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'The book delivers more than it promises... important book.' -Journal of Roman Studies'Flemming's translations are accurate and some of these texts have not been translated into a modern language before. The book is therefore very useful because it makes all these materials accessible to the non-classicist and offers an overview to those more familiar with classical texts.' -Medical History'In spite of the increased interest in both ancient medical science and the history of women, Rebecca Flemming's book covers a still quite neglected field by combining both of them.' -Medical HistoryDr Flemming has written a book about women and medicine in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, an important but neglected period. It is about female medical practitioners and patients in the Roman world, what male doctors wrote about women, how they understood them, and the wider effects their ideas and writings had upon women's lives.
An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality. Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to midd...
Christianity in the Second Century seeks to show how academic study on this critical period of Christian development has undergone change over the last thirty years. It focuses on contributions from early Christian and ancient Jewish studies, and ancient history, all of which have contributed to a changing scholarly landscape.
A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community’s well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, t...
Multidisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship of infertility and the "historic" STIs--gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis--producing surprising new insights in studies from across the globe and spanning millennia.
This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward women’s bodies. Across the globe, women have always controlled their fertility through intimate efforts ultimately tied to larger political processes and gendered power dynamics. Women’s biological reproductive capabilities have been contested sites of power struggles, shaping the formation, rule, and dissolution of political regimes throughout history. Yet these intersections between the intimate and the political remain understudied in the historical literature. This book explores these questions from the perspective of multiple time periods, geographic locations, actors...
How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirth Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing...
By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in which two classical stories of sexual difference were told, retold and remade from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnodike, the 'first midwife' who disguises herself as a man and then exposes herself to her potential patients, and Phaethousa, who grows a beard after her husband leaves her, are stories from the ancient world that resonated in the early modern period in particular. Tra...
Galen is the most important medical writer in Graeco-Roman antiquity, and also extremely valuable for understanding Graeco-Roman thought and society in the second century AD. This volume of essays locates him firmly in the intellectual life of his period, and thus aims to make better sense of the medical and philosophical 'world of knowledge' that he tries to create. How did Galen present himself as a reader and an author in comparison with other intellectuals of his day? Above all, how did he fashion himself as a medical practitioner, and how does that self-fashioning relate to the performance culture of second-century Rome? Did he see medicine as taking over some of the traditional roles of philosophy? These and other questions are freshly addressed by leading international experts on Galen and the intellectual life of the period, in a stimulating collection that combines learning with accessibility.
"Late Ancient Knowing explores how people in late antiquity went about knowing their world and how this knowing shaped late ancient lives. Each essay is dedicated to a single concept--'Animal,' 'Demon,' 'Countryside,' 'Christianization,' 'God'--studying the ways in which individuals and societies in this period created and interacted with visible and invisible realities. Rather than narrating late ancient history based on facts defensible in modern historical terms, these essays attempt to create histories based on what are now considered late ancient fictions, the now-discarded paradigms of late ancient thought"--Provided by publisher.