A Mochica stirrup vessel

Early Arabic versions of Trota’s text contain drawings – caricatures, really – of women undergoing treatment. Otherwise, depictions of women in Early Medieval European art are rare, and when they do grace the margins of manuscripts the images are overwhelmingly dominated by stock figures of saintly virgins.

More than five hundred surviving objects display a sexual theme: sex in bed, sex standing, anal sex, oral sex and masturbation are all graphically depicted. Whether these were the indulgences of a decadent elite, like the erotic murals of Pompeii, or magical charms designed to arouse, is not clear. What seems unarguable is that such objects must have initiated or reflected conversations about the physical relations between men and women: sex was no conversational taboo and there is no suggestion that, like the grisly sins of the flesh depicted by medieval European artists, sex was in itself ‘sinful’ or corrupting. Fertility and the cycles of birth, life, reproduction and death were recurring and vital motifs in South American society, as they were in Europe; but depictions of masturbation, of anal and oral sex are hardly encouragements to pregnancy and multiplication; quite the opposite. There is no prudery: this is sex for the hell of it.

I am particularly intrigued by a series of designs that show the pivotal event in the ever-renewing cycle of life: a woman at the moment of giving birth.^≈ In each example, the mother, sitting on a low stool or chair, is braced against and held from behind by another woman, while the baby emerges from her womb. Sometimes she is naked; occasionally she is clothed in a loose garment. On other vessels she is assisted by a second woman: a midwife, who is supporting or pulling the baby’s head as it emerges. Although many of these vessels are superficially similar, each one is individually crafted with a distinct and expressive range of individual artistic flair on show.

Three obvious questions come to mind: for whom were these ceramics made? What set of meanings or functions, if any, did they fulfil? And what liquid did the jugs hold? One might see the gift of such an item as a congratulatory present to an expectant mother – to wish her luck. That seems a little like offering a hostage to fortune, though. Or were such vessels commissioned and owned by professional midwives, to advertise their skills or to reassure their prospective clients? They might have held soothing oils or essences, to be burned in a dish to induce relaxation (reminding one of Trota the Salernitan medic). They could have contained magic potions or alcohol or, indeed, some herbal antiseptic.

Blurred vocational lines between midwives, women healers and shamans are an intercultural feature of pre-industrial societies. Whatever the individual case, these depictions tap into a preoccupation with the cycles of life, death and rebirth in whose wonders, mysteries, creativity and dangers women played central roles. Like the stirrup pots depicting sexual activity, the birthing vessels may also self-consciously relate these cycles to the transfer of fluids between bodies, symbolically replicated in drinking rituals or the pouring of the contents, magic or otherwise, from their spouts. The Mochica stirrup vessels remain one of art’s most intriguing mysteries.