Cambridge Scholars Publishing Cultural Constructions of the Uterus in Pre-modern Societies, Past and Present

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. About the Author Lorenzo Verderame is Professor of Assyriology at La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy. His publications include Le tavole I-VI della serie astrologica Enūma Anu Enlil (2002), Neo-Sumerian Administrative Texts from Umma Kept in the British Museum, Parts Two and Three (2006 and 2009), Approaching Rituals in Ancient Cultures (2013), Letterature dell’antica Mesopotamia (2016), and Introduzione alle culture dell'antica Mesopotamia (2017). He is the epigraphist in chief of the archaeological mission in Nina, and his research focuses on Mesopotamian magic, divination and religion, celestial observation, and Akkadian and Sumerian literature. M. Erica Couto-Ferreira teaches Sumerian at the CEPOAT, Universidad de Murcia, Spain. She is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Assyriology of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her publications include Etnoanatomía y partonomía del cuerpo humano en sumerio y acadio. El léxico Ugu-mu (2009) and Childbirth and Women’s Healthcare in Pre-Modern Societies (2014). Her research focuses on women’s healthcare, gender studies, history of the body, and ritual studies.