virginity tests

virginity tests Any patrilineal society inevitably values (or over-values) virginity in its females. Tests to detect virginity (or its absence) are as widespread historically as they are unreliable medically. They occur in folklore, in law, in literature, and in medical textbooks, falling into four groups: textile proof of bleeding; gynaecological examination by a jury of women; proof by magical ability on the part of the virgin; and somatic responses to ingested fluid or inhaled fumes. This last is what is usually meant by ‘virginity test’, and arose in response to the unreliability of the first three.

Mosaic law decreed that the bride's family should display the ‘proof of her virginity’ (i.e. blood-stained sheets) in public; inability to do so resulted in the bride being stoned to death (Deuteronomy 21: 13–21). The custom was still recognizable in early modern England. Katherine of Aragon kept her wedding sheets for over 30 years, producing them as evidence in the divorce case brought by Henry VIII against her; Shakespeare critics believe that the red-on-white of the strawberry-patterned linen handkerchief in Othello emblematizes Desdemona's virginity (hence, her failure to produce the handkerchief results in her death).

This test of the ‘first night's bloody napkin’ or pannum menstruatum prima nocte ( Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621) was relatively easy to fake. Farmyard kitchens offered access to chicken blood, and Jacobean drama provides the solution of bed-trick substitution, as in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (published 1622), where the virgin maid protects her mistress, the unchaste bride, by spending the wedding night with the groom. Unchaste brides could also cheat on a gynaecological test, for the bride had only to wear a veil for modesty's sake, as did Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, in a notorious example in 1613. Her attempt to annul her marriage to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, was controversial, not least because of Frances's reputation for promiscuity. Public opinion held that a veiled substitute submitted to the physical examination on the Countess's behalf, thereby enabling her to pass the test and declare herself virgo intacta.

If gynaecological examinations were open to deceit, they were further compromised in that they were carried out by women (allegedly united in conspiratorial mendacity). Folklore offered a third type of virginity-test — magic. Virgins were credited with miraculous herbal healing powers; they could tame savage beasts or calm stinging swarms; they could wear clothing and accessories that would not fit unchaste women (for example, the magic mantle in the King Arthur legend, the magic girdle in Spenser's Faerie Queene). Unsurprisingly, this seems not to have been a prevalent option in real life. Thus the physician's virginity test came into medical prominence.

Essentially this last type of virginity test involves giving the woman a diuretic potion to drink, and seeing if she can contain her urine. Recipes for preparing and administering the potion are found in Pliny the Elder's History of the World; recipes in medieval and Renaissance books tend to be translations or derivatives of Pliny. Powdered jet (i.e. black lignite) is a staple ingredient: ‘if a woman drink it fasting presently it provoketh urine, if she be [not] a pure virgin’. The medieval Book of Secrets by St Albertus Magnus finds tactile contact with the stone sufficient to test virginity: ‘if the stone be broken and washed, or be given to a woman to be washed, if she be not a virgin, she will piss soon, if she be a virgin, she will not piss’. Variant ingredients include white amber, purslane seeds, or burdock leaves, the last two administered through inhalation rather than ingestion, but the effect — urination — is consistent.

Clearly such a test owes more to metaphor than to medicine. The vestal virgins were allegedly able to carry water in a sieve. (Like the bloody napkin and the physical examination, this test is not as foolproof as it sounds: one simply anoints the sieve with lanolin to provide a seal.) Queen Elizabeth publicized her status as Virgin Queen in a famous portrait in 1579 in which she holds a sieve in her left hand. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1611) provides a woodcut illustration of Chastity: she carries a whip in her right hand (presumably to deter Cupid who sits blindfolded at her feet), and, like Queen Elizabeth, she holds a large sieve in her left hand. The paired paintings by Godfried Schalken (1643–1706), The Wasted Lesson in Morals and The Medical Examination (Mauritshuis, The Hague) use the same iconography to depict the loss of chastity. In the first painting an elderly woman wags her finger at a young woman, cautioning her against opening a casket (symbolizing her virginity). The admonition is evidently unheeded for in the second painting the girl weeps while the doctor examines a flask of her urine. Thus, the chaste woman was sealed, impermeable; the unchaste woman was porous, incontinent. Given the effects on pelvic floor muscles and bladder of repeated childbearing and unsophisticated obstetrical instruments, the equation of unchastity with incontinence was self-fulfilling. A popular Elizabethan proverb held that ‘a ship and a woman are ever repairing’.

Renaissance literature frequently refers to virginity tests, and The Changeling actually stages one; however, it alters the effect of the potion from micturition to the more stageworthy sneezing, gaping, and yawning. Early modern culture extended the image of the open, unchaste woman as a urinating, leaking vessel to equate the speaking woman with unchastity; the logic was that a woman who had the temerity to open one orifice (her mouth) would readily open another (her vagina). Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy compresses the sequence of female speech/sex/virginity-test/urination into two lines: ‘Tell but some woman a secret over night, / Your doctor may find it in the urinal i’ the morning' (1.3.83–4). The trope is one of containment, with one body part functioning metonymically for another; women cannot control their tongues, their sexual desires, or their bladders.

From here it was an easy step for early modern suspicion to extend to all female bodily fluids: tears, menstruation, lactation. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, Galen held that female fluids were related. Breasts and uterus were thought to be connected by tubes (white breast milk was transmuted menstrual fluid), as were tear ducts and bladder (an Elizabethan proverb proclaims, ‘Let her cry she'll piss the less’). Thus female leakiness was not just localized proof of loss of virginity but an innate condition signifying the first female transgression in Eden. Incontinence was both proof and punishment — evidence of loss of innocence and chastisement for it.

The virginity test in The Changeling is attributed to Antoine Mizauld (c.1520–78), a French doctor who studied medicine in Paris and published many works on medicine, mathematics, and astrology. The play uses his name simply to lend authority to the stage test, which does not correspond, in precise details, with any recipe or experiment in Mizauld's published works, although the broad outlines are authentic in the literature from Pliny onwards. By the seventeenth century the new scientists began to view virginity tests sceptically. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), who studied medicine in Leiden and practised in Norwich, wrote: ‘I find the triall of the Pucellage and Virginity of women, which God ordained the Jewes is very fallible’ (Religio Medici, 1643). He is referring specifically to the proof of the first night's ‘bloody napkin’, but his suspicion about reliability may be applied to virginity tests in general. Dale Randall points out that by the 1630s plays such as James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) ‘endorse a far pleasanter kind of diagnosis’, what we might call ‘trial by temptation’: when asked if he can detect a woman's virginity, the hero replies, ‘I'll know't by a kiss, / Better than any doctor by her urine’.

Laurie Maguire

Bibliography

Paster, G. K. (1993). The body embarrassed. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY.
Randall, D. B. J. (1984). Some observations on the theme of chastity in The Changeling. English Literary Renaissance, 14, 347–66.
Tilley, M. P. (1950). A dictionary of the proverbs in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor MI.

See also hymen.