VIRGINITY IS THE bush that burns and is not consumed; a virgin, says the Parson, is the Bride of Christ, living the life of angels; or, in the Wife of Bath's charmingly homely figure, she is fine wheaten bread. Yet one would not care to be a Chaucerian virgin. Virginity, in Chaucer's writing, invites trouble; it is dangerously attractive to violent desires. At best, as May and Griselda find, it merely attracts monstrous husbands. Violence against more unfortunate virgins is continuous background noise: Philomela, Antiochus's daughter and other nameless virgins are raped, “[b] irafte […] of hir maydenhede” (2.83, 3.888); Dorigen easily recalls many more who evaded rape only by suicide. Stories centred on virginity are stories of cruelty, torture, and death. The early Christian Saint Cecilia conforms to the norms of virgin martyr legends, standing her ground on virginity to speak resistance to patriarchal and civic authority until she is martyred. Her pagan counterpart, Virginia, goes straight to her death without even the opportunity to voice resistance. The fate of the only male virgin in the Chaucerian canon, the “litel clergeon,” of the Prioress's Tale, a “martir, sowded to virginitee,” shows that virginity is as dangerous for boys as it is for girls (7.503, 579). Emelye, Custance and a “formel” eagle forlornly resist, lament, or postpone the surrender of their virginity, but can only delay the inevitable. Narrative itself abhors a virgin. The bush may burn on, but wheaten bread will be eaten. Virginity may be rewarded a hundredfold in heaven, but it can expect to be continually assailed on earth.

Virginity in the Chaucerian canon, as in late medieval society, was a complex phenomenon, encompassing much more than the state of sexual inexperience. It was both a lived identity and an impossible ideal. The holiest of men, such as Christ or the boy martyr of the Prioress's Tale, might be imagined as exemplars of perfect virginity, but lived virginity was generally the concern of women. How this concern manifests in the Canterbury Tales, both within tales and in conjunction with women narrators, is the focus of this essay.