Rich historical records from pre-modern Japan allow us to imagine ‘sexuality’ despite the absence of an explicit lexicon referring to it. The chapter examines three systems of thought: the Kami (Deities) Way, Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism. The Kami Way was the native cult and the spiritual foundation for Japan’s first state. Inscribed in its texts such as the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 CE) are vivid descriptions of deities’ bodies and performances steeped in symbolic meanings. Buddhism’s treatment of sexuality varied as widely as its diverse offerings of doctrines and practices. At least for the priestly figures, however, it denounced desire for and intercourse with women but affirmed sex with men. Confucianism, which arrived from the continent alongside Buddhism, taught social order and disapproved of all human relations, including sexual ones, that threatened the stable moral order and the gender hierarchy. The three systems of thought operated symbiotically, and reflected and shaped social rules, norms, and power relations of a given historical moment. Mostly more celebratory than condemning of the sexual body, pre-modern sources have no vocabulary for virginity as a boundary to be guarded or conquered, nor a body-altering institution such as the castration of eunuchs.

This chapter finds in the Bible a diversity of views about sexuality, gender, marriage, divorce, celibacy, virginity, and the human body. It next traces in early Christianity an aversion towards same-sex relationships, abortion, and contraception, and a growing gynophobia combined with a growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. It discusses the association between sexuality and original sin, and between misogyny and the invention of the witch, together with the negation of sexual pleasure, the confinement of sexual relations to procreation within marriage, and the struggles of monks with their erotic desires. A painful incompatibility between the sexual practices of colonized peoples and missionary expectations and behaviour is noted. Through to the present time, different models of marriage and attitudes towards same-sex relationships are found within Christianity. The early diversity of views about sexuality is shown to be unresolved, re-appearing in the culture wars of the present century. While attitudes to cohabitation, divorce and masturbation are generally more liberal than in the past, global Christianity still retains a strong antipathy towards loving same-sex relationships, abortion, and even the ordination of women.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote important works on grammar and metre. Here excerpts are taken from his famous prose work on Virginity, with which one may compare his version in hexameter verse.Also from one of the few remaining letters, this one on the subject of education and the rivalry between the Irish and the English in this field. Aldhelm’s distinctively rheorical and inventive Latin prose was very influential in the following centuries.

Chastity signifies sexual purity and restraint, either through virginity or through fidelity in marriage. While Augustine and Aquinas define chastity as a virtue for both men and women, Shakespeare depicts chastity almost exclusively as a female virtue, repeatedly using the term in connection with feminized representations of nature, the virgin goddess Diana, and young women (married and unmarried). Although Shakespeare’s plays include male characters who fixate on the chastity of female characters, chastity is a virtue of self-government that must, by definition, be under the control of women themselves. For Shakespeare’s female characters, chastity functions as a means of expressing bodily autonomy and rejecting attempts at patriarchal control, concepts that are still relevant for young women today. Shakespeare’s chaste heroines now lend their names and stories to projects designed to promote social justice and advocacy for young women. The cultural authority of Shakespeare’s plays can help provide a historical and ethical reference for a virtue that centers on control over one’s own body. In the context of current global debates about women’s rights and sexual assault, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that chastity is not only a relevant virtue — it is crucial to understanding the importance of women’s autonomy.

This chapter turns to early Byzantine homiletics, beginning with the works of early fifth-century preachers including Hesychios of Jerusalem, Attikos, and Proklos of Constantinople. Problems with the dating and attribution of many of the earliest Marian hymns persist; this chapter offers new approaches to this subject. The preoccupation of fifth-century homilists remained Christological and we find few, if any, references to Mary’s intercessory power in the surviving sermons. However, the situation begins to change in the sixth century, with the homilies of (ps-)Basil of Seleucia, Severos of Antioch and Abraham of Ephesus displaying more interest in Mary’s human aspect and intercessory role between humanity and God. The sixth century is thus a turning point, as scholars have already remarked; with the addition of Marian feasts to the calendar during this period, preachers began to focus increasingly on the Virgin’s importance as a holy figure in her own right.

Sometimes killing by male-female couples represents an escalation of an adventure that starts with entirely, or at least relatively, harmless activities, as in looking at fringe pornography, sharing fantasies or accounts of earlier experiences, S&M or swinging. In some cases, this could be seen as grooming by the male. The existence of killer couples raises the issue of whether the female derives sexual pleasure from killing or the pleasure comes solely from pleasing the male . In each of the couples described here, the male would appear to be the dominant partner. For Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, it is unclear what set them on his tragic course. For Brady, it was possibly resentment against illegitimacy and social standing. Fred and Rosemary West both came from abusive backgrounds. The case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka raised the issue of whether Homolka showed evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.

How is it that female figures—though whether they are properly female is debatable—come to voice in Christian texts of late antiquity? How, in particular, do their voices enter into debates about desire, traditionally the province of masculine speech? And what do these virginal voices sound like? Are they distinct and recognizable to our reading ears? There is a story to be told, and it starts with Thecla. We might say that every Christian virgin who arrogates voice in some sense follows Thecla, speaking her desire in speech that both is and is not her own. Thecla, in other words, both inaugurates and serves as a figure for virginal voice in its startling, in-breaking forcefulness. But Thecla, however definitively novel, follows others as well. This chapter first backtracks to consider Thecla’s precursors, Diotima (Plato, Symposium) and Leucippe (Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon). It then follows the reworking of those figures in the Acts of Thecla and Methodius’ Symposium respectively. Finally, it explores the legacy of Thecla in two little-known late ancient Latin dialogues that feature notably voluble virgins—the Lives of Saints Helia and Constantina, respectively.

This chapter turns to early Byzantine homiletics, beginning with the works of early fifth-century preachers including Hesychios of Jerusalem, Attikos, and Proklos of Constantinople. Problems with the dating and attribution of many of the earliest Marian hymns persist; this chapter offers new approaches to this subject. The preoccupation of fifth-century homilists remained Christological and we find few, if any, references to Mary’s intercessory power in the surviving sermons. However, the situation begins to change in the sixth century, with the homilies of (ps-)Basil of Seleucia, Severos of Antioch and Abraham of Ephesus displaying more interest in Mary’s human aspect and intercessory role between humanity and God. The sixth century is thus a turning point, as scholars have already remarked; with the addition of Marian feasts to the calendar during this period, preachers began to focus increasingly on the Virgin’s importance as a holy figure in her own right.

Chapter 5 argues that food refusal resonates in the early modern theatre as a gendered mode of resistance. It begins by considering the contemporary phenomenon of 'miraculous maid' pamphlets, which recounted supposedly factual accounts of prodigious acts of religiously motivated food refusal. It then turns to Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604). It places these plays in the context of changes to religious practice, contemporary understandings of the female body and the space of the household. It argues that in the context of female food refusal, hunger has the capacity to function as a form of parodic obedience to the norms of contemporary gender ideology. By carrying dictates of privacy and closure to a point of often terminal excess, these texts query or satirise the double standard within early modern English society.

This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst for the eponymous heroine to follow Thecla’s example and reject the marriage proposed for her. She does so, however, without creating the rift with her parents that Thecla’s departure necessitates. That careful reuse demonstrates the developing uncertainty over whether the rise of Christian asceticism necessitated the destruction of the traditional household. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, we see the Cappadocian bishop again using Thecla to think with, as he feels his way towards a new solution to this same problem. These case studies not only show us the changing landscape of Christian thinking on marriage, family, and asceticism, but also reveal the complex matrix of meanings latent in the original Acts of Paul and Thecla.