Professor Helen King (OU), ‘The material body: what does an ancient womb look like?’

The standard view of votive body parts in the ancient Mediterranean is that there are a lot of wombs and breasts because childbirth was an area on which people felt particularly in need of divine assistance. In this paper, I want to question the identification of these votives simply as wombs. I will do this by setting these objects alongside the different ways in which the womb has been represented in two and three dimensions, and in a range of media, up to the present day, and by showing how textual descriptions can usefully be brought into alignment with visual imagery.