The womb has been represented in many ways across Western European history, from miracle to sewer. This chapter begins with some of the earliest ways of showing the womb in printed materials. It then looks at what happens ...

Gothic stainglasses are sometimes described as symbols of the Virgin’s hymen: they transform sunrays’ appearance without diminishing their light. For obvious reasons of bienséance, Mary’s birthing is not represented as ...

In our work, we focused on the eighth of the twelve emblems of Louis de Caseneuve, (?-1645), a Jesuit from a bourgeois family in Tournon, entitled Nascentem damna uenantur (Misfortunes strike the one who is born). The first ...

In the introduction to their collective volume, The Body in Parts, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio use a psychoanalytic approach to examine the image of a supposed Medusa placed (overlayed) on top of an anatomical engraving ...

Using wordplay, Clément Marot expressed his difficulty in describing the female sex. Around the same period, successful attempts were made in the “blasons du con”, composed at a time when medicine brought a finer knowledge ...

Considered both the enigmatic emblem of femininity and the source of all women’s ailments, the uterus has long been the object of male medical speculations, fantasies, and interpretations. In early modern Europe, dissecting ...

Many treatises on gynaecology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the uterus as the cause of women’s diseases, according to a perspective inherited from the Hippocratic Corpus and Aretaeus. Simultaneously, ...

Perfectly symmetrical and facing each other, the two beautiful nudes depicted in Andreas Vesalius’s Epitome (1543) can be considered an artistic introduction to the anatomical investigation of sexed bodies placed on an ...

Aim: This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the gender pay gap (GPG) in Poland, examined within the national, European, and global contexts. It explores key causes, sectoral disparities, and the broader economic ...