De institutione virginis
· Ambrose of Milan
· c. 391-392
· treatise
Latin · domain: latin-patristic-fourth-century · researched 2026-11-14
no English translation located. No published English translation of this text was located in the catalogues and series checked. Where only a non-English rendering or a translation of a daughter version exists, it is recorded below and does not close the gap. Treat this as a gap candidate, not as proof that no translation exists; the evidence names every source checked.
Why this is in the register
HOLLIS Primo for 'Ambrose De institutione virginis' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ambrose%20De%20institutione%20virginis&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 returns 4 records: the Italian 'Verginità e vedovanza' (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Rome: Città nuova, 1989, ed. Franco Gori, record https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990018620150203941), whose second volume contains De virginitate, De institutione virginis and Exhortatio virginitatis; a 1955 Italian 'Scritti sulla verginità'; and a monograph on the Virgin Mary in Ambrose. Nothing in English. The two obvious English routes do not cover it: the NPNF volume of Ambrose ('Select Works and Letters', 1896) translates De virginibus and De viduis but not this work, and the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies series that produced English De Abraham (2000) and In Lucam (1998) never reached it. A query for 'Ambrose On virginity' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ambrose%20On%20virginity&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 returns only the Peregrina Press rendering of De virginitate, a different treatise.
Ambrose's late treatise on the consecration of a virgin, and the work in which he argues most explicitly for Mary's virginity in the act of giving birth: the text itself insists that Christ was 'virginali fusus ... partu' and that the 'genitalia virginitatis claustra non solvit', which is the argument later Western mariology took from him. It is also a document about the social practice of consecrated virginity in 390s Milan: the legal status of the consecrated woman, her family, her property. Without it the English Ambrose on virginity is a one-sided corpus (De virginibus and De viduis only), and the mariological argument that later centuries cited is invisible.
"Correspondence : models of letter-writing from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century." Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 1997. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990072550790203941