Herrick’s “Julia’s Churching” ends with the astonishing line — “Brings him not one, but many a Maiden-head” — which is where the semantic collapse you’re describing becomes visible as a deliberate poetic maneuver.
The poem has been playing Hymen as social principle: churching restores Julia to ritual purity, the ceremony closes and reopens the marriage bond, Hymen presides as god of joining. Then the final couplet switches registers without warning. Suddenly “Maiden-head” is physical again — the membrane, not the status; the breaking-through, not the bond. And because Herrick has just finished insisting on “every night his Bride,” the membrane keeps reconstituting itself. Hymen the god enforces a cycle in which hymen the tissue is perpetually renewed.
Herrick knew both etymologies and used the instability. The poem doesn’t resolve membrane into bond or bond into membrane — it makes the wife’s body perform the god’s function, over and over, nightly. The physical and the cosmic don’t collapse here; they are forced into a kind of violent collaboration.
“She who keeps chastly to her husbands side Is not for one, but every night his Bride: And stealing still with love, and feare to Bed, Brings him not one, but many a Maiden-head.”
— Robert Herrick, “Julia’s Churching, or Purification” (1648)
The MED’s -hēd(e) suffix entry says it: the suffix forms nouns denoting “rank or position, condition, quality.” Maiden-hēd was built as a status word — the condition of being a maiden, the way knight-hēd is the condition of being a knight. Not anatomy. Around 1200, the Vices and Virtues gives Augustine’s position in English: “Gif maiden hafð þese hali mihte on hire þanke, þeih hie wurðe hire unþankes forleiðen, hie is to-foren gode naþelas maiden” — if the holy power resides in the will (þanke), violation cannot reach it. The -hēd is in the intention, not the tissue. Herrick’s “many a Maiden-head” reverses the word’s own formation: pure membrane, nightly reconstituting, the churching rite managing a body, not a status. What the suffix separated, the poem collapses — not membrane into bond, but something earlier: condition into flesh.