ABSTRACT
Though the female addressees of Aldhelm’s late seventh-century Opus de uirginitate are known to us only by name, the contents of this sprawling twin work of prose and verse suggest that he composed it with an awareness of these women’s prior reading and knowledge. Aldhelm’s startling characterization of virginity as an ornament acquired through labor thus likely reflects a shared cultural conception of ornament as something not frivolous or dispensable, but constitutive of the value of an artwork. Such a view of ornament may in turn explain a major divergence between the prose De uirginitate and its somewhat later verse companion, in which a psychomachia with Virginity as martial heroine has been substituted for a polemic against women’s elaborate attire.
