This volume investigates the history and nature of pain in Greek culture under the Roman Empire (50-250 CE). Traditional accounts of pain in this society have focused either on philosophical or medical theories of pain or on Christian notions of 'suffering'; fascination with the pained body has often been assumed to be a characteristic of Christian society, rather than Imperial culture in general. This book employs tools from contemporary cultural and literary theory to examine the treatment of pain in a range of central cultural discourses from the first three centuries of the Empire, including medicine, religious writing, novelistic literature, and rhetorical ekphrasis. It argues instead that pain was approached from an holistic perspective: rather than treating pain as a narrowly defined physiological perception, it was conceived as a type of embodied experience in which ideas about the body's physiology, the representation and articulation of its perceptions, as well as the emotional and cognitive impact of pain were all important facets of what it meant to be in pain. By bringing this conception to light, scholars are able to redefine our understanding of the social and emotional fabric of Imperial society and help to reposition its relationship with the emergence of Christian society in late antiquity.

Using contemporary theories drawn from health humanities, this volume analyses the nature and effects of disability, medicine, and health discourse in a variety of early Christian literature. In recent years, the "medical turn" in early Christian studies has developed a robust literature around health, disability, and medicine, and the health humanities have made critical interventions in modern conversations around the aims of health and the nature of healthcare. Considering these developments, it has become clear that early Christian texts and ideas have much to offer modern conversations, and that these texts are illuminated using theoretical lenses drawn from modern medicine and public health. The chapters in this book explore different facets of early Christian engagement with medicine, either in itself or as metaphor and material for theological reflections on human impairment, restoration, and flourishing. Through its focus on late antique religious texts, the book raises questions around the social, rather than biological, aspects of illness and diminishment as a human experience, as well as the strategies by which that experience is navigated. The result is an innovative and timely intervention in the study of health and healthcare that bridges current divides between historical studies and contemporary issues. Taken together, the book offers a prismatic conversation of perspectives on aspects of care at the heart of societal and individual "wellness" today, inviting readers to meet or revisit patristic texts as tracings across a map of embodied identity, dissonance, and corporal care. It is a fascinating resource for anyone working on ancient medicine and health, or the social worlds of early Christianity.

The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.

What did pain and illness mean to early Christians? And how did their approaches to health care compare to those of the ancient Greco-Roman world? In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study, Helen Rhee examines how early Christians viewed illness, pain, and health care and how their perspective was influenced both by Judeo-Christian tradition and by the milieu of the larger ancient world. Throughout her analysis, Rhee places the history of medicine, Greco-Roman literature, and ancient philosophy in constructive dialogue with early Christian literature to elucidate early Christians’ understanding, appropriation, and reformulation of Roman and Byzantine conceptions of health and wholeness from the second through the sixth centuries CE. Utilizing the contemporary field of medical anthropology, Rhee engages illness, pain, and health care as sociocultural matters. Through this and other methodologies, she explores the theological meanings attributed to illness and pain; the religious status of those suffering from these and other afflictions; and the methods, systems, and rituals that Christian individuals, churches, and monasteries devised to care for those who suffered. Rhee’s findings ultimately provide an illuminating glimpse into how Christians began forming a distinct identity—both as part of and apart from their Greco-Roman world.

Why is it so difficult to talk about pain? As we do today, the Greeks and Romans struggled to communicate their pain: this required a rich and subtle vocabulary which had to be developed over time. Pain Narratives traces the development of this language in literary, philosophical, and medical texts from across antiquity: poets, physicians, and philosophers contributed to an ever-growing lexicon to articulate their own and others’ feelings. The essays within this volume uncover the expanding Greco-Roman vocabulary of pain, analyse the medical discussions on pain symptoms, and explore the religious reinterpretations of pain concepts in late antiquity.

Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific. In a work that is sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches and disparate languages to tackle the thorniest challenges in pain research. He explores the shifting meaning-making processes that produce painful experiences, expanding the world of pain to take seriously the relationship between pain’s physicality and social and emotional suffering. Ranging from antiquity to the present and taking in pain knowledge and pain experiences from around the world, his tale encompasses not only injury, but also grief, exclusion, chronic pain, and trauma, and reveals how knowledge claims about pain occupy what pain is like. Innovative and compassionate in equal measure, Knowing Pain puts forward an original pain agenda that is essential reading for those interested in the history of emotions, senses, and experience, for medical researchers and practitioners, and for anyone who has known pain.

With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. This work challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks were not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. Three of these novels in particular-Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe-are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After establishing the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry. The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire, and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

By triangulating the Greco-Roman world, classical reception, and disability studies, this book presents a range of approaches that reassess and reimagine traditional themes, from the narrative voice to sensory studies. It argues that disability and disabled people are the ‘forgotten other’ of not just Classics, but also the Humanities more widely. Beyond the moral merits of rectifying this neglect, this book also provides a series of approaches and case studies that demonstrate the intellectual value of engaging with disability studies as classicists and exploring the classical legacy in the medical humanities. The book is presented in four parts: ‘Communicating and controlling impairment, illness and pain’; ‘Using, creating and showcasing disability supports and services’; ‘Real bodies and retrieving senses: disability in the ritual record’; and ‘Classical reception as the gateway between Classics and disability studies’. Chapters by scholars from different academic backgrounds are carefully paired in these sections in order to draw out further contrasts and nuances and produce a sum that is more than the parts. The volume also explores how the ancient world and its reception have influenced medical and disability literature, and how engagements with disabled people might lead to reinterpretations of familiar case studies, such as the Parthenon. This book is primarily intended for classicists interested in disabled people in the Greco-Roman past and in how modern disability studies may offer insights into and reinterpretations of historic case studies. It will also be of interest to those working in medical humanities, sensory studies, and museum studies, and those exploring the wider tension between representation and reality in ancient contexts. As such, it will appeal to people in the wider Humanities who, notwithstanding any interest in how disabled people are represented in literature, art, and cinema, have had less engagement with disability studies and the lived experience of people with impairments. FREE CHAPTER AVAILABLE! Please go to https://bit.ly/3pzpO7n to access the Introduction, which we have made freely available.

Pain and Pleasure in Classical Times attempts to blaze a trail for the cross-disciplinary humanistic study of pain and pleasure, with literature scholars, historians and philosophers all setting out to understand how the Greeks and Romans experienced, managed and reasoned about the sensations and experiences they felt as painful or pleasurable. The book is intended to provoke discussion of a wide range of problems in the cultural history of antiquity. It addresses both the physicality of erôs and illness, and physiological and philosophical doctrines, especially hedonism and anti-hedonism in their various forms. Fine points of terminology (Greek is predictably rich in this area) receive careful attention. Authors in question run from Homer to (among others) the Hippocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Galen and the Aristotle-commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias.