Author : Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Release : 1999
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 494/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Menacing Virgins by : Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Download or read book Menacing Virgins written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly. This book was released on 1999. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.