Explores ancient sexuality, focusing on symbolism as well as on beliefs, and explores the concept of the female body in Greece before the impact of Christianity.

When international scholarship recipient Brooke Townsend arrived in Greece, the last person she expected to see was her old high school flame, Panos Kratos. During his time as a foreign exchange student in Dallas, he and Brooke shared a brief interlude which left her broken-hearted and forever fascinated by the ancient world he came from. Although she vowed never to speak of Panos again, now that she’s face to face with the sexy Greek, can Brooke forget the past and trust him with her most prized possessions―her virginity and, more important, her heart?

From Classical Antiquity to the present, virginity has been closely allied with power: as someone who chooses a life of celibacy retains mastery over his or her body. Sexual potency withheld becomes an energy-reservoir that can ensure independence and enhance self-esteem, but it can also be harnessed by public institutions and redirected for the common good. This was the founding principle of the Vestal Virgins of Rome and later in the monastic orders of the middle ages. Mythical accounts of goddesses and heroines who possessed the ability to recover their virginity after sexual experience demonstrate a belief that virginity is paradoxically connected both with social autonomy and the ability to serve the human community. Virginity Revisited is a collection of essays that examines virginity not as a physical reality but as a cultural artefact. By situating the topic of virginity within a range of historical 'moments' and using a variety of methodologies, Virginity Revisited illuminates how chastity provided a certain agency, autonomy, and power to women. This is a study of the positive and negative features of sexual renunciation, from ancient Greek divinities and mythical women, in Rome's Vestal Virgins, in the Christian martyrs and Mariology in the Medieval and early Modern period, and in Grace Marks, the heroine of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace.

Marietta, a princess of Montvelatte, is just looking at the last man she wants to encounter in the world?Yanis Markides, a successful financial adviser who threw a young princess out of his bed ten years ago. She loved him and decided to give herself as his birthday present back then, but was rejected because he could only think of her as a younger sister. They now meet again at Marietta’s brother’s wedding as dance partners and Yanis whispers to her, “Let’s love each other tonight.”

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl’s denied or disrupted transition into adulthood. In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex, and childbirth. When problems arose just before or during this transition, the transitional girl’s status within society became insecure. Walker presents a case for how and why the dead Greek virgin girl, depicted in Archaic through Hellenistic sources, in both texts and inscriptions, as a bride of Hades, and the life-long female Christian virgin or celibate ascetic, dubbed the bride of Christ around the third century CE, provide a fruitful point of comparison as particular examples of strategies used to neutralize the tension of disrupted female transition into adulthood. Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ offers a fascinating comparative study that will be of interest to anyone working on virginity and womanhood in the ancient world.

Signs of Virginity examines virginity testing in Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship of these tests to male sexual violence. Rosenberg points to two authors--Augustine of Hippo and the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud--who construct alternative models that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity, encouraging men to be gentle, rather than brutal, in their sexual behavior.