Beyond Virginity

This paper will explore how virginity intersects with periodisation; how, as a concept, over time, it not only rises above the limitations of sex but crosses gender boundaries, and how it acts as a form of agency. The paper will essentially investigate whether the application of gender as a category of analysis produces alternative accounts of time/change/periodisation to conventional historiographical ones, or whether virginity, and the way that the concept was gendered, meant that the Byzantines were able to understand time and temporality in ways other than the dominant ones.