When Aldhelm of Malmsebury wrote De Virginitate to the nuns at the Barking Abbey, he exhorted the sisters to keep their virginity as a means of gaining virtue. In order to persuade and encourage his audience, he set up examples of Virgin Mary and famous saints as models of preserved virtue for the devotees to imitate.

The first half of the text addresses the importance of virginity and how to pursue it. Aldhelm suggests that his readers be as athletes as they “[fought] with muscular energy against the horrendous monster of Pride”¹ which made it difficult for them to pursue the humility to “chastise [their] body and bring it into subjection.”² Aldhelm stresses the importance of virginity as a key part of one’s status in the Church. As he develops further in De Virginitate, he made it clear that being a virgin was a woman’s best hope in gaining virtue. 

The second half of the tract was addressed to the devotees at Barking. Aldhelm began with a list of male figures from Christian literature, such as Daniel and Jeremiah, as well as early Church fathers, including Athanasius or Ambrose. Since Barking Abbey was a double-monastery, which meant that men and women both inhabited the monastery under the care and supervision of an abbess, the monks would also have received instruction from Aldhelm’s work. In short, De Virginitate was likely consumed and received by a mixed-gendered audience.

Aldhelm then introduced a list of model women. He alluded to the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity. He described her position in heaven as the mother of heavenly souls and the Bride of Christ. Since Mary was understood to be the fount of the Church,³ Aldhelm set up the Virgin Mary as an exemplar for the nuns to imitate in order to accomplish virtue. Around this period of time, the nun’s vow of celibacy took shape as a type of marriage with Christ, so that the nun would become the Bride of Christ.

Once Aldhelm set up the image of the ideal virgin in the text, he listed famous women martyrs who fulfilled those parameters. He listed Agatha, who died through the fires of Mt. Etna rather than give up her innocence and faith.⁴ He referenced Lucia, who preferred to remain chaste but was killed by a frustrated suitor.⁵ He included Eugenia, who disguised herself as a man in order to join a monastery.⁶ He referred to Agnes, Scholastica, Thecla, Eulalia. Aldhelm emphasized a common strain among the women: intact virginity was a sign of highest virtue, and it was definitely worth dying over.

But how did Aldhelm define virginity? How did he define “intactness”? How would the women readers at Barking Abbey have received this treatise (letter, rant, manifesto, proto-podcast…)?

Just as early medieval English double-monasteries included both men and women, the women who entered religious life at this time were not always single. In fact, many of the most prominent women of these early convents and double-monasteries had lived out secular lives before they entered monasticism. Queen Ethelburga (Æthelburh) of Kent founded Barking Abbey after the death of her husband, King Edwin of Kent. Ethelburga had several children, including Eanfled, who later moved to Whitby after her own marriage and the birth of her children. Famously, Etheldreda (Æthelthryth) was married twice, but since she never consummated her marriages, she was deemed a virgin; she took a vow of chastity and founded Ely Abbey. Therefore, these early religious institutions frequently became the new home of mothers, widows, and the previously married. 

To his wide and variety audience, Aldhelm not only defines virginity, but he also places it within a hierarchy:

Moreover the catholic Church accepts a three-fold distinction of the human race, which increases orthodox faith as it is described by an narrative in a certain volume, how “virginity,” “chastity,” and “conjugality” differ the one from the other in three ranks; which, as they are each in turn isolated by the triple quality of different life-styles, so they are separated on three levels by the different order of their merits––with the angel distinguishing (them) in turn in this manner: so that virginity is gold, chastity silver, conjugality bronze; that virginity is riches, chastity an average income, conjugality poverty; that virginity is freedom, chastity ransom, conjugality captivity; . . . From the evidence of this distinction, it is permissible to deduce or conjecture what virginity is, which unharmed by any carnal defilement continues pure out of spontaneous desire for celibacy; (and) chastity on the other hand which, having been assigned to marital contracts, has scorned the commerce of matrimony for the sake of the heavenly kingdom; or the conjugality which, for propagating the progeny and the for the sake of procreating children, is bound by the legal ties of marriage. To these three levels of rank, therefore, into which the flourishing multitude of believes in the catholic Church is divided, the gospel parable has promised hundred-fold, sixty-fold and thirty-fold fruit according to the outlay of their merits, . . . ”⁷

---

---

Aldhelm therefore indicated that the highest form of being, at least in a virtuous sense, was virginal, which he defined as being “unharmed by any carnal defilement.” His definition had a strong focus on physical intactness. While Aldhelm tried to nuance his argument at the very end of his work by stating that defiled corporeal virginity “is not lost provided that the sanctity of the soul remains,” for which he seemed to gesture towards non-consensual activity.⁸ However, he previously listed Agnes, who vowed celibacy but was thrown into a brothel by an angry suitor; just as her virginal safety was threatened, the suitor was killed through heavenly intervention so that Agnes remained intact.⁹ That is to say, while Aldhelm appeared to indicate that a pure soul can recover her virtue, the overall effect of his work indicates that a woman’s inviolate physical purity is paramount.

