How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirth
Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era.
In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire-especially women and girls-understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans' anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual's place in the empire and cosmos.
Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people's lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire. Anna Bonnell Freidin is assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan. "Birthing Romans offers a new framework for understanding Roman childbearing, showing how it opens a window into Roman constructions of identity, social status, freedom and enslavement, cultures of risk, and blame. Rarely have I encountered such sympathetic writing-Freidin truly conveys the beauty and tragedy inherent in childbearing and its complex interplay with parenthood."-Laurence Totelin, editor of A Cultural History of Medicine in Antiquity
"Freidin offers an intimate, multidimensional, theoretically informed, and deeply sympathetic account of the childbirth experiences of Roman women during the first three centuries of the Common Era. This beautifully written book will become a canonical intervention in the cultural history of the Roman imperial period."-Cam Grey, author of Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside "An important contribution to understanding the cycle of pregnancy, birth – and death – in which Roman women lived. The world of Veturia, and of her invisible sisters throughout the Roman empire, comes alive in its pages."---Helen King, Times Literary Supplement "Birthing Romans is a compelling and powerful book"---Gaia Gianni, American Journal of Philology
