Dire Remedies: A Social History of Healthcare in Classical Antiquity

Dire Remedies: A Social History of Healthcare in Classical Antiquity
Author: William V. Harris
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2024-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111507998

Dire Remedies: a Social History of Healthcare in Classical Antiquity is the first wide-ranging social history of ancient healthcare. Greek medicine is at the origin of modern medicine, but it was very often ineffective. What did people actually do when faced with pain and illness? Starting with a review of ancient health conditions and a survey of what doctors had to offer, W.V. Harris describes the multifarious practices and diverse kinds of people to whom Greeks and Romans turned for help. Topics include the possible development of analgesics, ancient ideas about contagion, the history of the god Asclepius and more generally the role of religion and magic, opinions about abortion, ancient responses to mental illness, and the invention of the hospital. Taking into account the fill range of textual sources and archaeological material, this book attempts to provide an unprecedentedly realistic – and readable – depiction of the Greek and Roman responses to ill health.

The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy (1000--49 BCE)

The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy (1000--49 BCE)
Author: Marco Maiuro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 881
Release: 2024
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0199987890

The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy provides a comprehensive account of the many peoples who lived on the Italian peninsula during the last millennium BCE. Written by more than fifty authors, the book describes the diversity of these indigenous cultures, their languages, interactions, and reciprocal influences. It gives emphasis to Greek colonization, the rise of aristocracies, technological innovations, and the spread of literacy, which provided the urban texture that shaped the history of the Italian peninsula.

A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World

A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World
Author: Iain Ferris
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2024-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1803277823

This study considers the relationship between geography and power in the Roman world, most particularly the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products: geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs.

Religion in the Roman Empire

Religion in the Roman Empire
Author: Jörg Rüpke
Publisher: Kohlhammer Verlag
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2021-10-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3170292250

The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy
Author: Emma-Jayne Graham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1351982451

This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand ‘religion’ to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

Archaeology & Pilgrimage

Archaeology & Pilgrimage
Author: Maddalena Bassani
Publisher: Edizioni Engramma
Total Pages: 192
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN:

Engramma 204 collects researches and findings of several Italian and European scholars who have dealt with aspects related to ancient, Medieval and Modern pilgrimage along the main three European Routes (Via Romea Francigena, Via Romea Strata, Via Romea Germanica), or along other routes to the Holy Land. The issue is divided into three sections. The first one is dedicated to the European project rurAllure by Martín López Nores, José Juan Pazos Arias, Susana Reboreda Morillo, Óscar Penín Romero, which focuses on the enhancement of minor sites along the pilgrimage routes of Europe, and it is accompanied by an overview on the development of promotional activities for some Italian cases supervised by Alessia Mariotti. The second section presents a series of studies related to some contexts that are close to mineral springs or important waterways and were frequented by pilgrims throughout the centuries: these are articles by Paola Zanovello and Andrea Meleri's on the Euganean Hills (Padua), by Maddalena Bassani's on the sanctuary of Minerva Medica in Val Trebbia (Piacenza) and that at Timavo’s Sources (Monfalcone), by Jacopo Turchetto on the centuriation between Padua and Altino. Furthermore, the articles by Silvia González Soutelo, Miguel Gómez-Heras, and Laura García Juan on the Bagno Vignoni area (Siena), and by Alessia Mariotti and Mattia Vitelli Casella on the Argenta site (Po Delta). In the third and final section one can read two important contributions, the first by Ludovico Rebaudo, devoted to the study of manuscript evidences recorded during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about archaeological remains in Anatolia; the second by Jacopo Tabolli, who presents an exhibition on votive bronzes left by pilgrims in the sanctuary at the ‘Sorgenti di San Casciano ai Bagni’ (Siena) that recently opened at the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome.

Thermalism in the Roman Provinces

Thermalism in the Roman Provinces
Author: Silvia González Soutelo
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1803277769

This book is focused on the role of thermal establishments with mineral-medicinal waters in the different territories of the Roman Empire, including their symbiosis with the landscape as well as the ways in which their construction was adapted to give greater comfort to those who came to take advantage of their health-giving properties.

Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East

Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East
Author: Ian Hodder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108476023

This book is primarily for researchers and students in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. The volume results from intense interaction between archaeologists at these sites and a group of theorists studying the scholarship of René Girard.