Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bugge, John

Titel

Virginitas : An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal

Ist Teil von

• Archives Internationales D�́�Histoire des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas : 17

Ort / Verlag

Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands

Erscheinungsjahr

1975

Link zum Volltext

• Volltext

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• I: Sexuality and the Fall of Man -- 1. Gnostic Cosmogony -- 2. Christian Gnostics and the Book of Genesis -- 3. Augustinian Orthodoxy and the Original Sin -- II: Virginity and the Monastic Economy of Perfection -- 1. Vita angelica -- 2. Simplicitas -- 3. Contemplation and Prophecy -- 4. Milites Christi -- III: Sponsa Christi: Virginity and Epithalamian Mystery -- 1. The Song of Songs and Christian Exegesis -- 2. Encratism and Marriage -- 3. Epithalamian Gnosis -- IV: Virginity Sexualized -- 1. The Twelfth-Century Context: Ideas and Influences -- 2. Victorine Spiritual Marriage -- 3. St. Bernard and the Song of Songs -- 4. The Katherine Group and Erotic Spirituality -- V: Surviving Elements of Christian Gnosis -- 1. Sin as Sexual -- 2. Traditional Features of Virginity Deontologized -- 3. Virginity and Moral Conflict -- Afterword -- Appendix: The Virgin Mary: Virgin Birth and Immaculate Conception
• Apreface is best written last, after a book is done and its author may look back to survey what he hopes he has accomplished and what he must admit he has not. In hindsight virginity by itself has seemed a very large field to till, but with that reflection also comes a sense of misgiving, the awareness that a really comprehensive treatment of that subject would somehow have to encompass an enormous ter℗Ư rain, the whole length and breadth of Christianity's attitude toward sexuality from the earliest times down to the high Middle Ages. It could be argued that no small book could cover so much ground, and I would be the first to agree. As its subtitle is meant to suggest, the present work is, in at least two senses of the word, an essay: both an initial and tentative effort to get at the meaning of an extremely important but as yet unprobed medieval belief in the perfective value of the virginal life; and an interpretive study of a complex subject from a limited point of view, specifically, that in which the virgin appears in devotional literature as the bride of Christ