Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between pregnant and pre-gravid women and their fetuses in the Roman Empire. It examines the cultural ideologies of reproduction and investigates the contributions of these ideologies to narratives of pregnancy and birth. By putting reproductive age women at the center of the investigation, this work departs from previous scholarship on Roman pregnancy and birth, which has overwhelmingly focused on the unborn fetus or the young child. Chapter one explores ideologies of reproduction and the nature of the maternal/fetal relationship in Roman legal texts. Chapters two and three consider these same issues in the Greco-Roman medical, scientific and philosophical texts of the Roman Empire. Chapter four explores the topic through uterine votives and amulets and birth scenes on biographical sarcophagi from the Roman Mediterranean. Throughout the investigation, four interrelated themes emerge. First there is a focus on the womb as an independent entity, paradoxically contained within the female body, but also capable of autonomous action. This imaginary appears, for instance, in Roman-era medical and scientific accounts of the “wandering womb” and in visual depictions of disembodied, oversized uteri on magical-medical amulets from Roman Egypt. Second, there is a corresponding focus on the fetal actor, valued for its broadly defined potentiality. Third, the notion of an independent, living fetus, endowed with rights, protections and potentialities leads to the creation and propagation of a narrative of maternal/fetal antagonism. The interests of the developing fetus are set in conflict with the interests, actions and choices of the pregnant woman. Fourth, the reproductive age woman is defined by her ability to reproduce—she is always a potential mother. In a pre-gravid state she has the potential to become pregnant. Once pregnant, both her mental and psychic state and her physical actions are seen as having considerable repercussions on the fetus. Out of these themes come the relationships and antagonisms that form the core of this investigation: woman versus womb and woman versus fetus. These narratives form the core of reproductive ideology in the Roman Empire.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Mulder, Tara L.,
"Fetal Actors, Female Bodies: Childbirth in the Roman Empire"
(2015).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0M61HNT
