The female reproductive system has, from very early on, been cast as the riddle of all riddles, as an entity calling for confounding and astounding descriptions that only the riddle is uniquely constructed to convey. To bear and to be born, these strike one as originary elemental riddles somehow in defiance of Aristotle's dictum that nothing can come from nothing. One of the earliest and possibly best-known recorded riddles about the mysterious uterus appeared for centuries in a Latin primer: ‘My mother bore me, and soon was born of me’. The solution presented is water and ice, which in a sense ‘give birth’ to one another by moving through the processes of freezing and melting. Perhaps equally old is the one about clouds, presented riddlingly as that which ‘becomes pregnant without conceiving’. While these ancient riddles figure procreation in elemental terms, anthropologists have also long considered the cultural bases and implications of such procreation riddles, observing just how the social rituals of riddling work, for instance, to entrench incest taboos. And from yet another perspective, just why procreation should be repeatedly encoded in the form of the riddle might be explained by human psychology, for as Freud observed, the central riddle of childhood is ‘where do babies come from?’

It is a mistake to think transhistorically of the riddle, to think of it as a durable rhetorical or linguistic form akin to anagrams and palindromes and serving mainly as a distraction or light entertainment. Riddles, like other linguistic forms, occupy a complex position within various cultures and at various historical moments. Recent critical works have done much to persuade us that historically grounded studies of linguistic forms such as puns and riddles and of rhetorical practices such as dilation and equivocation are crucial to our understanding of the interactions between early modern culture and literature. And early modern literary accounts in England are particularly thick with descriptions of the seemingly mysterious and miraculous workings – one might indeed say the riddle – of sexuality, especially female sexuality.

As for the riddle's place within ‘serious’ literature, critics and poets from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century seem at odds. For some, riddles are nearly synonymous with condemnable affectation and obscurity in formal writing.