All those supposedly pious medieval churches, might not have been as uptight as we imagine. Hundreds of explicit stone carvings showing naked women flashing their bits are scattered across European buildings. Old-timey peasants heading to church would walk under doorways with stone carvings of a women enthusiastically displaying her lady parts. These saucy ladies, known as sheela na gigs, are most common in Ireland, where over 120 of them have been caught in the act of their anatomical show-and-tell.
"The greatest concentrations can be found in Ireland, Great Britain, France and Spain, sometimes together with male figures," explains Barbara Freitag in her book Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma. Nobody's quite sure why they're called sheela na gigs — it might come from Irish for "Julia of the breasts" or old English slang for, well, you can probably guess.
From the book's introduction:
An air of mystery has surrounded the crude carvings of naked females, called Sheela-na-gigs, since their scholarly discovery some one hundred and sixty years ago. Especially puzzling is the fact that they occur predominantly in medieval religious buildings. High-minded clergymen have since defaced or destroyed many of these carvings, and for a long time archaeologists dismissed them as rude and repulsive
Modern feminist scholars are particularly into these ancient flashers. As Georgia Rhoades puts it, these figures represent "a message about her body, its power and significance — a gesture of rebellion against misogyny." In other words, medieval women were fighting the patriarchy before it was cool.
Oddly, these provocative figures show up most often in areas controlled by Anglo-Normans, whose laws were particularly harsh on women compared to the previous Anglo-Saxon laws. So either those Normans weren't as prudish as we thought, or something more interesting was happening in medieval church architecture than anyone's willing to admit. Nearly a thousand years later, scholars are still trying to figure out exactly what these ladies were up to.
Previously:
• Charles Ponstingl: amazing wood-carver who recreated the comics
• Lunar topography replicated in gorgeous fine art carvings
• Gorgeously detailed Thai fruit carvings
• Babylonian tablets reveal kings installed royal doubles during eclipses, then executed them
• Coins carved to reveal skulls under the faces
