Picturing Wombs in Late Medieval Germany

Jack Hartnell, University of East Anglia

This talk tries to make sense of an unusual group of obstetrical diagrams produced in late fifteenth-century Augsburg. Drawing on both long-standing visualisations of the female anatomy and more sinister gendered readings of contemporary obstetrical knowledge, these figures offer us a gateway into understanding the relationship between women, wombs, and their artistic realisation in medieval Germany.

Jack Hartnell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History & World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is an art historian and curator specialising in the cross-continental visual culture of premodern science and its display, broadly defined to include the artistic materials of medicine, cartography, and mathematics, most recently with a strong emphasis on Jewish art and culture.

Image caption: A German fifteenth-century manuscript now in Erfurt UL, CC1.0