The church, however, felt that maidens should hold on to that virginity even longer–like forever! The church explained to young girls that donating their dowries to the church coffers and taking the vows to become a nun, thus committing to lifelong virginity, was the ideal way to guarantee passage into Heaven. In this scenario, the father of the new nun has paid the same amount to the church as he would have to a husband, but he does not get an alliance, land, or power in exchange. And he doesn’t even get grandchildren. As much as the clergy tried to spin this scenario as the best option for young girls, many families disagreed.
This debate boiled down to one question: is virginity a consumable commodity that is meant to be spent or a treasure meant to be kept safe and unharmed both on earth and into the heavenly afterlife?
This same either/or pigeon-holing concerning virginity extended to medieval women in general. A woman was viewed as either a virgin or a whore, with little or no gray area in-between. The extreme polarized view, of course, was not representational of the average medieval woman who was a faithful wife and mother — clearly not a whore, but also not a virgin. We should note that this same sort of dichotomy did not exist for medieval men, who were not nearly as interested in the sexual escapades of other men as they were with women. Indeed, women personified the very polarization that was so problematic in the Middle Ages. Women were at the opposite end of the spectrum from men, and that end was lower, weaker, and misogynistic. Women are not men, which means they are considered as inferior and, somehow, unnatural. Yet men need women, for without them, the human race dies out. So, does the power to give life elevate women to the same status as men? To answer yes would have shook the very foundation of medieval life! That would totally rock their world! With a few notable exceptions, women in medieval literature were stereotyped by the virgin-whore poles, as either saintly nuns who could resist sexual temptation, or as whores who would seduce men into joining them in immoral lust. These literary role models only served to reinforce the misogynistic stereotypes.
Now, let us add to the debate the side-effect of having sex: children. People of the Middle Ages witnessed the depletion of cities and villages due to the Great Plagues that rolled through Europe, killing nearly a third of the population. Human extinction was on the thoughts of the survivors and the best way to repopulate a land is to start popping out babies. Ah, but here is the catch: should we continue to tell people that sex is immoral while at the same time encouraging more sex for procreation? That is a dilemma…
We also see this tendency to polarize impacting the medieval view of the vagina itself. On one hand, it is an object of depraved carnal yearning and desire. But on the other hand, the vagina is the beautiful, magical, life-giving organ. Polarizing virginity, polarizing sex, polarizing women, polarizing vagina. Clearly, we need to peer more closely at the tiny sliver of gray area between the poles.
Medieval Virginity Testing: Don’t Bother to Study
A unique feature of the vagina is that it comes hermetically sealed. For centuries, that seal–the hymen–has been the traditional marker of virginity. An intact hymen, or virgo intacta, makes it quite convenient for the dominant male factions of society (the clergy, the courts, the crown, dads, and future husbands), who are the ones who have assigned a high moral and monetary value to virginity, to determine its presence. Comparatively, male virginity has a low market value, perhaps because there is no tangible entanglement that could arise from a promiscuous penis. Or perhaps it is because the penis bears no physical signs of its philandering. Not so the vagina. A broken hymen betrays the vagina, proving to the world (or whoever looks) that the magical seal has been forever broken; that its contents have been tampered with and soiled.
Before we look at the various types of medieval virginity tests — and ways in which crafty women cheated on these tests — it is important to re-emphasize the reasons why virginity testing was necessary in the Middle Ages. While we would love to explain that medieval men were only concerned with the virtues and purities of their ladies for morality’s sake, it paints a distorted picture in which the men are noble and protective when, in fact, their motivation for administering virginity tests was, for the most part, purely selfish. Simply put, they wanted to know that their babies were legit. Remember, no paternity testing equals no way to find out who the baby daddy is.
Truly, the best solution was for a man to marry a virgin so he knows without a doubt that he has boldly gone where no man has gone before. And since women are pretty darn good actresses in bed, a bridegroom couldn’t count on blushing awkwardness as proof of virginity, therefore more concrete means of establishing virginity grew out of necessity.
The obvious way to check a woman’s virginity status was to inspect the hymen. While this was commonplace, it was not foolproof. Some women are born without hymens. Others rupture theirs prematurely doing a strenuous activity, like riding a horse or doing manual labor, daily doings for the majority of medieval maidens. Other times, like the damsel in the ditty that we used to open this chapter, women had to fake their hymen inspections to feign virginity. Hers is a rather crazy, yet true, story. (Seriously, we can’t make this stuff up.)
Lady Frances Howard was her name. When she was just 14, her parents married her off to a 13-year old boy, Robert Devereux, third earl of Essex, who, shortly after the wedding, was sent on an extended tour of the continent. It was customary for upper class families to force their youngsters into arranged marriages as a way to unite the families for political and economic gain. And to show that the parents were not total perverts, they kept the newlyweds away from each other until they were deemed “old enough” to have sex. The problem Lady Frances had was, by the time her pre-pubescent husband returned from his trip in 1609, she had fallen in love with someone else.
Lady Frances didn’t just pine from afar; she acted on her feelings and carried on a secret sexual affair with Robert Carr, the first earl of Somerset. So when the first husband inconveniently returned, Lady Frances was cold, badgering, and mean towards him. She most likely thought that he would ignore her and take his own lover, leaving her free to carry on her carrying on.
Apparently, he didn’t take the hint, because soon Lady Frances appealed to the courts for an annulment, claiming that the marriage was never consummated. The good, scandal-loving people of the court closely followed the details of this case and sensationalized the key players, chiefly Lady Frances. At one point during the annulment proceedings, Lady Frances lamented that, despite all her attempts to be compliant to her husband, she was, alas, still a virgin. She tried, she claimed, to satisfy her husband and fulfill her wifely duty, but, she also claimed, the Earl of Essex simply couldn’t get the job done. A virginity test was ordered to see if Lady Frances’s first claim was true.