Melanie Webb: Testing Virginity in Augustine's City of God

Following the sack of Rome in 410 CE, Augustine faced political, religious, and pastoral crises. Sparing Rome’s architecture, the Visigoths nonetheless deployed rape as a weapon of conquest. In response, Roman and Roman Christian communities upheld exemplary women who, in situations of rape, resorted to suicide in order to protect and attest to their chastity. The opening chapters of City of God speak to the aftermath of rape in the lives of these women.
For women who refused to kill themselves after being raped, Augustine seeks in City of God 1.18 to minimize the repercussions for these women’s social standing by invoking an analogue between rape and botched virginity tests. Here, Augustine anticipates his readers’ familiarity with the concept of virginity testing and its potential for producing erroneous results.
Cordelia Beattie writes in reference to Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine that “the images of the intact virgin and the chaste widow were put forward as models to which the clergy should aspire.”¹ For Augustine and much of his readership, not only is the status of women at stake in such discussions but so is their own. Augustine is also alert to the social implications of such theologies of female bodies for women. This paper will examine how Augustine frames his discussion of virginity testing with reference to invasive medical procedures in order to demonstrate that Augustine does not privilege pudenda in his assessment of the body’s sanctity.
¹ Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 18.