to Rome, were monastic institutions abolished outright.

  But even in places where convents still stood, and in some cases even before Luther posted his ninety-five theses in 1517, various reform-minded Catholics had already begun to embrace marriage. In some ways this was the result of economic and social change more than religious reform. As feudal and manorial arrangements declined, individual wage-earning, goods-producing households became the new lowest common denominator of the burgeoning new capitalist cash economy. With nonaristocratic families gaining visibility as self-supporting entities, marriage among non-nobles started to have economic meaning that it had not possessed under intensive feudal or manorial systems. Marriage and reproduction gradually became as tightly yoked to the economic, social, and political interests of the non-noble family as they had always been for the dynastic clans of the nobility.

  As economic autonomy became strongly linked to marriage, it led to a new way of conceptualizing the family and household. In Protestant and particularly Calvinist circles, the married household came to be seen as a closed system, each family replicating within its own members the kind of relationship that existed between governor and countrymen, a microcosmic version of the larger "family" of the secular state with the paterfamilias as ruler. By 1622 William Gouge, minister of Blackfriars Church, London, could write in his Of Domesdcall Duties that "A familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth, at least a lively representation thereof, whereby triall may be made of such as are fit for any place of authoritie, or of subjection in Church or commonwealth. Or rather it is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth." This pocket-sized vision of society positioned marriage as a vital tool that produced and trained men and women who would be fit to participate in the modern, secular state.

  What this meant to virginity was that it became, almost by definition, brief and transitional. In the Protestant mind, there was no place for the convent, nor for any behavior that smacked of it. The cultural category of the spinster or old maid became prominent in English culture around this time, for there was no longer a functional niche in the society for women who either did not wish to marry or could not find husbands. Indeed, the assumption in regard to women was that, as a 1632 pamphlet entitled The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights put it, "all of them are understood either married or to be married."

  Just as it was considered "natural" for women to marry and have children, it was considered "natural" that they be virgins before they did. Virginity was a brief moment through which women passed on their way from being children to being wives. This naturalizing and trivializing of virginity had the effect of homogenizing the various forms of female chastity, as demonstrated in these lines from Diana Primrose's 1630 A Chaine of Pearle, Or, A Memoriall of the peerles Graces, and heroick Venues of Queene Eliiabeth, of Glorious Memory:

  For whether it be termed Virginall

  In virgins, or in Wives stil'd Conjugall,

  Or viduall in Widdowes, God respects

  All equally, and all a-like affects.

  This scrap of verse serves as an eloquent summary of the fall of virginity in Protestant Europe. If all forms of chastity are equal in God's eyes, then there was no reason to draw distinctions between them. The virginity a woman took to the altar was of a piece with the monogamy she was expected to embody after she left it. Virginity itself, to the Protestant mind-set, no longer signified anything particularly special. It was something that could be expected of any reasonable, respectable unmarried woman. This way of thinking, argues literary historian Theodora Jankowski, created a subtle but important association: while chastity was a virtue of which a Protestant could be proud, the word "virginity" acquired specifically Catholic overtones.

  Probably the single most striking way in which the Catholic mode of virginity was effaced from Protestantism was in regard to the praise and veneration of the Virgin Mary. While no Protestant ever denied Mary's virginity or that it was perpetual, all of them agreed that the way she was worshipped within Catholicism was not what they
felt was appropriate for Christians. The Protestant Mary is no longer the quasi-goddess intercessor who reigns as queen of heaven, but instead a wholly human woman who happened to have had the honor of being Jesus' mother. The demotion was tangible: icons and statues of Mary do not exist in Protestant houses of worship in the way that they do in Catholic churches, nor are there Protestant equivalents of anthems like the Catholic Salve Regina or Sub Tuum Praesidium specifically praising Mary above all other women. Protestant insistence on the authority of scripture, and not the accumulated centuries of extracanonical literature, removed all but the essentials of Mary's identity.

