The womb as a wild mother beast

This article traces the roots of a metaphor that compares the aching womb to a forest or wild beast. A close examination of the metaphor, which appears in a chapter on uterine pains in Gilbert of England’s Compendium medicinae, opens a window into ideas that circulated in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin thought about human and animal maternal affection. After mapping out the medical tradition in which this singular metaphor appears, we turn to bestiaries, encyclopedias, literature, biblical commentaries, and sermons to situate this metaphor in a broader cultural context. By awakening the metaphor of the wild beast/womb, we identify a notion of embodied motherly love that circulated in medieval learned Latin Europe. These findings, in turn, shed new light on the role of animal-human discourse during the period, and reveal a compassionate approach to miscarriage and loss within medieval medicine.