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This interdisciplinary anthology takes as its starting point the belief that, as the material grounds of lived experience, material culture provides an avenue of historical access to women's lives, extending beyond the reaches of textual evidence. Studies here range from utilitarian tools used in Late Roman abortion to sacred, magical or ritual objects associated with sex, procreation, and marriage in the Renaissance. Together the essays demonstrate the complex relationship between language and object, and explore the ways in which objects become forms of communication in their own right, transmitting both rather specific messages and more generalized social and cultural values.
List of contents
Introduction Representing Women on Roman Sarcophagi; J.Huskinson 'Weapons to Probe the Womb': The Material Culture of Abortion and Contraception in the Early Byzantine Period; A. McClanan Myth and Magic in Early Byzantine Marriage Jewelry: The Persistence of Pre-Christian Traditions; A.Walker Spinning Yarns: Clean Linen and Domestic Values in Late Medieval French culture; V.Sekules Insecure Borders: Symbols of Clerical Privilege and Gender Ambiguity in the Liturgy of Churching; P.M. Rieder Relics of a Fertile Heart: The 'Autopsy' of Clare of Montefalco; K.Park Beautiful Brides and Model Mothers: The Devotional and Talismanic Functions of Early Modern Marian Reliefs; G.Johnson Renaissance Household Goddess: Fertility, Politics, and the Gendering of Spectatorship; A.Randolph The Moralized Breast in Early Modern Spain; C.Villaseñor-Black The Proper Uses of Desire: Reproduction and Sexuality in Reformation Anatomical Fugitive Sheets; K.Rosoff Encarnación The Sodomite's Clothes: Gift-Giving and Sexual Excess in Early Modern Germany and Switzerland; H.Puff
About the author
ANNE MCCLANAN studied at Harvard, the Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University and has excavated in Jordan and Turkey. Now an Assistant Professor at Portland State University, she teaches Late Roman and Medieval Art, she has a book forthcoming on the representation of early Byzantine Empresses that will appear in Palgrave's New Middle Ages Series edited by Bonnie Wheeler.
KAREN ROSOFF ENCARNACIÓN is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. During several years of work in women's health and occupational medicine she became interested in the relationship between individual experiences and the social and cultural formations within which they occur. Her forthcoming interdisciplinary dissertation, which combines her interests in art and medicine, studies the changing moral and epistemological status of visual experience in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in particular in relation to the development of anatomical prints in Northern Europe.
Summary
This interdisciplinary anthology takes as its starting point the belief that, as the material grounds of lived experience, material culture provides an avenue of historical access to women's lives, extending beyond the reaches of textual evidence. Studies here range from utilitarian tools used in Late Roman abortion to sacred, magical or ritual objects associated with sex, procreation, and marriage in the Renaissance. Together the essays demonstrate the complex relationship between language and object, and explore the ways in which objects become forms of communication in their own right, transmitting both rather specific messages and more generalized social and cultural values.
Additional text
'Such an anthology is certainly overdue, as studies of sexuality have tended to focus on queer experiences...an exciting and interesting addition to the historiography of premodern sexuality.' - Emma Hawkes, Parergon
'This collection of essays is helpful to those who would appreciate an overview on how different academic fields investigate the 'material culture' of sex, marriage and procreation. The necessity of such a project for further historical studies cannot be emphasized enough.' - Medical History
Report
'Such an anthology is certainly overdue, as studies of sexuality have tended to focus on queer experiences...an exciting and interesting addition to the historiography of premodern sexuality.' - Emma Hawkes, Parergon
'This collection of essays is helpful to those who would appreciate an overview on how different academic fields investigate the 'material culture' of sex, marriage and procreation. The necessity of such a project for further historical studies cannot be emphasized enough.' - Medical History
