A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (review)

In this book Mary Foskett reviews the multiple meanings and functions of virginity, partheneia, relevant to the narratives of Mary in Luke-Acts and the Protevangelium of James. She does so by contextualizing Mary's virginity in Greek, Roman, and Judaic concepts of virginity as seen in selected literary texts and sociohistorical/religious practice. Foskett begins by focusing on the ambiguity inherent in the ancient Greek word partheneia, which is usually translated as "virginity." She rightly notes that a parthenos can mean both a virgin, that is, a female who has had no sexual penetration, and a young girl of marriageable or near-marriageable age. Most narratives that focus on a parthenos, as Foskett notes, relying on classical scholarship, are interested not in her age but in her sexual status, but the word retains an ambiguity that the later Marian narratives exploit. The book seeks to enrich readers' experiences of narratives about Mary's virginity by bringing out "meaning in multiplicity" on the subject (164).

Foskett draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches to literature, including aspects of reader-response, intertextuality, narratology, and New Historicism. In her first chapter, "Which Virgin? What Virginity?" she notes that her three major goals are to focus on "the multivalence of partheneia in literature of the first- and second-century Mediterranean world"; "the ambivalence of ancient narrative representations of partheneia"; and the "identification of images of partheneia that are relevant to Mary in Luke-Acts and the Protevangelium": the "concern of this project is not the historical Mary, but rather the literary figure who emerges from these early Christian texts" (4). This chapter reviews some of the aspects of Mary's virginity in Foskett's chosen narratives and prepares for the next two chapters, which review nonbiblical ancient narratives that focus on female virginity.

Chapter 2, "Bodies and Selves," reviews Greek, Roman, and Jewish concepts of virginity. Foskett provides a good overview of relevant current classical scholarship on Greco-Roman sexuality and virginity, including medical theories of female anatomy and health problems or issues of virginity. Foskett correctly identifies the parthenos as "both a liminal subject and a liminal body" (29) but does not note the strict order of progression for Greek girls from child to parthenos to bride (nymph) and thence to woman (gyn) and mother; the immediate conversion of parthenos to nymph (married woman without children) marks the state of partheneia as concerned more with virginity than with youth.

Foskett gives a good review of the Roman rhetorical treatments of hypothetical problems of female chastity that were part of legal training (for example, how to evaluate the chastity of a woman kidnapped by pirates, even if she has managed to escape sexual molestation) and thus nicely demonstrates that virginity is more than mere lack of sexual contact but requires a kind of personal purity as well. The relationship of virginity and chastity to female prophecy is briefly discussed, with the conclusion that prophecy and sexual activity are seen as analogous; hence, only nonsexual women (either virgins like the Vestals or postsexual women like the Pythia) could act as prophetic vessels for the gods.

More reading in primary texts from Greece and Rome would have strengthened this chapter, which seems less aware than it should be of virginity's primary function in pagan antiquity, namely, its assurance that a man is raising his own child rather than somebody else's (a concern seen as far back as Homer's Odyssey, which regularly seeks to assure Telemachus and Odysseus that Penelope has been faithful). In antiquity female virginity is a commodity to be exchanged between a father and a prospective husband; even the hint of damage to it can have significant social and legal consequences for both girl and seducer or rapist. Catullus's poem 62, a wedding hymn that represents standard wedding songs, articulates this view of female virginity as a property belonging more to others than to the young woman...