Main description:

This is the first volume ever to systematically study the subject of disabilities in the Roman world. The contributors examine the topic a capite ad calcem, from head to toe. Chapters deal with mental and intellectual disability, alcoholism, visual impairment, speech disorders, hermaphroditism, monstrous births, mobility problems, osteology and visual representations of disparate bodies. The authors fully engage with literary, papyrological, and epigraphical sources, while iconography and osteo-archaeology are taken into account. Also the late ancient evidence is taken into account. Refraining from a radical constructionist standpoint, the contributors acknowledge the possibility of discovering significant differences in the way impairment was culturally viewed or assessed.

Contents:

1. Approaching Disabilities a Capite ad Calcem. Hidden Themes in Roman Antiquity
Christian Laes, C.F. Goodey, M. Lynn Rose

2. Mental States, Bodily Dispositions and Table Manners: a Guide to Reading 'Intellectual' Disability from Homer to late Antiquity
C.F. Goodey, M. Lynn Rose

3. Psychiatric Disability in the Galenic Medical Matrix
Patricia A. Clark, M. Lynn Rose

4. Two Historical Case Histories of Acute Alcoholism in the Roman Empire
Danielle Gourevitch, with the collaboration of Dr. Gilles Demigneux
4.1. Drunkenness, Alcoholism and Ancient History
Christian Laes

5. Exploring Visual Impairment in Ancient Rome
Lisa Trentin

6. A Nexus of Disability in Ancient Greek Miracle Stories: a Comparison of Accounts of Blindness from the Asklepieion in Epidauros and the Shrine of Thecla in Seleucia
Cornelia B. Horn

7. Silent History? Speech Impairment in Roman Antiquity
Christian Laes

8. Monstrous Births and Retrospective Diagnosis: The Case of Hermaphrodites in Antiquity
Lutz Graumann

9. What's in a Monster? Pliny the Elder, Teratology and Bodily Disability
Bert Gevaert, Christian Laes

10. A King Walking with Pain? On the Textual and Iconographical Images of Philip II and Other Wounded Kings
Evelyn Samama

11. Disparate Lives or Disparate Deaths? Post-Mortem Treatment of the Body and the Articulation of Difference
Emma-Jayne Graham

12. Disparate Bodies in Ancient Artefacts: the Function of Caricature and Pathological Grotesques among Roman Terracotta Figurines
Alex Mitchell

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
ABBREVIATIONS
GENERAL INDEX
INDEX LOCORUM