  The Virgin Mary's demotion within Protestantism led to some dramatic and curious historical moments. During the systematic restoration of Anglicanism that attended Elizabeth I's early reign (she had had to reinstitute it following her half-sister Mary's abortive attempt to restore Catholicism), among the striking anti-Catholic measures taken by the state were search-and-destroy missions aimed at finding and eradicating icons and statues of the Virgin Mary. Various scholars, including the incisive Helen Hackett, have looked at these anti-Marian campaigns as being part of a complex rearrangement of virginal power. It is difficult not to see the destruction of icons and statues of Mary as a way of destroying the old Catholic virgin so that she could be replaced with a new Protestant model—the queen herself.

  The Making of the Virgin Queen

  Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was never literally compared to the Virgin Mary during her lifetime. It would have been sacrilegious from the scripture-centered Anglican viewpoint. Also, it would not have made sense from the perspective of the Virgin Mary's role within the Gospels: according to the terms of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of 1563, the bearer of the crown also stood as head of the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine a role less congruent with the Virgin Mary's timeless and much-vaunted passivity to God's will than running a nation and a state religion. Nonetheless, Elizabeth's reign was nothing if not a lengthy process of creating a virginal persona that has proven to be very nearly on a par, in terms of its iconic popularity, with the Virgin Mary's own.

  How much of this was deliberate, and how much the coincidental accretion of attention that accompanies a long-reigning and beloved monarch, is hard to say. Elizabeth's savvy in regard to managing and manipulating public opinion was substantial. She spent lavishly on gowns, jewels, portraits, and royal progresses, whistle-stop horseback tours of her domain that let her see and be seen. Her skill with rhetoric, both visual and verbal, was undisputed, as in the legendary speech delivered to her troops on the eve of the Spanish Armada. The queen, dressed in an Athenalike white gown and silver breastplate, told her men, "I have the body of a weak, feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king—and of a King of England too."

  Elizabeth's kingly attitude toward her role as ruler played a significant part in her controversial, wily virginity. Twenty-five years old when she was crowned, Elizabeth had already declared a preference for virginity, having asked for permission to remain unmarried during the time that her younger half-brother, Edward VI, briefly occupied the throne. She had reiterated her desire "to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best lyked me or pleased me" again, during the period when her half-sister Mary was queen, when several continental potentates made offers of marriage to the young princess. But what had been acceptable, if eccentric, behavior coming from a third-place princess whose (hypothetical) children might constitute potential competitors for any children her half-siblings had became unthinkable once Elizabeth was queen.

  The third and last of Henry VIII's children to be crowned, Elizabeth was, in light of her brother and sister's ultimate failure to leave any heirs, also the last Tudor standing. Elizabeth could either marry and have children or let the Tudor line die with her. Domestic and international politics added to the marriage pressure. England was a small and isolated country in need of allies on the Continent, and the person next in line for the throne was the staunchly Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret. Mary had the backing of France and other powerful Catholic countries on the Continent (her son, James VI, ultimately succeeded Elizabeth upon her death in 1603). But the notion of another Catholic queen on the throne, particularly in the wake of Bloody Mary's gruesome persecutions during the Catholic interregnum, sat exceedingly poorly with English Protestants for whom those persecutions were a still-ragged wound. When Elizabeth's first Parliament convened in 1559, they lost little time in formally petitioning the queen to marry.

  Elizabeth responded with a statement on 10 February, in which she very carefully failed to refuse the prospect of marriage outright, but failed to welcome it either. The newly crowned queen said that if it pleased God to continue to maintain her in her sentiment that it was best she continue to remain unmarried, she would do so with pleasure. On the other hand, she said that she hoped that God would provide "in convenient tyme wherby the realme shal not remayne destitute of an heir that may be fitt to governe and peradyenture more beneficiall to the realm then such an offspring as may come of me." Leaving the whole issue in God's hands was the most politic way of refusing to say either yes or no.

