The body is a complex site of interdisciplinary debates, a central category in cultural constructions which has been widely analysed through different theoretical perspectives. As both linguistic sign and materiality occupying and needing space, the body remains, as much as bodies remain, an essential focus in the essays collected here, ranging from very early Medieval discourses to early modern European cultural and medical contexts, from disability to science fiction, from contemporary fiction on materiality and waste to postcolonial rewritings of/on the body.