Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity by Michael Rosenberg (review)

This volume, many years in the making, sheds new light on ancient expectations concerning virginity and sex. What drives the book is not the question of how people in antiquity understood or sought evidence of virginity—though Rosenberg makes welcome contributions on these fronts too—but of how late ancient Jews and Christians fashioned ideals for masculine sexuality. The valuing of virginal "signs," such as blood on nuptial sheets, assigns men an aggressive role in heterosexual relations and valorizes vigorous penile-vaginal penetration that would draw blood. Rosenberg questions the common-sense quality of this disturbing paradigm and searches for signs of ancient alternatives.

It is impossible to find completely precise terminology for the topics discussed in this book. Rosenberg's choices of terms will not suit everyone, but they reflect attention to important distinctions. In order to avoid superimposing a vaginal hymen on discourse where hymens may not conceptually exist, he speaks of penetration causing genital "rupture," evidenced in bleeding or lacerations. "Physical" virginity is a capacious category encompassing absence of penetration, ideas about bodily purity, and physiological and anatomical proofs. Some texts unsettle reliance on bodily proofs by promoting "faith-based" standards, which include moral and spiritual aspects of virginity as well as divine or miraculous forms of proof. While these broad categories could be divided further, their contrast allows for an effective exploration of Rosenberg's key question: what do authors' views of female virginity and its signs imply about a male partner's role and ideal behaviors in first coitus?

In Chapter One, diverse examples of virginity tests reveal that most ancient societies relied not on bodily evidence but on other means, such as oaths and ordeals, for their (real, fictional, or hypothetical) virginity testing of women. Ancient Jews and Christians were not the only groups to associate virginity loss with bleeding and injury, but they were the only groups that turned this link into means of proof. According to Rosenberg's framework, Deuteronomy 22.13–21—with its procedure involving a garment, perhaps a blood-stained one, for verifying brides' premarital virginity—established a dominant, body-based model that subsequent Jews and Christians "would either affirm or subvert" (30). In Chapter Two, Rosenberg unfolds the ambiguity of meanings for virginity-related terms in biblical texts. Some passages cast virgins as desirable victims for violence by male penetrators. Chapter Three argues that several Second Temple and Rabbinic texts depart from the juridical procedure of Deuteronomy 22 without challenging the belief that female bodies provide evidence about virginity.

Chapters Four and Five examine texts that may offer a "countercurrent" to the Deuteronomic model, yet still do not fully overturn it (79). Such writings reject physical standards in favor of faith-based ones, or foreground physical measures but subtly undermine them in a central episode or dissenting Rabbinic view. Rosenberg groups Jewish and Christian texts within a common biblical heritage, emphasizing the possible shared cultural setting of texts like the Protevangelium of James and the Mishnah. He notes the ambivalence of the sources, arguing that despite discomfort with purely physical definitions, they perpetuate assumptions about virginity that leave traditional ideals for men's sexual behavior intact. For instance, the violence of first coitus is magnified by an intriguing comparison to kosher slaughter (64–65).

The book culminates in a third section, where strange bedfellows—Rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine of Hippo—issue bold challenges to conventional modes of masculine sexuality. Chapter Six deftly demonstrates that some voices in the Bavli replace grooms' legal claims about the absence of postcoital bleeding with claims about vaginal looseness. Embedded narratives complicate such claims, present brides as speaking subjects, and undercut the supposed objectivity of virginity verification, meanwhile "encouraging a culture of male sexual gentleness" (126): instead of expecting to draw blood, grooms must penetrate carefully to perceive the narrowness of a virginal wife. Chapter Seven situates this analysis in a larger argument about the...