ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how virginity and virgins might have been understood as asexual and "ungendered", as some of the Church Fathers and modern scholars so often present them, and how this in turn presented some challenges for Christian writers, particularly in the Western Church. The so-called Greek novels abound with the kind of gender-bending we find in Early Christian literature, and these texts have therefore, particularly in the wake of Foucault, become popular as comparative material for scholars of Early Christianity. Recent studies of sexuality and gender in Antiquity all stress how the division between the two sexes reflects the social and cultural importance of this division in classical Greece as well as in Roman times. Hippolytus, the devoted follower of the virgin goddess Artemis, is probably the closest we may come to a male virgin in classical Antiquity. The chapter deals with instances where the derivatives virginitas or partheneia are applied with specific reference to men.
