Sheelas, Sex, and Significance in Romanesque Sculpture: The Kilpeck Corbel Series

• Autores: Marian Bleeke
• Localización: Studies in iconography, ISSN 0148-1029, Nº. 26, 2005, págs. 1-26
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Sculptures on the church of Saint Mary and Saint David at Kilpeck, England, offer a potential medieval discourse on the sexually active female body as a reproductive body rather than a sinful one. One sculpture is recognized as one of the group of “Sheela-na-gigs,” images of naked women actively exposing their genitals, found on 12th-century and later medieval buildings in England and Ireland. These images are now commonly regarded as “sermons in stone,” delivering the medieval church's moralizing message about the evils of women and the sins of sexuality. The general absence of other sexually explicit imagery on the church would appear to have tied the Sheela sculpture to other sorts of images and thereby provided the terms for a potential discourse on the sexually active female body. Unlike the church's discourse on sexual sin, the terms of this discourse are not moralizing, but seem instead to refer to the physiological processes of reproduction. The Kilpeck Sheela and other corbels indicate that the dramatic effects that the physiological processes of reproduction have on the woman's body were literally seen as dangerous and disturbing.