Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s social theology: the barbaric heroic ideal christianised

Aldhelm’s De virginitate was the major product of his scholarly energies. In it Aldhelm, in a fixation on virginity as the means of living on earth the angelic life, moved beyond simple sexual rigorism to a radical exaltation of the preservation of physical virginity through the advocacy of both castration and suicide. It is further argued that the prime motivating factor in Aldhelm’s doing so was his desire to establish, for his Anglo-Saxon audience, a new paradigm of a christianised heroic ideal for both male and female, a way of living a truly christian life in terms commensurate with the violent norms of the barbaric heroic code.