The Temptations of the Flesh:

Virginity and Chastity, 16th–21st Century

Alain Cabantous and François Walter

(Payot, 414 pages, 2020)

The concepts of virginity and chastity have sat at the heart of Christian theological debate relating to the nature and aims of marriage throughout modern Western history. Following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, virginity and chastity lost much of their moral and social value. Yet if one is to judge from recent movements calling for sexual abstinence, and the persistence of hymen checks, they have retained a measure of currency. In retracing the complex history of these two notions over time, the authors offer a fresh perspective on the evolution of sexual and moral attitudes, and the perduring weight of male fantasies on the female condition.

Cabantous and Walter guide us through the transition from Greek antiquity’s notions of sexual virtue to Christian ethics of purity. In retracing the shifting definitions of virginity and chastity as the two became increasingly associated with women’s submissive status and sexual inferiority, the authors unpack the relationship between virginity, chastity, celibacy, and abstinence; one might be a virgin without being chaste, chaste without being a virgin, or celibate without being chaste. This complexity prompts them to question the relation between theory and practice, religious injunctions and real social behaviors. Drawing on a wealth of sources—theological treaties, patristic texts, manuals of confession, libertine novels, and more—the authors present a rich and complex historical landscape populated by Roman vestals, eighteenth-century libidinous priests, French revolutionary heroines, and English feminists. These reveal that virginity could also be embraced as a political weapon, a refusal of marital submission, and complicity with an oppressive social and economic order.

The Temptations of the Flesh presents an engaging and comprehensive reflection on the changing perceptions of the body and its carnal, reproductive, political, and spiritual functions. Cabantous and Walter do not to propose a new history of sexuality. Rather, they offer a fresh, broader perspective of the concepts of chastity and virginity, both male and female, that have played an essential role in the construction of Western modernity.

Alain Cabantous is a professor of modern history at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He has published numerous books, including Histoire de la nuit XVIIe–XVIIIe (Fayard, 2009, Prix Guizot de l’Académie française) and Blasphemy (Columbia University Press, 2002).

François Walter is an honorary professor of history at the University of Geneva. Among his publications are La Suisse: Au-delà du paysage (Gallimard, 2011) and Hiver: Histoire d’une saison (Payot, 2014).