Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma

Barbara Freitag's Sheela-na-gigs, Unravelling an Enigma, published by Routledge in 2004, is a scholarly investigation into the origin and meaning of the carved figures, typically shown displaying an exaggerated vulva, found on medieval churches and castles primarily across Ireland and Britain, surveying and weighing the competing explanations that have been proposed, a warning against evil, a fertility figure, a survival of pre-Christian goddess worship, against the actual architectural and documentary evidence. Its strength is that Freitag treats the figures as a genuinely open scholarly question and tests each existing theory against the evidence rather than adopting one romantic explanation, which much earlier writing on sheela na gigs did uncritically. Its limit is that the carvings' original purpose remains, by the book's own honest conclusion, unresolved rather than settled, so a claim stating definitively what a sheela na gig meant to the people who carved it overstates what even this careful study is able to establish.