Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

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

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Editors:
  1. Anne L. McClanan
    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Karen Rosoff Encarnación
    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
    Download chapter PDF

  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
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

'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

About the authors

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.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation