Virgin: The Untouched History by Blank Hanne

Author:Blank, Hanne [Blank, Hanne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Heaven and Earth

Valde durum est contradiciere quod habet gustus pomi. It is so hard to deny things that taste of the apple.

—Saint Hildegard of Bingen

THE VIKING FORCES that landed on the North Sea coast of Scotland in 870 swept south with a vengeance, leaving utter devastation in their wake. The only thing that traveled faster than the Vikings was the news that they were on the way.

When word of the approaching berserks reached Ebba the Younger, abbess of Coldingham Abbey, a convent located just north of the present-day border between England and Scotland, she gathered the sisters together, knowing that they had no greater strength than the community they shared. Warning her community of virgins of the probability that they would all be raped by the invaders when the convent was sacked, Ebba took a razor and sliced off her own nose and upper lip, making a bloody, mutilated spectacle of her face that she hoped would repel the invaders. One after the other, the nuns followed suit, fearlessly carving into their own flesh with cold steel in the hopes that it might forestall their having to endure a violation of their bodies that these consecrated virgins perceived as far worse than the ones to their faces.

According to the legend, it worked. The Vikings took one look at the ruined faces of the nuns who appeared at the convent gate, and burned the place to the ground. Trapped inside the inferno of their cloister, Ebba and all her nuns died a horrifying death. But in death they found victory: the women of Coldingham died virgin martyrs, guaranteed a place in Heaven.

Gruesome, coldly practical, and yet oddly transcendent, the story of the nuns of Coldingham Abbey provides a useful snapshot of the often extreme nature of the medieval world. In this era a retreat into the monastery did not reprieve one from having to face the realities of invasion or war, nor did it in any way protect women from the threat of rape. Although this was the heyday of the great scholar-theologians, the golden age of monasticism, and the period during which the Roman Catholic Church achieved an unprecedented hold over virtually all of western Europe, it was also an era dominated by seemingly perpetual war, budding class struggle, devastating epidemics, internecine politics, Crusades and Inquisitions, a slowly but surely metamorphosing economy, and, at different times and places, the very real problem of armed invasion. A great deal of medieval culture was necessarily preoccupied with the difficult task of negotiating and maintaining the perpetually uneasy balance between the mandates of heaven and those of earth. Virginity was central to that struggle because of its own critical role in the dominant institution of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church.

As the Catholic Church matured, its influence spread wherever the Roman Empire's roads preceded it. With the northward and westward migration of Roman Catholicism went its singular philosophy of sexual renunciation, asceticism, and sacrifice. To the farmers, hunters, and craftsmen of early

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