The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction

   • Anne L. McClanan, Karen Rosoff Encarnación

   Pages 1-10

3. Representing Women on Roman Sarcophagi

   • Janet Huskinson

   Pages 11-31

4. “Weapons to Probe the Womb”

   • Anne L. McClanan

   Pages 33-57

5. Myth and Magic in Early Byzantine Marriage Jewelry

   • Alicia Walker

   Pages 59-78

6. Spinning Yarns

   • Veronica Sekules

   Pages 79-91

7. Insecure Borders

   • Paula M. Rieder

   Pages 93-113

8. Relics of a Fertile Heart

   • Katharine Park

   Pages 115-133

9. Beautiful Brides and Model Mothers

   • Geraldine A. Johnson

   Pages 135-161

10. Renaissance Household Goddesses

    • Adrian W. B. Randolph

    Pages 163-189

11. The Moralized Breast in Early Modern Spain

    • Charlene Villaseñor Black

    Pages 191-219

12. The Proper Uses of Desire

    • Karen Rosoff Encarnación

    Pages 221-249

13. The Sodomite’s Clothes

    • Helmut Puff

    Pages 251-272

14. Back Matter

    Pages 273-285

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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.

• communication
• Europe
• gender
• marriage
• material culture
• politics
• reformation
• Renaissance
• Sex
• Spain
• weapons
• women

'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

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.

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