Read Virgin: The Untouched History Online
Authors: Hanne Blank
This is by no means to say that aristocrats never laid claim, either consensually or by rape, to the virginity of women beneath them. Saying that
the jus
primae noctis
was a myth is not the same as denying that sexual abuses of power took place. But acknowledging that sexual abuse took place is a very different thing from claiming that a particular sexually abusive practice was either customary or, as the
word jus
(law) implies, an aspect of the formal and legally extenuated rights of the nobility as a class. The former is a given. The latter is a myth.
Given how important virginity was to medieval culture, it seems likely that had the practice of the lord of the manor deflowering every virgin on her wedding night actually existed, someone would have recorded it somewhere. As it stands, the earliest reference we have to any form of this supposed custom dates from 15.26, in a text that attributes it as having been practiced by a medieval Scottish king. Unfortunately, the king in question is nowhere to be found in any records that date from earlier than 1526: he was apparently invented because someone wanted a bogeyman.
The market for aristocratic bogeymen has been rather brisk since the 1500s, given the number of
jus primae noctis
tall tales that appeared since that time. Take for example the story related throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the formation of the free town of Montauban, a city in the Toulouse region of France. The story related how monks of the Abbey of Saint-Theodard, located in Montauriol, adjacent to the territory that became Montauban, had become greedy and power-mad, going so far as to enforce the
droit du seigneur
over the women of Montauriol. Montauriol's serfs eventually rebelled against this treatment, the story goes, by fleeing the abbey's lands and founding the free town of Montauban.
In reality, nothing of the kind ever happened. A charter of foundation for the free town of Montauban exists, dated 11 October 1144. In it, one Alphonse Jourdain, comte de Toulouse, established the city and charged its inhabitants with the responsibility of building a bridge over the River Tarn. Jourdain wanted a bridge, some of his serfs wanted independence. The deal was straightforward and honest.
Not all the fictions that have reinscribed this myth pretend to historical truth, however. Many, in fact, were intended as entertainment. From the seventeenth century to the present, the idea of
the jus primae noctis
has been used as a brilliantly engaging plot device. In the drama and opera of the eighteenth century, in fact, the motif became a literal classic through the successes of both Beaumarchais's play
Le mariage du Figaro
(1775—1778) and the opera
Le none
di Figaro,
which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in 1786 to an Italian libretto adapted from the Beaumarchais original by the inimitably witty Italian Lorenzo da Ponte. These two works, probably the apogee of
the jus primae
noctis
theme, are merely the best known.
It is no coincidence that the best-known dramas featuring
the jus primae noctis
date from the late eighteenth century. The rising tide of anti-aristocratic and anti-imperial sentiment in Enlightenment France all but demanded it. To invoke
the jus primae noctis
was to invoke a recollection of every unrighteous imposition or abuse from above, no matter how small. As a rallying cry it was hugely effective. Almost any hardworking but impoverished
paysan
could imagine himself a defenseless virgin whose only personal treasure had ruthlessly been taken by some greedy aristocrat, and so the myth of
the jus primae
noctis
fanned the flames of revolution. In historical fact, however, the "lord's first night" never existed save in the minds of those who believed it did.
*It should be noted that we know that the sexual consummation of these marriages was sometimes but not always postponed for several years due to the youth of the brides. For example, although Edmund Plantagenet, second son of Henry III of England, was married to the ten-year-old Aveline de Forz at Westminster Abbey in 1269, the marriage was not consummated until 1273, when the groom was a robust twenty-eight and the bride had finally turned fourteen.
*The nature of the relationship between the author of the document and Jesus himself has been the subject of long controversy. Explanations that allow for the existence of Jesus's brothers and sisters, mentioned in the Bible, but that also allow for Mary's perpetual virginity have been many and varied.
The "Flos Virginis," so much coveted by the Europeans, is never valued by these savages.
—John Lawson
I
N THE NATURAL COURSE of events the Queen is of an age where she should in reason and as is woman's way, be eager to marry and be provided for," wrote Baron Pollweiler, a negotiator visiting the court of the twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. Pollweiler was in England attempting to broker a marriage agreement between Elizabeth and the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Charles of Austria. "The natural and necessary inference from all this is," he continued, "either that she has married secretly, or that she has already made up her mind to marry someone in England or out of it and . . . is postponing matters under the cloak of Your Imperial Majesty's son, my gracious master. For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable."
For all intents and purposes, the Baron was right. In a country whose monasteries and convents had been abolished by Elizabeth's father Henry VIII in 1539, and in which she herself had firmly reestablished Protestantism as the state religion, it was indeed inconceivable that a woman should wish never to marry. Yet, as we know, Elizabeth remained unmarried to the end. By dint of savvy political maneuvering, a blend of sincere and Machiavellian religiosity, and simply being beyond the reach of too much secular or religious strong-arming, she reigned for forty-five years as that most inconceivable thing—a public, powerful, and thoroughly secular virgin.
