♏︎⚦𝓜 (10, 602)

Public Domain Review contributor Rebecca Whitely offers a thoroughgoing exploration of the iconography and understanding of pregnancy and childbirth of Early Modern Europe, which envisioned in utero as a homunculus, a nesting portrait of mother and daughter couched in metaphors of astronomy and a well-tended garden. By turns both practical and superstitious, such diagrams and their legacy resolve—both in terms of caretaking and control—like any anatomical imprint when examined on multiple registers.