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The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De
rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed
with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more
layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus
causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the
patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown
dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme
generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book
argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along
those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease
and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that
unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from
calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the
narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is
integral both to the poem's philosophical agenda but also to its
wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds
new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by
showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a
blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and
meaning-both inside and outside the text.
This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions'
implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also
raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine,
along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and
scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions
included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers
and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible
interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural
understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the
multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical
thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the
representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical
treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that
constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers
including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while
comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy,
especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of
wonder/admiration (thauma), conceptualizations of the body and the
soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light
on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.
This volume aims to revisit, further explore and tease out the
textual, but also non-textual sources in an attempt to reconstruct
a clearer picture of a particular aspect of sexuality, i.e. sexual
practices, in Greco-Roman antiquity. Sexual practices refers to a
part of the overarching notion of sexuality: specifically, the acts
of sexual intercourse, the erogenous capacities and genital
functions of male and female body, and any other physical or
biological actions that define one's sexual identity or
orientation. This volume aims to approach not simply the acts of
sexual intercourse themselves, but also their legal, social,
political, religious, medical, cultural/moral and interdisciplinary
(e.g. emotional, performative) perspectives, as manifested in a
range of both textual and non-textual evidence (i.e. architecture,
iconography, epigraphy, etc.). The insights taken from the
contributions to this volume would enable researchers across a
range of disciplines - e.g. sex/gender studies, comparative
literature, psychology and cognitive neuroscience - to use
theoretical perspectives, methodologies and conceptual tools to
frame the sprawling examination of aspects of sexuality in broad
terms, or sexual practices in particular.
The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De
rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed
with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more
layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus
causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the
patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown
dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme
generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book
argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along
those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease
and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that
unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from
calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the
narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is
integral both to the poem's philosophical agenda but also to its
wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds
new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by
showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a
blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and
meaning-both inside and outside the text.
Although ancient hope has attracted much scholarly attention in the
past, this is the first book-length discussion of the topic. The
introduction offers a systematic discussion of the semantics of
Greek elpis and Latin spes and addresses the difficult question of
whether hope -ancient and modern- is an emotion. On the other hand,
the 16 contributions deal with specific aspects of hope in Greek
and Latin literature, history and art, including Pindar's poetry,
Greek tragedy, Thucydides, Virgil's epic and Tacitus' Historiae.
The volume also explores from a historical perspective the hopes of
slaves in antiquity, the importance of hope for the enhancement of
stereotypes about the barbarians, and the depiction of hope in
visual culture, providing thereby a useful tool not only for
classicist but also for philosophers, cultural historians and
political scientists.
The present volume offers a systematic discussion of the complex
relationship between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient
world. For a long time, the relationship between the two has been
assumed to be virtually non-existent. Paradoxography is concerned
with disclosing a world full of marvels and wondrous occurrences
without providing an answer as to how these phenomena can be
explained. Its main aim is to astonish and leave its readers
bewildered and confused. By contrast, medicine is committed to the
rational explanation of human phusis, which makes it, in a number
of significant ways, incompatible with thauma. This volume moves
beyond the binary opposition between 'rational' and 'non-rational'
modes of thinking, by focusing on instances in which the paradox is
construed with direct reference to established medical sources and
beliefs or, inversely, on cases in which medical discourse allows
space for wonder and admiration. Its aim is to show that thauma,
rather than present a barrier, functions as a concept which
effectively allows for the dialogue between medicine and
paradoxography in the ancient world.
Although ancient hope has attracted much scholarly attention in the
past, this is the first book-length discussion of the topic. The
introduction offers a systematic discussion of the semantics of
Greek elpis and Latin spes and addresses the difficult question of
whether hope -ancient and modern- is an emotion. On the other hand,
the 16 contributions deal with specific aspects of hope in Greek
and Latin literature, history and art, including Pindar's poetry,
Greek tragedy, Thucydides, Virgil's epic and Tacitus' Historiae.
The volume also explores from a historical perspective the hopes of
slaves in antiquity, the importance of hope for the enhancement of
stereotypes about the barbarians, and the depiction of hope in
visual culture, providing thereby a useful tool not only for
classicist but also for philosophers, cultural historians and
political scientists.
This innovative and wide-ranging volume is the first systematic
exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies
and machines in classical antiquity. It examines the conception of
the body and bodily processes in mechanical terms in ancient
medical writings, and looks into how artificial bodies and automata
were equally configured in human terms; it also investigates how
this knowledge applied to the treatment of the disabled and the
diseased in the ancient world. The volume examines the pre-history
of what develops, at a later stage, and more specifically during
the early modern period, into the full science of iatromechanics in
the context of which the human body was treated as a machine and
medical treatments were devised accordingly. The volume facilitates
future dialogue between scholars working on different areas, from
classics, history and archaeology to history of science, philosophy
and technology.
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