Despite the legion biographies, films, and fictions about her, the docu-mentable facts of Elizabeth's anomalous life make her a difficult subject for the historian of virginity. We do not know and cannot say, for example, whether she was "really" a virgin in the sense of never having sexual relations with any partner at any time. There were as many rumors that she was in some way physically deformed and unable to engage in intercourse as there were that she had borne bastards by her longtime confidant Robert Dudley, Master of the Queen's Horse and later Earl of Leicester. No evidence of any of this has been found; indeed there is no documentary evidence of her sexual existence at all. What there is to work with is her enormous and often self-conscious legacy. It is more than slightly ironic that, despite the gallons of ink that have been spilled on the subject, what is known about the virginity of the Virgin Queen is little more than what she herself said in 1559: "in the end this shalbe for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a Queene, having reygned such a time, lyved and dyed a virgin."
Elizabeth's odd-woman-out example does, however, shed some useful light on what the culture of Western virginity was like from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: a tumultuous time, rife with discovery and reform. Recall that Vesalius had only finally isolated the hymen in the mid—sixteenth century, and scientific approaches to virginity were undergoing a general renovation. In the realm of religion, Reformationists and Counterreformationists, with Protestant and Catholic versions of sexual law, grappled for the minds and bodies of believers. Even the globe was changing, as explorers traversed the world and discovered "virgin" continents where the maps had formerly said "here there be dragons." Those engaged with the iconography, the ideology, and the physical reality of virginity were all alike obliged to go where no one had gone before.
Perhaps more than any other single force, Protestantism had changed the face of virginity in Europe. Putting marriage first and abandoning monasticism and celibate clergy, Protestantism flipped the Roman Catholic Church's emphasis on virginity neatly on its head. Where Roman Catholic doctrine had stated that virgins received 100 percent of heaven's rewards, while the married could expect only 30, Protestant theology set forth the principle that all godly believers would partake equally in heaven regardless of their sexual or marital status. Martin Luther was particularly vociferous on the subject of marriage, pointing out that neither lifelong virginity nor clerical celibacy was called for in the Bible, claiming that few people were naturally inclined toward either one, and contending that the result of requiring celibacy of people who were not inherently given to it was to encourage illicit sexual relations. Even the Pope, Luther claimed, had "as many concubines as Solomon." Himself a former Augustinian monk married to a former nun, Katharina von Bora, and the father of six children, Luther practiced what he preached when it came to placing a high priority on marriage and family.
Protestant enthusiasm for marriage and family was contagious among all Christian rank and file,' including Catholics, the lion's share of whom were, of course, married. Unsurprisingly, this met with stern disapproval from Rome. As part of the Council of Trent (1545—1563), the Roman Catholic Church's Counterreformation assembly called in response to the emergence of Protestantism, the Church issued the treatise
De sancti matrimonii. De sancti matrimonii
stood as the central Catholic document on marriage and sexuality until the Vatican II assembly of the mid—twentieth century. Among its other doctrinal points, it threatened with excommunication any Catholic who claimed, a la Luther, Calvin, and other Protestant thinkers, the heresy that marriage was preferable to virginity.
In the Council of Trent's reminder of virginity's supremacy we see a Christian laity whose world view had been thoroughly scrambled by the sudden appearance of Protestantism, and a Catholic establishment that was struggling to cope with the blow. It is difficult, from our vantage point in a world where Protestant denominations are as numerous as ice cream flavors, to empathize with the degree to which the Reformation transformed Christianity. With a nod to the preceding chapter, however, it may help to consider the nature and the magnitude of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, at least in regard to virginity.
The Fall of the Sacred Virgin
Protestantism had no place for consecrated virginity and thus no place for nuns or convents. Some priests, monks, and nuns abandoned their positions, their celibacy, and their Catholicism as Protestantism gained presence and power, but neither Luther nor his early followers had anything close to the clout it required to actually close down monasteries or convents. Some later closed their doors due to attrition or the Protestantization of the territory in which they stood, and the presence of nuns and convents shrank dramatically in the parts of Europe that became majority Protestant. Only in England, where Henry VIII single-handedly forced the conversion of the entire country to an Anglican church not beholden to Rome, were monastic institutions abolished outright.
But even in places where convents still stood, and in some cases even before Luther posted his ninety-five theses in 1517, various reform-minded Catholics had already begun to embrace marriage. In some ways this was the result of economic and social change more than religious reform. As feudal and manorial arrangements declined, individual wage-earning, goods-producing households became the new lowest common denominator of the burgeoning new capitalist cash economy. With nonaristocratic families gaining visibility as self-supporting entities, marriage among non-nobles started to have economic meaning that it had not possessed under intensive feudal or manorial systems. Marriage and reproduction gradually became as tightly yoked to the economic, social, and political interests of the non-noble family as they had always been for the dynastic clans of the nobility.
