Menstrual Blood: Uses, Values, and Controls in Ancient Rome

2014

This dissertation is a cultural history of the role of human fertilityfecunditasin Ancient Roman society c. 200 B.C.-A.D. 250. I ask how the Romans chose to understand human fertility, how they sought to preserve and encourage it, and how the absence of fertility affected their marriages, their families and their political careers. It is an investigation of the place of fertility in the Roman cultural consciousness. Using a wide range of sourcesliterary, epigraphic, papyrological, juridical, and numismatic-I argue that the Romans conceptualized fecunditas (fertility) not just as a generic female quality, but as one of the cardinal virtues that all married women were expected to embody. A woman's fecunditas could be evaluated and judged according to how many children she bore, how often she became pregnant, and how many of her children survived into adulthood. Although fecunditas was constructed as a female responsibility, élite Roman men were able to take advantage of having a fertile wife. Official benefits, such as those accrued by law under the ius trium liberorum, the rights of three children, brought one level of honour. An élite man could also exploit the fecunditas of his wife to increase his own social capital. In return, women of proven fertility were thought to deserve conjugal loyalty from their husbands and ought not to be divorced. Infertility could lead to the dissolution of a marriage. Fecunditas was not a private matter, nor were the members of the imperial family, the domus Augusta, immune to its pressures. At all levels in Roman society there was a strong interest in the safeguarding of the fecunditas of Roman citizen women, for through them the strength of the Roman state was preserved. It is not wrong, I argue, to speak in terms of a sort of fecunditas project, an obsession with the numbers of Roman citizens and the importance of fertile women to bear more of them, which permeates Roman society from the beginning of the Republic into the third century A.D. iii To Ben and Eamon First, I must thank my supervisor, Prof. Jonathan Edmondson, for convincing me initially to join the Collaborative Programme in Ancient History (ColPAH) run by York University and the University of Toronto, and for his guidance, support, and understanding over the last six years. Particular mention must be made of his Herculean efforts in reading and commenting on the entire dissertation in two weeks when I first gave him a full draft. I have benefitted enormously from his wealth of experience and knowledge. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Prof. Elizabeth Cohen, Prof. Andreas Bendlin, and Prof. Christer Bruun, for their helpful comments and suggestions. Dr. Rebecca Flemming went well above and beyond the requirements of an acting supervisor during my time at Cambridge in 2013. She read drafts of every chapter, not just the one which I had come to Cambridge to write, and discussed them with me at length. Her generosity with her time was very much appreciated. I am grateful to Prof. Brent Shaw for agreeing to be my external examiner and for his thoughtful and valuable comments on the dissertation. I would also like to thank the other members of my examination committee, Prof. Jeremy Trevett and Prof. Tony Burke. The dissertation has been much improved by the critical eyes of everyone who has read it. They will not all agree with everything in this dissertation, of course, and any remaining errors are my own responsibility. I acknowledge with gratitude that financial support for my research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship), the Ontario government (Ontario Graduate Scholarship), and by York University. The Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, also awarded by SSHRC, allowed me to spend four months in the summer of 2013 as a visiting graduate student in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. I am grateful for the scholarship opportunities that allowed me to concentrate on my research.

LUCIUS'€™ ROMANS , 2018

This month's post has been written by Sophie Chavarria, a second-year PhD student in Classics and Archaeology at the University of Kent. This article is partly inspired by a talk she gave last month at the Annual Meeting of Postgraduate in Ancient History organised by the University of London.

Religion and Theology, 2003

To what extent did early Christian martyr stories function as empowering the female body and contributing to an independent view of her 'self' and 'identity'? In the light of claims, often motivated by political correctness, that certain early Christian traditions acknowledged, appreciated and promoted woman's agency in Graeco-Roman social interaction, it is argued that if the notion of a 'regulatory body' is taken into consideration, early Christian female bodies and identities were crushed both by the Roman Imperium and early Christian patriarchal leadership.

