The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity

"Cooper's focus, in 'The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity', is the tension between virginity and marriage as Christian ideals during the rise of the ascetic movement, and her main strength is her insistence that theological debates did not take place in a cultural vacuum but within the parameters set by traditional Graeco-Roman views of sexuality. She goes further than many previous writers on this period in her confident integration of the 'classical' and 'theological' sources....While making a strong case for seeing rank, rather than gender, as women's first area of identity, Cooper also offers persuasive suggestions on how women readers in the period used the texts men wrote....Cooper rightly links her excellent study to contemporary uses of gender in defining moral superiority in Western and post-colonial societies...[and] has given us a model of how it should be done."Kate Cooper is the author of 'The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity', published 1996 under ISBN 9780674939493 and ISBN 0674939492.