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

How different were the Vestals and the early Christian virgins? If we are to believe the early Latin church fathers, the Christian virgin trumped the Vestal virgin and even introduced a completely new kind of virgin altogether. In Borderline Virginities, Sissel Undheim examines the validity of the early fathers' claim to superior virginal innovation and demonstrates that the cultural construction of Christian and pagan sacred virginities in late antiquity was not so conclusively distinct. As Undheim shows, though, modern scholars have often taken those claims at face value, leading to an outsized emphasis on the differences between the Vestals and early Christian virgins at the expense of an appreciation of the broader and more flexible construct of sacred virginity depicted in the sources.

This volume, based on Undheim's dissertation, draws upon an extensive collection of mostly Latin written sources and available epigraphic evidence to unseat the stereotypical young, unmarried female virgin as the center of late antique virginity. Undheim's analysis shows that the sources offer a variety of other "seemingly paradoxical" virginities that shaped the definition of virginity, such as "married virgins, virgin widows, virgin mothers, virgin martyrs, slave virgins, old virgins, aristocratic virgins, divine virgins, heretic virgins, pagan virgins, gender-bending virgins, male virgins, false virgins, and fallen virgins" (1). Undheim uses "Roman virginities" as an umbrella term to make sense of the overlap between sacred pagan and Christian virginities of late antiquity, to address the problematic dichotomies of Christian/pagan, sacred/secular, and physical/spiritual, and to highlight the Christian implicit and explicit reliance on the constant re-definition and re-construction of virginity in the Roman context.

In Chapter One, Undheim introduces the landscape of sacred virginity in late antiquity. That a virgo was by most accounts a young, unmarried girl who had never had sex is relatively straightforward but, as Undheim shows, virginitas was a flexible term and not restricted to that specific frame. Drawing upon the approach of Denise Kimber Buell, Undheim offers the helpful paradigm of "fixity" and "flexity" to navigate the malleable construct that is virginity in late antiquity. In sum, virginity as abstraction remains tethered to the physical "fixity" of the virgo, but exhibits "flexity" beyond that fixed referent that allows for so-called "borderline virgins" to participate in the expansive nature of virginitas. 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.

In Chapter Two, Undheim explores the rhetorical and socio-cultural constructions of sacred virgins' virginity. The key here is that Vestal virgins and Christian virgins were contemporaries and shared a common Roman context. 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 also explains how Roman virginities demonstrate fixity and flexity as they relate to social status, age, appearance, and symbolism. In sum, not every virgin was a sacred virgin, but every sacred virgin had to be virgin par excellence.

In Chapter 3, Undheim considers the understudied notion of "male virginity." The importance of this exploration is underscored by the incongruity found in many of the key early Christian writers: in theory, virginity, as a central soteriological paradigm, was thus open to all Christians regardless of gender. In practice, however, it is virgin women who received almost exclusive attention. Instead, Undheim discusses how eunuchs tend to function rhetorically as the male counterpart to...