We are delighted to announce our upcoming Ancient History research event, a book launch taking place online, on Monday 10 May, 17:00-18:15, celebrating the volume Bodily Fluids in Antiquity (Routledge , 2021) edited by Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Laurence Totelin (Cardiff University).
The discussion panel includes Prof. Ralph M. Rosen (University of Pennsylvania) and Prof. Caroline Petit (University of Warwick).
Following a five-year project, Mark Bradley (Department of Classics and Archaeology), together with Laurence Totelin and Victoria Leonard (Cardiff University), has published an edited volume with Routledge on Bodily Fluids in Antiquity. From ancient Egypt to Imperial Rome, from Greek medicine to early Christian narratives, this volume examines how the fluids produced by the human body influenced ancient 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.