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.

Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

'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.

?This collection of essays is remarkable not only for the breadth of its scope, materials and approaches, but also for its quality? - Sophie Cavarria, The Journal of Roman Studies, 2023.