  This was the first of two parliamentary petitions that exhorted Elizabeth to marry, and the first of three corresponding statements from the queen. Over the course of the two petitions and the three responses—1559, 1563, and 1569—we can trace a fascinating evolution in Elizabeth's apparent attitudes toward marriage. The brash young queen ducking the will of the Parliament in 1559 had become a bit wiser and cagier by the time her second Parliament issued a similar petition to the now thirty-year-old queen in 1563. Somewhat more forthcoming now, although having in the interim rejected the suits not only of her own subject (and probable love of her life) Robert Dudley, but also of some of the most powerful men in Europe, including Archduke Charles of Austria, King Erik XIV of Sweden, and even her own half-sister Mary's widower, Philip II of Spain,* Elizabeth appeared to take the question of an heir at least somewhat seriously.

  In the first of two responses to this petition, she reminded Parliament of the story of the biblical Elizabeth, whom God had blessed with a miraculous late-life pregnancy. Drawing the parallel between herself and her New Testament namesake, she told Parliament that she had heard and understood their request, even if she might appear to be waiting for divine intervention on the matter. The second response to this petition, in November 1566, shows further softening of Elizabeth's antimarriage stance. For the first time, the thirty-three-year-old queen avowed that she would marry as soon as she could conveniently do so, "yf God take not hym awaye with whom I mynde to marrye." Her reasons for wanting to do so were clear: "I hope to have chylderne, otheryse I wolde never marrie." But she was equally clear, and absolutely unabashed, about the fact that the people who most encouraged the marriage would be the first to declare their disapproval of anyone she chose as a husband. Furthermore, she revealed with arch disdain that there had been some who had told her that "they never requyred more then that theye myght ones here me saye I wold marrie," condemning such facile sentiments with a scathing "there was never so great a treason but myght be cov-eryde under as fayre a pretence."

  This was, perhaps, not so much genuine reconciliation to the idea of marriage as it was sheer strategy. Having eluded marriage as long as she had, there was little chance, barring some unprecedented unanimous agreement on the parts of Parliament and the Privy Council as to an appropriate choice of husband, that she would be required to marry. Elizabeth may also have felt that she could finally allow herself to verbally placate Parliament because her subjects were increasingly likely, for political reasons, to back her desire to remain unattached. The queen had many powerful friends among her subjects who treasured her deep commitment to Protestantism. Some of them had begun to realize that given the options available to her in terms of suitable husbands, a married queen might ironically be even less advantage
ous to the Protestant cause than a virgin queen without an heir.

  This was dramatically demonstrated during Elizabeth's last courtship. It would have been a most unusual pairing even by today's standards, let alone by those of the time: in 1579 Elizabeth was forty-six; the Duke of Alencon twenty-five. The intent was clearly political, since a marriage between Elizabeth and Alencon would have destroyed the looming potential of an anti-English alliance between France and Spain. But the English were having none of it. They had become accustomed to their spinster queen, had little love for the French, and, with Mary and Philip still very much in the collective memory, remained disinclined to entertain the idea of another marriage between any English queen and a foreigner. John Stubbs, an anti-Alencon writer whose tract Discoverie of a gaping Gulf where into England is like to be Swallowed by an other French manage appeared in September 1579, earned swift Royal retribution. For his temerity in questioning the queen's right to decide her own affairs, and not at all coincidentally for having been sufficiently impolitic to raise the question of Elizabeth's ability to bear a child in her forties, Stubbs and his publisher were both permanently relieved of their right hands.

  The rapidly abandoned Alengon courtship was the turning point for Elizabeth's career as virgin queen. Before it, there had been the lingering possibility, however slight, that she might at long last marry. After it, the idea was no longer seriously raised: Elizabeth was past the point where she could reasonably be assumed to be fertile. From that point on, writes Helen Hackett, "the Queen would be unequivocally celebrated as ever-virgin."