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Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc. By Maud Burnett McInerney. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ix + 250 pp. $45.00 cloth.
Virgins and martyrs are clearly people out of control-the virgin rejects the claims of family and society, the martyr the demands of the state. This study, focused on the female virgin martyr, argues that the struggle for control extends to the narrative or rhetoric surrounding the saint. In her survey of the virgin martyr ideal in the medieval West, Mclnerney argues that representations by male writers such as Ambrose seek to render the virgin martyr passive and silent, while texts by female authors, such as Hildegard of Bingen, rescue the virgin martyr from masculine silencing and explore possibilities for feminine agency and vitality. There are two rhetorics in these texts, says McInerney, one "to claim freedoms of various sorts for women in the name of virginity, and [one] to deny women such freedoms in the name of virginity" (8).
This book, part of Macmillan's New Middle Ages series, which presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval culture, pursues this argument primarily with a literary analysis of virgin martyr accounts beginning with Perpetua and Thecla in the second century (whom the author notes were neither both virgins and martyrs), through the patristic period with treatment of Ambrose, Jerome, and others, into the Middle Ages, with consideration of virgin martyr accounts by male writers such as Aldhelm and Wace, and...