Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The essays in Menacing Virgins delineate the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity and examine how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. The collection includes readings of Icelandic poems, Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, seventeenth-century dramatic song, and the iconography of Italian wedding chests.