A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity

A thematic overview of how the human body was perceived in the period from 750 BCE to 1000 CE, covering birth and death, health and disease, sex and eroticism, medicine, popular beliefs and the self.

A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity explores 1,750 years of the history of the West, from Homer to the end of the first millennium CE. This span of time includes three major eras of Greek civilization, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire until its collapse in the 5th Century CE, and Medieval Europe up to the transition to the High Middle Ages. Key issues include the invention of the nude as a cultural icon, the early development of Western medicine, and formative discourses about the identity and ethical management of the body. A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and disease, cultural representations and popular beliefs, and self and society.