Borderline Virginities: Sacred and Secular Virginities in Late Antiquity by Sissel Undheim (review)

• Autores: Amy Brown
• Localización: Journal of early Christian studies: Journal of the North American Patristic Society, ISSN 1067-6341, Nº. 1, 2019, págs. 154-156
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Undheim also demonstrates how the early fathers were invested in distinguishing Christian virgins (those who freely chose lifelong virginity and exhibited true chastity) from Vestal virgins (typed as a paltry few women forced into temporary service who failed to exhibit true chastity) and traces how these skewed rhetorical descriptions became part of the theoretical architecture for distinguishing Christian and Vestal virgins in modern scholarship. According to Undheim, the polemical championing of the supposed permanence, numbers, and agency of Christian virgins that was part of later religious debates, especially during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, assumes a false dichotomy: "The Christian virgins should thus not be understood as some kind of cryptopagan imitation of the Vestals, no more than the Vestals were a prefiguration of Christian virgins" (85). Undheim's excellent book represents the fruit of the "cultural turn" in late antique studies, drawing upon a wide variety of theoretical approaches that attempt to cross the "ditch between representation and 'reality,' by focusing on ideology and social constructions as well as the importance of the textuality and literary character of the historians' sources" (35).