During the Middle Ages a woman's virginity was highly prized (meanwhile it did not seem to matter too much whether or not a man was a virgin). A lady was expected not to have sex until she was married, and her wedding night would be a kind of test to show that she had remained 'pure'. However, if she did have sex before, was there a way she could cheat on this test?
This was one of the topics raised in Kathleen Coyne Kelly's book, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages. She takes a look at how virginity was viewed and defined during the medieval period, finding that there were many viewpoints on the matter, which went beyond the medical and physiological. One text from the time states signs of virginity could include “shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men and the acts of men.”
The most common sign of virginity in a woman was that her hymen remained intact, and husbands would expect that a new wife would bleed during the first time they had sex. Some medieval texts advised women about how to convince a man into believing she was still a virgin. One version of the Trotula for instance gives a couple of options for a lady facing this situation:
This remedy will be needed by any girl who has been induced to open her legs and lose her virginity by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises…When it is time for her to marry, to keep the man from knowing, the false virgin will carefully deceive the husband as follows. Let her take ground sugar, the white of an egg, and alum and mix them in rainwater in which pennyroyal and calamint have been boiled down with other similar herbs. Soaking a soft and porous cloth in this solution, she let her keep bathing her private parts of her with it.
But the best of all is this disappointment: the day before her marriage, she let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care of her lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man.
Kelly adds that other tricks involved a woman arranging to have her wedding take place while she was menstruating, or (at least in medieval literature) secretly substituting the bride with another woman when it came time to consummate the marriage.