Menacing Virgins

Download or Read eBook Menacing Virgins PDF written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Menacing Virgins
Author :
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Total Pages : 260
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0874136490
ISBN-13 : 9780874136494
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Menacing Virgins by : Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Book excerpt: The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.


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