Sheela-Na-Gig

This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the Church and aristocratic moralists. So important was virginity to a woman’s value that we can find a variety of Medieval sources telling a woman how she could fake her virginity.

First of all, you could just *act* like a virgin, which one text says would mean showing “shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, [and] casting eyes down before men . . . .”.

The eleventh-century _Trotula_ (an important gynaecological text) has some more practical, if cringe-worthy, advice: “the day before her marriage [the woman who wants to fool people about her virginity], let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man”.

I, for one, am super glad they put the word “cautiously” in that description.

There were more ways to commit virginal subterfuge — try to get married when you were menstruating, for instance.

But if you really wanted to see if the lady was a virgin, then you could do things like check her urine or make her try to smell coal or certain flowers.

Hymen tests, urine checkers, and leeches of course are horribly wrong ways to go about establishing virginity, but the takeaway here is that a woman’s marital value, beauty, and moral rectitude was thought to be elevated by whether or not she had been penetrated by a penis.