2000

This paper examines how Strabo's characterization of Pythodoris, a queen of mixed descent who ruled the region round Colchis at the margins of the Roman Empire, disrupts the tropes that regulated the representation of male and female rulers in classical antiquity. It begins by considering some of the prevailing ways in which the sexes were differentiated in the literature of this epoch, particularly in relation to political power. In the conclusion, it is argued that the destabilization, in Strabo's text, of the opposition between Greco-Roman and barbarian, by which the ethnic other was constituted, helps dissolve the ideologically motivated contrast between masculine Romans and feminized Asiatics, and thus simultaneously disarms the idea that women are incapable of ruling autonomously. One of the themes of the second conference on Feminism and Classics-and one that is becoming increasingly central to women's studies in general-is the proposition that the binary opposition between the sexes, as represented in social and literary discourse, is sustained in part by being implicated in other hierarchical polarities, such as race, age, the antagonism between native and foreign, or the local spatial tension between the domestic and the public sphere. 2 As Susan Stanford Friedman (1996: 18) writes: "One axis of identity, such as gender, must be understood in relation to other axes, such as sexuality and race"; Friedman advances what she terms a "new geography of identity" (22), in which "interactional analysis of codependent systems of alterity replaces the focus on binary difference," and invites critics to examine whether such systems, when they coexist in a text, clash or else "intensify each other in collaboration" (26). 3 The representation of gender roles within a given social discourse is thus a complex variable, at least within certain limits: the sexes may achieve symbolic parity, for example, in contexts where other structures of difference are temporarily disabled, even while they continue to be marked by extreme dimorphism in nearby domains. Tracing the turns of gender discourse in antiquity thus requires sensitivity to the way in which sexual polarities respond to or are imbricated with other regions of the social lexicon. The representation of these latter distinctions, in turn, may be ____________________ 1 I am deeply grateful to Isabel Moreno Ferrero for her comments on an earlier and much inferior draft of this paper, and for many suggestions and references; she was my guide to the Historia Augusta and to Florus. 2 This paper was originally presented at a conference on "Feminism and Classics," held at Princeton University in the spring of 1996. I am grateful to the co-organizers of the conference, Judith Hallett and Janet Martin, for having invited me to participate. The paper, revised and brought up to date, is published here for the first time, although an earlier version of it was made available on the internet, courtesy of "Diotima," at http://www.stoa.org/diotima. 3 I am grateful to Judith Hallett for bringing this remarkable essay to my attention.

This article is about the creative ritual practices of a group of Spanish and Catalan pilgrims who visit French shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Raised and educated in Catholic families, these women describe themselves as being part of the worldwide Goddess movement and do not consider their theories and rituals to be in conflict with Christian values. During their pilgrimages they celebrate rituals in shrines that they feel were unjustly monopolized by the “Church”. The pilgrims see Mary Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood, and advocate a “feminist reading” of Jesus’ message. They perform creative rituals to commune with “Mother Earth” by offering Her their menstrual blood. The creative ritualization of menstruation allows the pilgrims to reinterpret Catholic rituals thereby transforming negative concepts related to body and gender they have received from their Catholic families. The pilgrims’ rituals of offering also foster an embodied relationship with the divine. Analysing one particular menstrual ritual I will show how offering their blood to Mother Earth these women literally turn upside down the central ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist. Through this strategy they manage to ritually transform menstruation from a curse into a blessing and to elaborate new notions about their body and sexuality. I will analyse these womens’ conceptualization of menstrual blood drawing on historical studies about the meaning of menstruation in Christianity as well as anthropological studies about menstruation in traditional as well as in Western societies. I will argue that proclaiming the sacrality of menstrual blood these women try to repair a social order in which menstruation is still often associated with female subordination. With their rituals these women aim to provoke not only a healing process on a personal level but also a shift of perception on a social level.

