Introduction

This volume addresses a set of historical questions that explore the multiple aspects associated with the uterus through the dissection of both learned and popular sources, material evidence, daily practices, iconography, and representation. It transcends Eurocentric models of understanding and representing the female body by bringing into the discussion a number of case studies taken from a larger number of cultural and social historical realities, including the Mediterranean, the Ancient Near East, Pre-Columbian America, East Asia, and Medieval Europe, that are explored from the methodological perspectives offered by a wide range of disciplines and epistemologies. Because of its intimate, indissoluble relation to the experience of being a woman, and because of its hiddenness within the body and darkness; its communication with the outside world and its accessibility through the vagina; its capacity to contain and give shelter; to engender and procreate; to expulse and give birth to both fully formed and truncated, deformed beings; and its potential to go in and out, the womb offers a wealth of possibilities to conceptualise the world.