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.

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.