Mapping the Womb.
A Discursive History of the Uterus in Premodern Jewish Culture
This project offers the first comprehensive study of the uterus in premodern Jewish culture, showing how it functions as a discursive and epistemic site through which theological, legal, medical, and gendered knowledge is produced and negotiated. Across key genres of Jewish writing, the womb is imagined not simply as an organ of reproduction but as a locus for thinking about creation, sexual difference, authority, and communal continuity. Focusing on the discursive establishment of the Jewish uterus, the project asks three interrelated questions: which terms establish the womb as an epistemic site in Jewish texts; through which spatial, topographical, and conceptual models is the uterus described, and how do these relate to contemporaneous cultural traditions and narratives; and how do these constructions participate in broader discourses of gender, reproduction, lineage, and bodily regulation?
Despite a rich and wide-ranging textual tradition, the Jewish womb has not yet been examined systematically in scholarship. By tracing a discursive history of the uterus in premodern Jewish thought, the project makes an original contribution not only to Jewish Studies, but also to gender history, the history of knowledge, and the medical humanities, while demonstrating how deeply rooted constructions of the female body continued to shape later cultural discourse. The premodern period is especially significant in this regard, since it marks a formative phase in which Jewish understandings of the female body, sexual difference, care, and medical treatment were reconfigured across interconnected religious, medical, and intellectual traditions.
The project’s source base consists of rabbinic texts, including Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, as well as Jewish medical, mystical, and polemical treatises ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Biblical, extra-Jewish, and material sources serve selective contextual and comparative purposes. Rather than aiming at exhaustive coverage, the project works with selectively defined and conceptually filtered corpora, approaching each text through a uterus-centred selection of key works and passages. This source base is designed to make historically legible the uterus as a discursive and epistemic site across Jewish textual traditions. Approached as an archive in the Foucauldian sense, the analysed texts do not merely preserve statements about the womb, but participate in shaping the very conditions under which it becomes thinkable and governable. At the same time, they are treated not simply as expressions of Jewish thought, but as historically situated evidence for how reproductive bodies, gendered difference, and communal continuity were conceptualised and regulated in the premodern period.
Andi Arnovitz, Be Fruitful and Multiply, 2019.
Methodologically, the project combines lexicological analysis with topographical and conceptual approaches grounded in gender-critical theory. Lexical analysis traces the terms and semantic associations through which the womb becomes thinkable, including its links to compassion, motherhood, secrecy, and generation. Attentive to the interrelation of words and worlds, this approach also draws on comparative non-Jewish material from the same broad periods in order to show how ideas of the womb were shaped by surrounding cultures and where Jewish thought departs from them. Topographical analysis examines the spatial structures through which the womb is imagined, for instance as container, house, prison, tomb, or boundary space shaped by concealment and control. These constructions are further illuminated by the Jewish idea of the human body as a microcosm, an image of the divinely created world in which each space has its designated form, order, and function. Conceptual analysis, finally, examines how the womb functions as a site of meaning through metaphor. It emerges not only as a container of associations and expectations attached to those who bear wombs, but also, by extension, as a figure for female gender and the roles assigned to women. In this way, the analysis makes visible the mechanisms through which premodern Jewish writers negotiate questions of gender, embodiment, authority, and Jewish continuity.
The project establishes the womb as a key category for the historical study of Jewish thought and for wider feminist histories of the body, reproduction, and knowledge, demonstrating that the uterus was not a marginal object of reproductive discourse, but a central site at which different categories of identity were negotiated and regulated.
Aurora consurgens, Ms. Rh. 172, f. 11r, Zentralbibliothek Zürich
Medieval Menstrual Matters:
Power, Purity, and Bodies in Global Contexts
Publication project with Rosalie Gabay Bernheim
This project explores the Middle Ages through the lens of menstruation to interrogate how patriarchal power shaped thought, practice, and everyday life. It brings into focus a site where medical, theological, and cultural discourses converge, producing durable ideas about gender, purity, embodiment, and social order. Reading sources where menstruation is explicit and, crucially, where it is silenced or euphemised, the project recovers the contours of medieval intellectual traditions and the lived experiences of menstruators. It argues that medieval societies moved from a narrow preoccupation with guarding sacred spaces to a pervasive governance of bodies, with consequences for marriage, sexuality, fertility, and political belonging.
Spanning c. 800–1500, the volume is deliberately interdisciplinary and non-Eurocentric. Chapters work across medical, theological, legal, literary, visual, and material evidence from medieval Europe and its interconnected worlds, with comparative points to other premodern frameworks where sources permit. Drawing on feminist histories of patriarchy and critical menstruation studies, the project treats menstruation as a collective, historically produced experience. It mobilises the concept of menstrunormativity—the patriarchal expectation that menstruation be concealed, regulated, and deemed deviant when visible—and reads silence, euphemism, and prescription as evidence for how that norm was made and maintained.
Methodologically, the project “reads against the grain,” linking prescriptions to practices and institutions to embodied experience through feminist, queer, disability, postcolonial, and critical race frameworks. It traces how menstrual meanings structured access to education, labour, authority, and sacred space, and shows how the devaluation of reproductive sexuality reinforced subordination. By making past configurations legible, the volume equips contemporary scholarship and activism—on cost, sustainability, leave policies, pain, stigma, and openness—with historical depth. Menstruation mattered in the Middle Ages, and it matters now.
Imagining the Menstruating Jew in Medieval Christian Thought
Doctoral Research, 2019 – 2023
My doctoral research explored a striking yet little-studied motif in medieval Christian discourse: the accusation that Jewish men menstruated. Spanning sources from the 12th to the 17th century, my project traced how Christian writers imagined the Jewish male body as feminised – or even queer -, leaky, and theologically deviant.
Far from being a bizarre curiosity, this image served as a powerful vehicle for expressing anxieties about gender, sexuality, and religious difference. The bleeding Jewish man became a symbol of disorder—collapsing distinctions between male and female, sacred and profane, Christian and Jew. Through this figure, Christian thinkers articulated fantasies of bodily transgression, reinforced social boundaries, and contributed to emerging notions of racialised identity.
Methodologically, the project draws on queer theory, critical race studies, and critical menstruation studies to analyse how Christian culture used the language of the body — especially bleeding, permeability, and defilement — to imagine Jewishness as a site of threat and transgression. This interdisciplinary framework enabled a close reading of how bodily imagery operated across theology, medicine, and polemic.
The project makes three key arguments: first, that the menstruating Jew functioned not merely as a figure of heresy, but as a distinctly queer construction, deployed to destabilise both Jewishness and masculinity. Second, that blood—framed as divine punishment, moral failure, or somatic error—was used to render the Jewish body irredeemably abject. And third, that this motif became a strategic rhetorical tool in times of crisis, used to justify exclusion, conversion, and violence. In doing so, it helped shape antisemitic thought and Christian identity alike.
This was the first sustained study of the menstruating Jew as a queer cultural trope. Drawing on over thirty Latin and vernacular texts — including sermons, medical treatises, theological commentaries, and Inquisition records — I showed how Christian authors used this imagery to mark Jewishness as both physically and morally uncontainable.
This research will appear as a monograph entitled Queer Blood, forthcoming with ARC Humanities Press in 2026.
Poster for “Medieval Matters”, Symposium at Queen Mary, University of London, June 2023. © Kerstin Mayerhofer.