Chapter 1 begins with an overview of some of the deployments of the bride of Christ in the early church, focusing mainly on Tertullian and his use of the metaphor as an instrument of control over consecrated virgins. The situation, as I see it, is extremely poignant because Tertullian, who was wont to extol virginity and disparage marriage, was reluctant to use this strategy: he was led to it by a literal reading of Genesis 6 and a fear of angelic miscegenation.
The second chapter examines the evolution of the consecrated virgin at the hands of the church fathers: her association with a very reclusive Virgin Mary (conflated with the bride of the Song of Songs), the different disciplines devised for the virgin, and the increasing focus on intact virginity. Patristic adulation of the sealed body not only justified legal restrictions on the woman's freedoms as protection of Christ's bride but, at least for some, validated suicide in the event that her virginity was imperiled.
Chapter 3 focuses on the successor states established in the wake of the Roman Empire's collapse and the conundrum of what to do with a would-be bride of Christ who is not a virgin. The English Aldhelm's initiatives to decenter female virginity include representing virginity primarily as a male virtue, in addition to extending its boundaries with instances of married chastity. By the same token, clerical authorities in the Frankish Empire struggle with polite ways of withholding the title sponsa Christi from Queen Radegund, who, although a member of a religious community and an important monastic foundress, was not a virgin. The chapter concludes with the examination of the life of the matron Rictrude and the hagiographer's projection of a rivalry between virginal and nonvirginal nuns.