Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity by Julia Kelto Lillis

Author:Julia Kelto Lillis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520389014
Publisher: University of California Press

Closing Mary’s Womb

Writings from the Jovinianist and Nestorian controversies provide high-water marks and historical reservoirs of the ideas and images surrounding Mary’s genital closure, but anatomical configurations of virginity did not originate with nor remain confined to these controversies.69 Other Christian writers latched onto the idea that Mary’s womb was perceptibly closed at conception or childbirth, and a few may have done so prior to or apart from the Jovinianist controversy: hymn 12 of Ephrem’s Hymns on the Nativity and a sermon attributed to Amphilochius of Iconium are possible examples.70 Whereas works by those embroiled in the debates above cluster around key events in a controversy, these isolated works are of less certain date, with less available context to clarify what is at stake for the author. By the sixth century, belief in anatomical virginity and Mary’s anatomical intactness during childbirth was widespread, at least among Chalcedonians and Miaphysites. Mary’s closed womb features in anonymous Syriac poetic works of the fifth or sixth century; it appears in early-fifth-century Latin liturgical poetry and homilies and became commonplace in early Byzantine hymnody as Christians celebrated the Nativity.71 With time—perhaps quite a short span of time—Mary’s closed womb ceased to be a theologically strategic innovation and became a common corollary of the widespread belief in her permanent virginity, drawing on the newly widespread “common sense” that virgins’ reproductive systems are naturally sealed shut.

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