Verbum Vitae, 2020

The piece considers the story of the woman with the flow of blood (haimorrhoousa) in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as it is represented in two works: the homily of Pseudo-Chrysostom (PG 59, 575-578) and Kontakion 12 (in the Oxford edition) of Romanos the Melodist. Interpretations of this episode from the gospels touch upon the issue of ritual purity in the Jewish law as well as the attitude of Christian authors toward female menstruation. The texts mentioned above are examined, along with statements from the Fathers of the Church on menstruation, in an attempt to answer the question of whether Christian authors embraced the idea that menstruating women should be excluded from social and religious life. The article shows that the attitude of Christian authors towards menstruating women was in fact generally positive.

Acta Theologica, 2010

In contrast with the struggle of 19 th and 20 th century women all over the world to be admitted to medical schools, women in ancient Greece and Rome were apparently increasingly at liberty to practise medicine from the 4 th century BC onwards. The available evidence offers conclusive proof of this more tolerant attitude. The sources are few in number, but fragmentary information can be gleaned from medical writers, passing remarks in Greek and Latin authors, and funerary inscriptions. These sources emphasise the professions of midwife and female doctor. Although there is some overlap between their duties, we find that in Greece a distinction was drawn between maia and iatrikê as early as the 4 th century BC, while in Rome the two professions of obstetrix and medica or iatrina were well established by the 1 st century BC. The training, personal characteristics, qualifications, duties, status and remuneration of practitioners of the two professions will be considered in this study. The funerary inscriptions of female doctors reveal that they were honoured in the same way as men for exceptional services; medical works were also dedicated to them as colleagues, and those of them who wrote texts of their own were quoted with respect. Thus, although there were never very many female doctors, the classical world does not seem to have placed insurmountable obstacles in the way of women who wished to practise medicine.

2005

Menstruation formed the bedrock of medieval concepts about how the female body functioned. In medieval Europe, menstruation was seen as the end result of a whole bodily process of purification, one unique to the female body. Menstruation was also seen as a necessary prerequisite for conception. In fact, many references to menstruation in the context of fertility see the successful completion of its purgative function as key to fertility—a fact crucial to understanding why emmenagogues (preparations for bringing on menstruation) were not necessarily seen as abortifacients but may well have had a deliberately pronatal purpose. This essay examines various notions surrounding menstruation in medieval Europe, including why the menses were called “women’s flower,” in what circumstances they were likened to poisons, and why in some instances men were thought capable of “menstruating,” too. Outside of medical contexts, menstruation is largely seen as nefas, something that cannot or should not be named or spoken about. Thus, medical discussions of menstruation are our main source for reconstructing beliefs and attitudes toward this key aspect of female physiology.

2014

This article is about the creative ritual practices of a group of Spanish and Catalan pilgrims who visit French shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Raised and educated in Catholic families, these women describe themselves as being part of the worldwide Goddess movement and do not consider their theories and rituals to be in conflict with Christian values. During their pilgrimages they celebrate rituals in shrines that they feel were unjustly monopolized by the "Church". The pilgrims see Mary Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood, and advocate a "feminist reading" of Jesus' message. They perform creative rituals to commune with "Mother Earth" by offering Her their menstrual blood. The creative ritualization of menstruation allows the pilgrims to reinterpret Catholic rituals thereby transforming negative concepts related to body and gender they have received from their Catholic families. The pilgrims' rituals of offering also foster an embodied relationship with the divine. Analysing one particular menstrual ritual I will show how offering their blood to Mother Earth these women literally turn upside down the central ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist. Through this strategy they manage to ritually transform menstruation from a curse into a blessing and to elaborate new notions about their body and sexuality. I will analyse these womens' conceptualization of menstrual blood drawing on historical studies about the meaning of menstruation in Christianity as well as anthropological studies about menstruation in traditional as well as in Western societies. I will argue that proclaiming the sacrality of menstrual blood these women try to repair a social order in which menstruation is still often associated with female subordination. With their rituals these women aim to provoke not only a healing process on a personal level but also a shift of perception on a social level.