Free Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank Page B

somewhere "in front of the cervix" can perhaps be excused by the tendency, even in the 1400s, to view the uterus as the true womanly genital, and the vagina merely as an accessory passageway. In any case, he seems to have an understanding that this bit of tissue—it is technically something of a misnomer, although a common one, to call it a membrane—is inconspicuous and often not noticed unless it is damaged.
    Savonarola's usage of "hymen" to mean the vaginal hymen was rapidly followed by the first such usage in English. The 1538 dictionary produced by Londoner Thomas Elyot cites it thus: "a skinne in the secrete place of a maiden, which whanne she is defloured is broken." From this point on, "hymen" becomes more and more commonly the vaginal hymen and less and less commonly anything else. By the seventeenth century, physicians and midwives writing in the vernacular use the term "hymen" in their discussions with the expectation that readers will automatically know which, out of the many parts of the body that could be called the hymen, they mean.
    This chronology leaves no evidence to support the idea that there is a direct connection between Hymenaeus, the Greek god of marriage, and the name we've ended up using for the small bit of genital tissue that bears the name "hymen." While it does indeed seem like a fine bit of poetic justice that the story of Hymenaeus, a tragedy involving the death of a young groom on his wedding night, would come to be associated with a piece of anatomy that traditionally doesn't survive the wedding, the etymological timing simply doesn't make a causal relationship plausible. Had the ancient Greeks used the word "hymen" to mean something more anatomically specific, even if only in the specific sense of meaning a membrane whose functional destiny lay in its being broken (the amniotic sac, for instance), the argument that Hymenaeus lent his name to the hymen might hold a bit more water. As it stands, Greeks of the era during which Hymenaeus was actively worshipped did not, as we've seen, acknowledge the existence of a specific vaginal membrane, much less name it after their patron god of weddings. Just as the hymen itself is vestigial, a remnant of the time in the formation of the female body when the vaginal canal did not yet open into the vulva, so is the term we use to identify it, a throwback to an era where anatomical knowledge was so generalized that every membrane in the body could carry the same name.
    Virginity Before the Hymen
    The story of the anatomical hymen begins in earnest with the Greek Soranus, practicing and writing in third-century Rome. Soranus's claim to fame is his Gynecology, one of the earliest works on the topic that has survived in its entirety, and what Soranus has to say about the physical nature of virginity is very interesting indeed.
    In virgins the vagina is depressed and narrower, because it contains ridges that are held down by vessels originating in the uterus; when defloration occurs, these ridges unfold, causing pain; they burst, resulting in the excretion of blood that ordinarily flows. In fact, the belief that a thin membrane grows in the middle of the vagina and that it is this membrane that tears in defloration or when menstruation comes on too quickly, and that this same membrane, by persisting and becoming thicker, causes the malady known as "imperforation," is an error.
    This description of the vagina as an expanding vessel with corrugated walls was considered authoritative for centuries due to its combination of intelligent observation and meticulous logic. Soranus refused to believe in the rumors he had heard about some strange membrane in the vagina because, as he wrote in Gynecology, he had no evidence that proved it existed. He had never been able to find it in dissection. He had never experienced any barriers to the insertion of probes into the vaginas of virgin patients. It also seemed, to Soranus, that if "the breaking of the membrane during