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51 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Biography, Women and Power

  • Rebecca Flemming
  • Journal:
    The Journal of Roman Studies / Volume 113 / November 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 December 2023, pp. 171-186
    Print publication:
    November 2023

  • Julia Hillner's life of Helena, mother of Constantine, is the twentieth volume published in OUP's ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, launched in 2010 with Duane Roller's biography of Cleopatra. An earlier and overlapping series on the same theme — Routledge's ‘Women of the Ancient World’ — began in 2006 and adds a further half-dozen titles to the portfolio, from Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizbeth Carney to The Women of Pliny's Letters by Jo-Ann Shelton.1 The pace of publication picked up in 2018 and two lives from the later Roman empire — of Melania the Younger by Elizabeth Clark and Sosipatra of Pergamum by Heidi Marx — appeared alongside Celia Schultz's account of Fulvia in 2021, for example. Late republican and late antique women dominate the catalogue overall, with some empresses and exotic leaders in between, and alongside a smaller set of Hellenistic royalty.2

  • 1 - (The Wrong Kind of) Gonorrhea in Antiquity

  • from Part One - The Hidden Pitfalls in the Early Documentary Record
    • By Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.
  • Edited by Simon Szreter
  • Book:
    The Hidden Affliction
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2019, pp 43-67

  • Summary

    Historiography and Methodology

    Studying the relationship between disease and fertility in antiquity is challenging. The first difficulty is establishing the presence, and then prevalence, of any particular condition before an assessment can be made of its demographic impact. In the case of what are now called sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the empirical obstacles to identifying such infections in the classical world are exacerbated by the moralizing that attends discussions of sexual practice and that has so strongly characterized the ways sexual behavior and pathology have been, and continue to be, conceptually conjoined. Julius Rosenbaum's influential and exhaustive nineteenth-century exploration of the ancient history of syphilis (broadly construed), for example, is based on the assumption that venereal diseases are caused by the “abuse” of the genital organs for nonprocreative purposes. Their history is, therefore, the history of human “lasciviousness and debauchery,” and there was so much of that in classical Greece and Rome that syphilis and all kinds of genital afflictions necessarily followed.

    More methodologically reputable approaches to the problem of past disease presence are threefold. The first is retrospective diagnosis, based primarily on the written sources surviving from a historical society, in which the descriptions of various ailments are critically assessed against modern clinical accounts and understandings. Paleopathology provides the second, focused on the analysis of the biological remains of that society, mostly on osteological scrutiny of skeletal evidence, but also increasingly on the study of ancient DNA (aDNA). Third, the development of next-generation gene-sequencing technologies and advances in Bayesian phylogenetics over the past decade have led to a dramatic increase in molecular clock–dating studies, including various key pathogens: it is now possible to produce a reasonably robust evolutionary timeline for present populations of microbes from genomic data about those populations, and more historical samples are now available. All these techniques and approaches have their strengths and weaknesses; they are best combined and, of course, ultimately reliant on the availability and quality of the evidence itself.

    In terms of retrospective diagnosis from ancient texts, there has been much debate among medical historians and physicians, often with a classical education and interests, about whether modern syphilis, gonorrhea, or any other genital affliction was present in antiquity. In the early years of the twentieth century, syphilis found no champions, but views were more divided on gonorrhea, which is the focus here.

  • 44 - Concluding Reflections

  • from Epilogue
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 659-671

  • Summary

    In 1995, anthropologists Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp brought scholars together around the observation that ‘seemingly distant power relations shape and constrain local reproductive experiences’. Seeking in part to historicize a rich ethnographic literature, this chapter asks how reproduction was globalized after 1890, World War II and especially 1980. It addresses two main questions. First, how did practices of procreation travel, and to what extent did the connections make reproduction everywhere the same? Second, how have the most powerful influences changed and with what effects? The chapter tackles aspects of these questions for three topics: childbirth, which changed as countries converged on routine supervision by medical attendants leading to hospital delivery, but historians have given short shrift; the move to family planning, which by contrast dominates historical writing on reproduction in ‘developing countries’; and the global market in technologies of assisted reproduction that has grown since 1978. It concludes that globalization made reproduction global and local at the same time, thus enriching and refracting traditions from different regions of the world; that lines of continuity link arguments, practices and critiques, yet the constellation looks different in 1900, 1950 and today; and that nation-states remain paradoxically central even today.

  • 5 - States and Populations in the Classical World

  • from Part I - Inventing Generation
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 67-80

  • Summary

    This chapter explores both theoretical debates about states and populations in the classical tradition of political philosophy and the actual practices of ancient polities in relation to their human resources, arguing that Michel Foucault’s influential idea of the ‘invention of population’ in the eighteenth century needs serious revision. Not only were questions of how large the population should be, its optimal character and constitution, fundamental to the utopian visions of Plato and Aristotle, for example, but both had their ideal cities regulating marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing in various ways. Ancient states were also concerned with matters of population in practice. The Roman Republican census enumerated and ordered the citizen-body, and provided a key opportunity to encourage marriage and child-bearing, for instance; and classical Sparta also incentivised large citizen families, within an explicitly eugenic frame, in which the state organized to optimize its offspring, through both positive measures, such as those aimed at ensuring mothers were physically robust, and the negative mechanism of exposing weak and sickly infants. All this indicates that ancient engagements with actual and notional populations was much more rich and complex than Foucault allows, something worth studying in its own right.

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