Women In The Middle Ages Came Up With Clever Ways Of Faking Their Virginity, And Some Of Them Are Absolutely Mind-Boggling
Back in the Middle Ages (a.k.a. the Medieval era, approximately 476-1450 A.D.), virginity was an extremely desirable trait in a wife. As second-class citizens, women were highly encouraged to get married because they couldn't own property, which made being a virgin bride a valuable bargaining chip.
Essentially, women were the property of their fathers until they got married, and then they became the property of their husbands. This remained the case until the late 19th century. (Shoutout to the UK's Married Women's Property Act of 1870, only 300+ years later!)
Virginity was extremely attractive in a wife "primarily because it was the surest method to guarantee paternity," Karen Harris and Lori Caskey-Sigety, authors of The Medieval Vagina: An Historical and Hysterical Look at All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages, said in a blog post.
"A high value was placed on virginity, making it a commodity of sorts. As with all things, once a value is assigned to an object, people will go to great lengths to prove its authenticity and to regain it if it is lost."
Society had multiple ways of determining whether or not a woman was a virgin. She might have undergone an inspection from a midwife to see if her hymen was intact or would have been expected to show bloody sheets after the wedding night.
Science and medicine were, to put it kindly, very limited. So there were also ideas that virgins "were endowed with magical powers and could quiet swarming bees, tame wild animals, hold water in their hands, and control the urge to urinate," Harris and Caskey-Sigety add. I extend my deepest sympathies to any young medieval woman who was tossed into a swarm of bees with high expectations.
But, as a medical practitioner of the time said in The cases of impotency and virginity fully discuss'd, "There are a thousand ways of losing the marks of virginity, without having to do with a man; there are in like manner, a thousand ways of recovering them again, when it has been really lost by having to do with a man."
Harris and Caskey-Sigety note that "some women are born without hymens and others ruptured theirs prematurely doing the strenuous activities that comprised women’s work in the medieval era."
If a bride had a little pre-marital indiscretion or was even just anxious, she'd need to figure out a way to fake it — and fortunately, there were several options available at the time. Here are 7 of the wildest ways women managed to fake their virginity in the Middle Ages:
1.Women could find a midwife to perform their inspection who would say they were a virgin even if they weren't.
Sadly, very few medieval midwives had heard America Ferrera's monologue from Barbie, so this was a fairly rare occurrence. Harris and Caskey-Sigety said, "Most midwives were honest in their appraisal, and their findings served to...throw their fellow female under the medieval bus. Most women believed the cultural rhetoric that labeled females as wicked, untrustworthy, inferior, and dishonest."
2.Women could place a leech on their labia to create a scab that would be torn open and bleed on their wedding night.
Just looking at this image of leeches is giving me hives. The strength of medieval women is immeasurable.
A few days before their marriage and subsequent consummation, women could attach a leech to their vulva that would create a small wound. They'd remove it, allow the wound to scab over, and then the friction of their wedding night activities would tear open the scab, causing them to bleed.
In his book Natural Magick, published in 1558, John Baptista Porta details how this could have been completed with the help of a midwife.
The text reads: "Midwives that take care of this, do it another way. They contract the place with the Decoction of the aforementioned things, then they set a Leech fast upon the place, and so they make a crusty matter or scab, which being rub'd will bleed."
And The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine, published in the 12th century, says, "What is better is if the following is done one night before she is married: let her place leeches in the vagina (but take care that they do not go in too far) so that blood comes out and is converted into a little clot. And thus the man will be deceived by the effusion of blood."
I agree with Trota of Salerno. Please "take care that they do not go in too far."
3.Women could pour a small vial of animal blood on the sheets when their new husband wasn't looking.
Harris & Caskey-Sigety said, "It wasn’t too difficult for a clever yet soiled bride to acquire a vial of blood. Most medieval households had adjoining farms, and animals were routinely butchered for dinner. A bit of chicken blood could easily be hidden in a piece of jewelry and spilled onto the sheets under the cover of darkness." I can think of few things more romantic than figuring out the perfect timing to dump a random animal's blood in your marital bed.
4.Women could create a poultice or wash with a concoction of some kind to tighten things up down there for the wedding night.
The Trotula suggests "a constrictive for the vagina so that [women] may appear as if they were virgins. Take the whites of eggs and mix them with water in which pennyroyal and hot herbs of this kind have been cooked, and with a new linen cloth dipped in it, place it in the vagina two or three times a day." Please don't try this at home.
It also recommends taking "the newly grown bark of a holm oak. Having ground it, dissolve it with rainwater, and with a linen or cotton cloth, place it in the vagina in the above-mentioned manner. And remove all these things before the hour of the commencement of intercourse."
Reminder: this medieval Cinderella may not have had access to a clock at home (they started appearing in homes around the 1300s), so this might require some skillful timing.
Another option from The Trotula is taking "oak apples, roses, sumac, great plantain, comfrey, Armenian bole, alum, and fuller’s earth, of each one ounce. Let them be cooked in rainwater, and with this water, let the genitals be fomented."
I'm not loving sound of the word "foment" in such close proximity to "genitals."
They also used alum water, which "is a chemical compound of hydrated potassium aluminum sulfate used to tan leather and pickle meats and set the dye in wool," Harris and Caskey-Sigety said. "A key property of alum water is that it is an astringent. It shrinks and tightens skin. So used in the vaginal area, alum water could shrink the tissue, giving the illusion of virginity, without actually replacing the hymen."
I am incapable of imagining the desperation necessary to feel comfortable knowing the thing you're about to put in your vagina is used for pickling meats.
5.Women could insert rings, resin, or suppositories into their vaginas that would provide extra resistance.
Phas / Universal Images Group via Getty Images, @bejayoharen / Via giphy.com
"These devices acted like a surrogate hymen," said Harris and Caskey-Sigety. Safe to assume the gentleman in the first image is none the wiser.
6.Women could fumigate their vaginas with some type of herbal substance intended to repair their ruptured hymen.
Harris and Caskey-Sigety said that "fumigation was a common medical treatment option in the Middle Ages, so it is not surprising that some virginity restoration techniques made use of fumigators. Vessels containing water mixed with some sort of herbal substance, often foul-smelling ones, were heated over open fires until steam was produced. The steam was funneled through a tube inserted into a fallen woman’s vagina."
7.Finally, women could take the spiritual course and simply wait seven years.
The Penitential of Finnian, written in the early years of the Middle Ages, offers a penance to reclaim absent virginity. “She must live for six years on bread and water, and in the seventh year, she shall be joined to the alter; and then we say her crown can be restored, and she may don a white robe and be pronounced a virgin." I'll be honest: this feels like a great way to get scurvy. Unfortunately, humans had no idea that we needed to eat an orange once in a while until the 1700s.
Personally, I'm very glad women can own property these days, least of all so that no one feels the need to go through outlandish purity tests. Still, it's nice to know that even hundreds of years ago, women could take a bit of power back for themselves — even if it meant putting a leech on their hoo-has.
