Eighteen papers, presented at a conference held in Cardiff in 2000, examine perceptions and representations of the human body, particularly female, in literature and in medieval and early modern ideology in general. Women, foreigners and other marginalised sections of society were often presented by male authors and churchmen as having monstrous' appetites for sex, money, food, power and sin. Divided into three sections, papers focus on sexual appetite, depictions of the monstrous female body' and the use of the body as a metaphor for the state and for a race.