Virgin Whore

by Emma Maggie Solberg

Overview

In Virgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies—and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama.

More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively interpret Mary and her virginity as fragile. In a collection of plays known as the N-Town manuscript, Mary is represented not only as virgin and mother but as virgin and promiscuous adulteress, dallying with the Trinity, the archangel Gabriel, and mortals in kaleidoscopic erotic combinations. Mary’s "virginity" signifies invulnerability rather than fragility, redemption rather than renunciation, and merciful license rather than ascetic discipline. Taking the ancient slander that Mary conceived Jesus in sin as cause for joyful laughter, the N-Town plays make a virtue of those accusations: through bawdy yet divine comedy, she redeems and exalts the crime.

By revealing the presence of this promiscuous Virgin in early English drama and late medieval literature and culture—in dirty jokes told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian romances, and the double entendres of the allegorical Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn—Solberg provides a new understanding of Marian traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501730337
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2018
Pages:	294
Sales rank:	856,301
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Emma Maggie Solberg is an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture in the English department at Bowdoin College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Many Fathers of Jesus Christ
2. Testing the Chastity of the Divine Adulteress
3. The Second Eve
4. Imitations of the Virgin
5. Promiscuous Mercy
6. The Whore of Babylon
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

James Simpson

Scholarship digs deep or shifts sideways: the deep digger discovers what was hidden from view, while the sideways shifter exposes what was hidden in plain sight. In her feisty, provocative Virgin Whore, Maggie Solberg is a sideways-shifter. Her delightful, poker-faced prose realigns our sight to confront what was staring us in the face: a larger than life Virgin!

Nicole R. Rice

Virgin Whore shows that the Virgin beloved by medieval English Christians was not a demure, passive character, nor were her paradoxes limited to her roles of "mother of mercy" and "queen of hell." Solberg’s original investigation of Mary’s scandalous purity offers an exciting new paradigm for early drama scholarship and will make an impact on literary studies, history, theology, and art history.

Editorial Reviews

Solberg illuminates with careful attention the specific insults hurled in one play at both the adulteress whom Christ rescues in the Gospel of John and the Virgin herself

The New York Review of Books

Solberg adds new and surprising insights to ongoing conversations about Marian traditions and the history of sexuality.

Choice

Emma Maggie Solberg's Virgin Whore lives up to its provocative, no-punches-pulled title. Engagingly written, it is actively subversive from the get-go.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Virgin Whore contributes not only to Marian studies but also to literary studies more widely by demonstrating early drama's use and transformation of tropes shared throughout the corpus of medieval literature. Providing a solid historical context for its arguments, this work will also be useful for scholars working on early performance, Jewish–Christian relations and anti-Semitism, Marian and Reformation theology, and medieval gender. Like the figure forming its subject matter, this is a visceral, courageous, and occasionally mischievous study.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Strikingly detailed, clearly organized, and disarmingly presented.

Renaissance Quarterly

Virgin Whore contains many interesting ideas, which Solberg presents in an engaging way, and is a welcome addition to the literature.

Sixteenth Century Journal

"Scholarship digs deep or shifts sideways: the deep digger discovers what was hidden from view, while the sideways shifter exposes what was hidden in plain sight.In her feisty, provocativeVirgin Whore, Maggie Solberg is a sideways-shifter. Her delightful, poker-faced prose realigns our sight to confront what was staring us in the face:a larger than life Virgin!"

James Simpson

"Virgin Whore shows that the Virgin beloved by medieval English Christians was not a demure, passive character, nor were her paradoxes limited to her roles of "mother of mercy" and "queen of hell." Solberg’s original investigation of Mary’s scandalous purity offers an exciting new paradigm for early drama scholarship and will make an impact on literary studies, history, theology, and art history."

Nicole R. Rice