Secondly, Aldhelm placed chastity, which he colorfully described as “an average income,”¹⁰ as second in the hierarchy. He accorded this position to those women who were married but had separated from their spouses for the express purpose of entering a convent. As above, Etheldreda (Æthelthryth) separated from her husband, with the support of Wilfrid, so that she could enter a convent. In this case, Etheldreda would technically be described as “chaste,” though later authors such as Bede would rely upon her intactness as a point of her virtue. Therefore, according to Aldhelm, for women who had partaken in the marriage bed, a vow of celibacy did not absolve them completely of their defilement. 

Finally, Aldhelm addressed the state of women who were currently married and bearing children. He placed the position of “conjugality” in the lowest position. While Adlhelm had shown a preference for those who adhered to regular monastic discipline rather than a personal devotion,¹¹ the most influential factor relied on a woman’s physical intactness. As above, Aldhelm characterized women who had taken a vow of chastity as second in the hierarchy of virtue. However, while these women had previously been married, they had created a distance between that point to where they were now. Thus, if chaste women were following Adlhelm’s instruction for humility and self-subjugation, they were working their way toward purity. While that carnal event occurred in the past, it was dimmed in Aldhelm’s memory because they listened to his program.¹²

This opportunity was not so with women who were still married and bearing children. According to De Virginitate, the intense physicality of the marital bed and labour stained the purity of women. Before marriage, they were perfect virgins, like gold. After the sex of marriage and giving birth, they were like bronze. That is, Aldhlem did not say that these women particularly did anything that we would call bad. Rather, his intense focus on a woman’s physical intactness was the most important factor in whether they were virtuous.

Aldhelm was of course writing to both men and women when he addressed Barking Abbey. Therefore, both men and women would have received his ideas. We know that the women in his audience were very clever and literate, since he remarked in the address of De Virginitate that he admired the “extremely rich verbal eloquence” of their letters.¹³ However, by the ninth century in England, communities of women begin to lose some of that educational luster.¹⁴ In fact, relatively few works by women authors are preserved from this period of time compared to their male counterparts. While the works written by men in this period are varied in genre, the many ecclesiastic texts by them tend to place an increasing focus on a woman’s virginity as a sign of her virtue. While it would be very difficult to prove that every following male author was familiar with Aldhelm’s work, the general medieval milieu placed an escalating pressure on women’s bodies as the locus of virtue, while de-emphasizing the education of women’s minds.

While it’s sometimes chancy to cast back to medieval literature to draw connections between the past and the present, I do wonder how significant works on virginity affected modern discourses on gender. In particular, I am contemplating how entrenched and mangled society’s obsession with virginity can be. Internet dude-bros make viral podcasts about “body counts,” while in many places child-marriage is still troublingly legal. The original source of this fascination is likely far more ancient than Aldhelm. 

However, after reading through De Virginitate, I must say that virginity––or the need that women be physically “intact” to be value-able––may just be a concept that some dead guy, long ago, invented.

---

---

1. Aldhelm, Aldhelm: The Prose Works. Ed. Lapidge and Herren. D.S. Brewer, 1979. pp. 68. ↩︎
2. Aldhelm, pp. 73. ↩︎
3. Pseudo-Athanasius, “Chapters 80-8,” De Virginitate, Complete Text (MS A and B). Translated by David Brakke. Scriptores Syri. Tomus 223. 2002.  ↩︎
4. Aldhelm, 107-108. ↩︎
5. Aldhelm, 108-109. ↩︎
6. Aldhelm, 110-111. ↩︎
7. Aldhelm, 75. ↩︎
8. Aldhelm, 129. ↩︎
9. Aldhelm, 111-112. ↩︎
10. In this economy? ↩︎
11. The issue of following a regular monastic discipline versus a devoted but secular life is a very complicated one and too difficult to fully explore in this post. ↩︎
12. Which you too can receive for only four payments of $35.99! ↩︎
13. Aldhelm, 59. For Aldhlem to remark that another author is eloquent is a high compliment, since his hermeneutic Latin style is known for being complicated and difficult to decipher. ↩︎
14. The reasons behind the loss of education in England are deeply complicated and still mysterious. The Northumbrian Golden Age resulted in the rapid institutionalization of monastic communities, knowledge sharing, and the production of ornate manuscripts. However, the Viking Age brought raids to monastic communities in the ninth century, though it is unclear if the effects of this violence were the main cause for the reduction in women’s learning. ↩︎