So, how do you test a Vestal’s virginity? Well, some praying is involved. The priestesses were believed to have a special connection with the gods, so when the Vestal Tuccia was accused, she was given the opportunity to conjure a miracle and prove she was still a virgin. According to Valerius Maximus, Tuccia proved her virginity by carrying water in a sieve. Tuccia called out, ‘O Vesta, if I have always brought pure hands to your secret services, make it so now that with this sieve I shall be able to draw water from the Tiber and bring it to Your temple.’{10} The sieve has since become a symbol of virginity and Queen Elizabeth I was often painted holding one to symbolise that no one had taken a bite of her cherry bun. But if you did not happen to have a sieve to hand there were other virginity tests available to you – as long as you had a snake, some ants and a cake. The Roman writer Aelian (AD 175–235) describes a ritual for testing virginity that took place on holy days:
In a grove is a vast deep cavern, the lair of a snake. On fixed holy days maidens bring barley cakes in their hands, their eyes bandaged. Divine inspiration guides them straight to the serpent at a gentle pace without stumbling. If they are virgin, the snake divines the answer and accepts the food, if not, it remains untasted. Ants break up the cakes of the deflowered and carry the pieces outside the grove and thus cleanse the spot. The people get to know of the results and the girls are examined and the one who shamed her virginity is punished.{11}
Quite what this ‘punishment’ was is not elaborated upon, and given that snakes are not widely known for their love of Battenberg, this test seems rather unfair.
But to really confirm the seal had not been broken, you needed a bottle of wee. The thirteenth-century text De Secretis Mulierum explains that the urine of virgins is ‘clear and lucid, sometimes white, sometimes sparkling’. The reason that ‘corrupted women’ have ‘muddy urine’ is because of the ‘rupture’ of skin and ‘male sperm appear on the bottom’.{12} Pissing Perrier is a neat party trick, but there are other signs to look for. William of Saliceto (1210–1277) wrote that ‘a virgin urinates with a more subtle hiss’, and if you had a stopwatch handy, it ‘indeed takes longer than a small boy’.{13}
Medieval virginity tests are quite urine-focused, and fifteenth-century Italian physician Niccolo Falcucci was also a piss prophet, but he had a few other tricks up his sleeve.
If a woman is covered with a piece of cloth and fumigated with the best coal, if she is a virgin she does not perceive its odor through her mouth and nose; if she smells it, she is not a virgin. If she takes it in a drink, she immediately voids urine if she is not a virgin. A corrupt woman will also urinate immediately if a fumigation is prepared with cockle. Upon fumigation with dock flowers, if she is a virgin she immediately becomes pale, and, if not, her humor falls on the fire and other things are said about her.{14}
The anonymous, thirteenth-century Hebrew text Book of Women’s Love says, ‘The girl must urinate over marshmallows in the evening, and bring them in the morning; if they are still fresh she is modest and good, if not she is not.’{15} Before you start pissing into a bag of flumps, the marshmallow referred to here is a medicinal plant.
But perhaps you are struggling to inspect, listen to or time your intended’s waterworks. In which case, you will need to study her general appearance for the tell-tale clues that her flower has been plucked. Before explaining that a virgin’s piss sparkles, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum explains what to look out for. ‘The signs of chastity are as follows: shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men and the acts of men.’ (FYI, these are also signs she ordered and ate the Pizza Hut family feast on her own and is praying you don’t find the evidence in the bin.) Magnus continues:
If a girl’s breasts point downwards, this is a sign that she has been corrupted, because at the moment of impregnation the menses move upwards to the breasts and the added weight causes them to sag. If a man has sexual intercourse with a woman and experiences no sore on his penis and no difficulty of entry, this is a sign that she was first corrupted. However, a true sign of the woman’s virginity is if it is difficult to perform the act and it causes a sore on his member.{16}
Of course, once the hymen became the go-to virginity test, checking for sparkling wee that whistled, perky boobs and the ability to smell coal without wetting oneself largely fell out of favour. Virginity testing became all about tightness and blood.
Producing bloodied bedsheets as proof of a wife’s virginity does still occur around the world today, although it’s rare. In certain regions of Georgia, brides have a ‘Yenge’, usually an older family member, who will instruct her in what to expect on her wedding night. Traditionally, it was the Yenge’s responsibility to take the bloodied sheets from the marital bed and show them to both families to ‘prove’ the bride was a nookie newbie. Although the Yenge’s role is largely ceremonial today, in some areas the practice of showing bloodied sheets still goes on.{17}
The bloody sheet test also has a long pedigree. It is found in the Bible, old medieval romances, and it’s even said that Catharine of Aragon was able to produce blood-stained sheets to prove she married Henry VIII as a virgin.{18} Of course, as long as people have subscribed to this deeply flawed test, there have been ways of faking it. Given what was at stake should the gift of a bride’s virginity be unwrapped by someone else before the ‘I dos’, you can understand why a girl might tell a fanny fib on her wedding night, and for as long as medical texts have been telling us how to prove virginity, they’ve also been giving advice on how to restore it. The Trotula is the name given to three twelfth-century Italian texts on women’s health. At least one of the three was authored by a woman, Trota of Salerno, who practised medicine in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno. The Trotula has this exceptionally devious advice for a girl whose cherry is on the blink:
This remedy will be needed by any girl who has been induced to open her legs and lose her virginity by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises… When it is time for her to marry, to keep the man from knowing, the false virgin will carefully deceive the husband as follows. Let her take ground sugar, the white of an egg, and alum and mix them in rainwater in which pennyroyal and calamint have been boiled down with other similar herbs. Soaking a soft and porous cloth in this solution, let her keep bathing her private parts with it.
But the best of all is this deception: the day before her marriage, let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man.{19}