The first section of this paper will discuss the semantic field of the Greek words parthenos virgin , and parthenia virginity. The second section of the paper will advance a new hypothesis on the medical knowledge that lay in the background of the representations of virginity, to be found in different sources. The two sections are connected. Soranos of Ephesus II century CE was the first physician to mention a membrane obstructing the vagina, but he claimed that this was just a false belief.
There could be imperforation, which was an anomaly, but there was no normal occlusion. They relied, however, on a different kind of sign of vaginal intercourse: pregnancy. As long as they could trust the conception of a child as the predictable effect of heterosexual coition, pregnancy revealed the loss of virginity. Contraception was to disturb that trust. The transition from a representation of virginity as sexual inexperience but without the anatomical support of the hymen to the need to pin down sexual integrity via a membranous structure, is correlated to the increasing awareness that women might tamper with their bodies, and that heterosexual coition, therefore, might go unobserved.
The project of this special issue of EuGeStA is to go back to basics, and update our knowledge of denominations, definitions and semantic fields, in light of recent scholarship on gender and sexuality, in Greek and Roman societies 1. The intent is to refresh our awareness of the language that shaped those representations. The presupposition is that language opens the way to our understanding of culture. This is particularly true when talking about virginity.
Virginity is an important marker of gender, since the social control of chastity, before and out of wedlock, concerns women, not men. If we prefer to map sexuality, as I do, by charting discourses and representations of pleasures, desires, bodies and institutions, again, virginity appears to be at the junction of these coordinates. Virginity is relevant in regard to marriage and the family; it involves a corporeal condition; it requires abstention from, or, at least control of erotic drives; it entails a particular regime of pleasure and pain.
Furthermore, if we are interested in the dynamic transfers of knowledge and language, virginity poses a challenge: it is a matter of inquiry into anatomy and physiology, but it offers a recurrent, dramatic theme in fictional narratives and the theater, from Homer and Hesiod, to tragedy, comedy, poetry and the novel.