As economic autonomy became strongly linked to marriage, it led to a new way of conceptualizing the family and household. In Protestant and particularly Calvinist circles, the married household came to be seen as a closed system, each family replicating within its own members the kind of relationship that existed between governor and countrymen, a microcosmic version of the larger "family" of the secular state with the paterfamilias as ruler. By 1622 William Gouge, minister of Blackfriars Church, London, could write in his
Of Domesdcall Duties
that "A familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth, at least a lively representation thereof, whereby triall may be made of such as are fit for any place of authoritie, or of subjection in Church or commonwealth. Or rather it is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth." This pocket-sized vision of society positioned marriage as a vital tool that produced and trained men and women who would be fit to participate in the modern, secular state.
What this meant to virginity was that it became, almost by definition, brief and transitional. In the Protestant mind, there was no place for the convent, nor for any behavior that smacked of it. The cultural category of the spinster or old maid became prominent in English culture around this time, for there was no longer a functional niche in the society for women who either did not wish to marry or could not find husbands. Indeed, the assumption in regard to women was that, as a 1632 pamphlet entitled
The Lawes Resolution of Women's
Rights
put it, "all of them are understood either married or to be married."
Just as it was considered "natural" for women to marry and have children, it was considered "natural" that they be virgins before they did. Virginity was a brief moment through which women passed on their way from being children to being wives. This naturalizing and trivializing of virginity had the effect of homogenizing the various forms of female chastity, as demonstrated in these lines from Diana Primrose's 1630
A Chaine of Pearle, Or, A Memoriall of
the peerles Graces, and heroick Venues of Queene Eliiabeth, of Glorious Memory:
For whether it be termed Virginall
In virgins, or in Wives stil'd Conjugall,
Or viduall in Widdowes, God respects
All equally, and all a-like affects.
This scrap of verse serves as an eloquent summary of the fall of virginity in Protestant Europe. If all forms of chastity are equal in God's eyes, then there was no reason to draw distinctions between them. The virginity a woman took to the altar was of a piece with the monogamy she was expected to embody after she left it. Virginity itself, to the Protestant mind-set, no longer signified anything particularly special. It was something that could be expected of any reasonable, respectable unmarried woman. This way of thinking, argues literary historian Theodora Jankowski, created a subtle but important association: while chastity was a virtue of which a Protestant could be proud, the word "virginity" acquired specifically Catholic overtones.
Probably the single most striking way in which the Catholic mode of virginity was effaced from Protestantism was in regard to the praise and veneration of the Virgin Mary. While no Protestant ever denied Mary's virginity or that it was perpetual, all of them agreed that the way she was worshipped within Catholicism was not what they felt was appropriate for Christians. The Protestant Mary is no longer the quasi-goddess intercessor who reigns as queen of heaven, but instead a wholly human woman who happened to have had the honor of being Jesus' mother. The demotion was tangible: icons and statues of Mary do not exist in Protestant houses of worship in the way that they do in Catholic churches, nor are there Protestant equivalents of anthems like the Catholic
Salve Regina
or
Sub Tuum Praesidium
specifically praising Mary above all other women. Protestant insistence on the authority
of
scripture, and not the accumulated centuries of extracanonical literature, removed all but the essentials of Mary's identity.
The Virgin Mary's demotion within Protestantism led to some dramatic and curious historical moments. During the systematic restoration of Anglicanism that attended Elizabeth I's early reign (she had had to reinstitute it following her half-sister Mary's abortive attempt to restore Catholicism), among the striking anti-Catholic measures taken by the state were search-and-destroy missions aimed at finding and eradicating icons and statues of the Virgin Mary. Various scholars, including the incisive Helen Hackett, have looked at these anti-Marian campaigns as being part
of
a complex rearrangement of virginal power. It is difficult not to see the destruction of icons and statues of Mary as a way of destroying the old Catholic virgin so that she could be replaced with a new Protestant model—the queen herself.
The Making of the Virgin Queen
Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was never literally compared to the Virgin Mary during her lifetime. It would have been sacrilegious from the scripture-centered Anglican viewpoint. Also, it would not have made sense from the perspective of the Virgin Mary's role within the Gospels: according to the terms of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of 1563, the bearer of the crown also stood as head of the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine a role less congruent with the Virgin Mary's timeless and much-vaunted passivity to God's will than running a nation and a state religion. Nonetheless, Elizabeth's reign was nothing if not a lengthy process of creating a virginal persona that has proven to be very nearly on a par, in terms of its iconic popularity, with the Virgin Mary's own.
How much of this was deliberate, and how much the coincidental accretion of attention that accompanies a long-reigning and beloved monarch, is hard to say. Elizabeth's savvy in regard to managing and manipulating public opinion was substantial. She spent lavishly on gowns, jewels, portraits, and royal progresses, whistle-stop horseback tours of her domain that let her see and be seen. Her skill with rhetoric, both visual and verbal, was undisputed, as in the legendary speech delivered to her troops on the eve of the Spanish Armada. The queen, dressed in an Athenalike white gown and silver breastplate, told her men, "I have the body of a weak, feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king—and of a King of England too."