1st Edition
Bodily Fluids in Antiquity
From ancient Egypt to Imperial Rome, from Greek medicine to early Christianity, this volume examines how human bodily fluids influenced ideas about gender, sexuality, politics, emotions, and morality, and how those ideas shaped later European thought.
Comprising 24 chapters across seven key themes—language, gender, eroticism, nutrition, dissolution, death, and afterlife—this volume investigates bodily fluids in the context of the current sensory turn. It asks fundamental questions about physicality and fluidity: how were bodily fluids categorised and differentiated? How were fluids trapped inside the body perceived, and how did this perception alter when those fluids were externalised? Do ancient approaches complement or challenge our modern sensibilities about bodily fluids? How were religious practices influenced by attitudes towards bodily fluids, and how did religious authorities attempt to regulate or restrict their appearance? Why were some fluids taboo, and others cherished? In what ways were bodily fluids gendered? Offering a range of scholarly approaches and voices, this volume explores how ideas about the body and the fluids it contained and externalised are culturally conditioned and ideologically determined. The analysis encompasses the key geographic centres of the ancient Mediterranean basin, including Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Egypt. By taking a longue durée perspective across a richly intertwined set of territories, this collection is the first to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging study of bodily fluids in the ancient world.
Bodily Fluids in Antiquity will be of particular interest to academic readers working in the fields of classics and its reception, archaeology, anthropology, and ancient to Early Modern history. It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in the history of the body and history of medicine.
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin
Part I
The language of fluidity
1. Fluid vocabulary: flux in the lexicon of bodily emissions
Amy Coker
Part II
A woman in flux
2. A valid excuse for a day off work: menstruation in an ancient Egyptian village
Rosalind Janssen
3. Uterine bleeding, knowledge, and emotion in ancient Greek medical and magical representations
Irene Salvo
4. Puellae gently glow: scent, sweat, and the real in Latin love elegy and Ovid’s didactic works
Jane Burkowski
5. Overflowing bodies and a Pandora of ivory: the pure humours of an erotic surrogate
Catalina Popescu
Part III
Erotic and generative fluids
6. The eyes have it: from generative fluids to vision rays
Julie Laskaris
7. ‘Infertile’ and ‘sub-fertile’ semen in the Hippocratic Corpus and the biological works of Aristotle
Rebecca Fallas
8. Say it with fluids: what the body exudes and retains when Juvenal’s couple relationships go awry
Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet
9. Flabby flesh and foetal formation: body fluidity and foetal sex differentiation in ancient Greek medicine
Tara Mulder
10. One-seed, two-seed, three-seed? Reassessing ancient theories of generation
Rebecca Flemming
11. Phalli fighting with fluids: approaching images of ejaculating phalli in the Roman world
Adam Parker
Part IV
Nutritive and healthy fluids
12. A natural symbol? The (un)importance of blood in early Greek literary and religious contexts
Emily Kearns
13. Taste and the senses: Galen’s humours clarified
John Wilkins
14. Breastmilk, breastfeeding, and the female body in early Imperial Rome
Thea Lawrence
15. Breastmilk in the cave and on the arena: early Christian stories of lactation in context
Laurence Totelin
Part V
Dissolving and liquefying bodies
16. Tears and the leaky vessel: permeable and fluid bodies in Ovid and Lucretius
Peter Kelly
17. Seneca’s corpus: a sympathy of fluids and fluctuations
Michael Goyette
18. Bodily fluids, grotesque imagery, and poetics in Persius’ Satires
Andreas Gavrielatos
Part VI
Wounded and putrefying bodies
19. ‘Efflux is my manifestation’: positive conceptions of putrefactive fluids in the ancient Egyptian coffin texts
Tasha Dobbin-Bennett
20. Physiology of matricide: revenge and metabolism imagery in Aeschylus’ Oresteia
Goran Vidović
21. Open wounds, liquid bodies, and melting selves in Early Imperial Latin literature
Assaf Krebs
Part VII
Ancient fluids: afterlife and reception
22. The reception of Classical constructions of blood in Medieval and Early Modern martyrologies
Anastasia Stylianou
23. ‘Expelling the purple tyrant from the citadel’: the menstruation debate in book 2 of Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum libri sex (1662)
Caroline Spearing
24. Opening the body of fluids: taking in and pouring out in Renaissance readings of Classical women
Helen King
Envoi
Mark Bradley and Victoria Leonard
Index
Biography
Mark Bradley is Professor of Classics and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham, UK. Together with Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University, USA), he is editor of a series of volumes on ‘The Senses in Antiquity’ for Routledge, for which he has contributed a volume on Smell and the Ancient Senses (2015).
Victoria Leonard is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, and at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean. She has published on religious conflict, gender and violence, and ancient historiography.
Laurence Totelin is Reader in Ancient History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published widely on Greek and Roman botany, pharmacology, and gynaecology.
"This carefully curated collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of bodily fluids in premodern Mediterranean cultures from a variety of socio-cultural, historical, scientific, linguistic and semiotic perspectives. This landmark volume shows how, despite the different functions and symbolic valences of bodily fluids, they nevertheless constitute an identifiable conceptual category in the ancient and early modern mind."
- Ralph M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania, USA
"Bodily Fluids in Antiquity is not a book (just) for medical historians: there is something for everyone, cultural historian, literary critic, linguist, or the simply curious. An unforgettable immersion in the liquid dimension of human bodies."
- Caroline Petit, University of Warwick, UK
