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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Six: The Blank Page
Although it has been centuries since any physician could admit professionally to taking such things seriously, let alone to having studied it as a medical discipline, astrology was once considered a legitimate part of a physician’s skill set. Until sometime in the fourteenth century it was a typical part of a doctor’s training, with works by various Arab scholars featuring as some of the most popular astrological teaching texts. One, called the Centiloquium, that dated from the late ninth or early tenth centuries, was copied and distributed so many times—and bear in mind that at this point in time all books were copied by hand—that over 150 copies still exist today.
During the heyday of medical astrology, as medievalist Helen Rodnite Lemay has shown in her invaluable work on the subject, it was believed that the stars had a sort of physical influence on people that began at the moment of their conception. Even infants in the womb came under the influences of the various celestial bodies. The fifth month of gestation was believed to fall under the control of the planet Venus, for example, and the planet, just like the Roman goddess of the same name, was understood to rule all things pertaining to physical desire. If a physician wanted to determine whether or not a woman was a virgin, therefore, he might begin by consulting his astrological texts to find out what sort of influence Venus might have had on her even before she was born, and only later looking at what extraterrestrial configurations might’ve governed her at the time of the consultation.
The often deeply religious, and definitely deeply heresy-conscious, physicians of medieval Europe did not, of course, believe that the stars were more powerful in influencing the course of human events than was God. Rather, the heavens were a natural force that was as dependent upon for its existence God as humans were. Thus “si Deus voluerit” (a frequent way that the Latin manuscripts translated the original Arabic phrase in'sh’allah), if God willed things to be the way they were, and the stars were but a sort of heavenly machine through which God influenced humans, men could safely look to the stars for glimpses of the Divine intent without giving the impression of idolatry. And these glimpses were invaluable, particularly when it came to the type of astrological forecasts that were known as “interrogations,” namely, questions whose answers were normally hidden to human beings.
Among the types of questions that might be asked as an astrological interrogation was the question of whether or not a particular woman was a virgin. Numerous books, including the influential writings of the Italian scholar Guido Bonatti, specifically describe how to use the stars to answer this question, and Bonatti’s results at least seem to have been spectacularly specific. By reckoning the appropriate astrological charts, Bonatti claimed to be able to tell whether a woman was tempted by a man but did not give in to him, whether she remained entirely unmoved by a man’s sexual entreaties, and even whether she had refrained from having sex with a man but was still secretly thinking it over.
It appears that in some cases, astrologers even believed that the stars could divulge extremely specific details—whether a woman’s private parts had been touched by either a hand or a penis, if a man had ejaculated on or near her without penetrating her vagina, and whether a woman had been fooling around and had become convinced that she’d lost her virginity even though she really hadn’t. And that wasn’t all. The writer Albohali described configurations of planets that would make women sexually aggressive, and Ibn Ezra contended that Venus in either the seventh or twelfth house would lead to an individual desiring intercourse excessively, even daily. Albubather’s Book on Nativities, a popular text, catalogued astrological details that would predict traits as diverse and undesirable as sodomy, impotence, hermaphroditism, hemmorhoids, and bad breath.
Not all the astrologers seem to have been completely convinced, however, that the stars were foolproof or, for that matter, that they as astrologers wanted to take responsibility for it even if they were. Despite the extraordinary level of specificity with which he claimed to be able to diagnose a sexual history through the stars, Bonatti advised a circumspect approach to handling an astrologically suspected breach of virginity. Knowing as he did that virginity could be compromised in numerous ways, some of which didn’t have anything to do with being penetrated sexually by a man, he advised the careful astrologer that the query should be dismissed rather than run the risk of falsely casting aspersions on a woman’s virtue. One might read this as a humanitarian gesture, of course, and no doubt that was what Bonatti intended his readers to see. But it might be more realistic to read it as a cleverly disguised admission that he realized that astrology might simply not be quite as accurate, nor virginity as knowable, as he wanted to make it out to be… and that he was uninterested in being held liable for being the bearer of bad news.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames