In this thoughtful meander of six chapters plus introduction and conclusion, Julia Kelto Lillis in Virgin Territory synthesises ideas about female virginity mainly in Christian Late Antiquity. Drawing on religion theorist Jonathan Z. Smith's 1978 promotion of Alfred Korzybski's 1958 dictum of general semantics, ‘the map is not the territory’, Lillis presents virginity as a discursive concept to be mapped. By this view, humans as linguistic beings cannot know and communicate an unmediated reality or territory, only maps about the territory through linguistic and other expressions. Hence, we should remain mindful that ‘the map is not the territory’. This view is debatable, not least because not all human experience, interaction and knowledge are necessarily mediated through language. Further, persons inclined toward idealism or realism have long differed on the ability of human inquiry and expressions to approximate and communicate a grasp of reality. L., however, treats it as incontrovertible that ‘maps are all we possess’, not territory itself (18). Yet she paradoxically titles her book Virgin Territory, which seems inconsistent with this perspective. The title should accordingly be understood as [Mapping] Virgin Territory, for L. ‘seeks to describe the “maps” that early Christians drew to represent … the “territory” or reality of virginity’ (17).
Patristic advocates of female virginity, however, idealist Christian Platonists included, were in their view disclosing and extolling the divine reality of virginity in their writings. L.'s approach detaches her work from this real-life patristic stance. For dedicated virginal girls and women like Ambrose's vindicated friend Indicia, to preserve their sexual potential for the return of Jesus Christ was not just a construct to map, as it is for L. It was an anticipated experience that purportedly would surpass the best sexual climax ever. Little of this ascetic tension, thrill and obsession is discernible in L.'s mapping of Christian virginity. She also presents her approach as a corrective to the patristics being naïve realists about virginity, for she maintains that the church fathers could only be mapmakers about this topic too (17). Yet, believe them or not, the patristics positioned their views as shaping and conveying virginity itself—the territory, not the map.
L. utilises an open-ended approach of conceptual analysis to explore and map female virginity. She seeks to show that ‘concepts like virginity are human-made and are produced on an ongoing basis through human thoughts, words, acts, relationships, and systems’ (4), mainly in early Christianity. The conclusions in her book are as broad as her thesis and would benefit from more specific substance beyond reiterating virginity's variety and malleability: Early Christian ‘virginity was … a mutable and multifold concept that thinkers could build from existing discourses in various directions’ (135). ‘Late ancient virginity discourse teems with commonalities and borrowings, yet brims with variety’ (161). ‘Variety persists’ in the virginity concept; ‘virginity was … never stable, profoundly meaningful yet perpetually malleable’ (217).
L. does present several specific arguments about female virginity. In ch. 1, she explains that Greek medicine shows no awareness of any hymen as an ostensible vaginal membrane sealing the womb until broken by penis penetration. Giulia Sissa already demonstrated this point in her 1984 Annales article as well as in 1990 and 2013 (see L.'s Bibliography and Index). This has been the consensus position since the 1990s in the field of women and Greek medicine. In chs 5 and 6, L. returns to discussing hymen perceptibility, where she further supports Sissa that this membrane is first on record in Christian Late Antiquity as perceptible proof of virginity. L. gives Sissa credit in all this, but one chapter rather than three on the hymen and related concerns of virginity preservation would have sufficed.
In ch. 2, L. explicates another virginity theme already familiar to scholars on the Protevangelium of James but deserving greater recognition. In this apocryphal gospel, the virginity of the Virgin Mary has a post-partum specificity. Historically, one reason why men prefer to copulate with virgins has little to do with the virgin's first time at sexual intercourse. Rather, as epitomised by virgins, vaginas not stretched out from childbirth are preferable for men to penetrate sexually, for they are tight and stimulating. Hence, even mothers after childbirth can be virginal, so long as their vaginas spring back to their pre-delivery state. The Protevangelium insists that the post-partum vagina of Mary models this return to virginal tightness, as verified by the midwife's inspection of Mary after Jesus's birth. This is quite the immaculate virginal rebound, but for whose imaginable pleasure the gospel does not say.
In chs 3 and 4, L. presents detailed conceptual analyses of female virginity from patristic sources that are original and a fine complement for the historical analyses of the same in Peter Brown's Body and Society (1988). L.'s open-ended exploration, however, hinders her work from decisively selecting and declaring what she thinks matters from the mutable variety that she detects and presents about virginity in patristic sources. Her text still wrestles with this Protean concept.
L.'s Virgin Territory offers her own valuable analyses about early Christian female virginity. Though partly derivative about the hymen, she also presents a worthwhile review of current research on virginity in Classical and Late Antiquity. Given her map-making approach, her focus is not on the patristics’ agenda to Christianise their territory of female virginity, but on building a complex semantic grasp of virginity as represented in this agenda.
