This book discusses social, religious and medical attitudes towards bathing in Late Antiquity. It examines the place of bathing in late Roman and early Byzantine society as seen in the literary, historical, and documentary sources from the late antique period. The author argues that bathing became one of the most important elements in defining what it meant to be a Roman; indeed, the social and cultural value of bathing in the context of late Roman society more than justified the efforts and expense put into preserving bathing establishments and the associated culture. The book contributes a unique perspective to understanding the changes and transformations undergone by the bathing culture of the day, and illustrates the important role played by this culture in contributing to the transitional character of the late antique period. In his examination of the attitudes of medical professionals and laymen alike, and the focus on its recuperative utility, Zytka provides an innovative and detailed approach to bathing.

Abstract: In antiquity, bathing was not the private affair it is today. It was a public activity involving all classes of Roman society. Baths dotted the landscapes of cities across the empire, and even villages, military forts, monasteries, and villas contained public (or semi-public) baths. After an introductory chapter, chapter two provides an introduction to the rich bathing culture of the early Roman empire. It details the social world of the baths, engaging such topics as the role of health care in bathing culture and the nature and extent of mixed bathing in the early Roman world. It then proceeds to an overview of the material evidence, presenting several different types of baths from four select regions in the Roman world. Chapter three analyzes the nature of late antique Christian discourse on baths and bathing. After a discourse analysis I juxtapose other forms of evidence against the ascetic-monastic literature and work toward an understanding of social practice in late Roman bathing culture. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that rigorist Christian discourse on baths and bathing in late antiquity served important ideological functions within the Christian community, but should not be taken as an accurate reflection of social practice or mentalities concerning bathing in late antiquity. Chapter four presents a regional study of baths of central and southern Greece, the province of Achaea, and it includes select baths from the islands and Crete. The chapter begins by presenting the archaeological evidence itself. After explaining and presenting the evidence, I analyze the architectural evolution of this body of baths in late antiquity. Ultimately, the architectural evolution of baths in late antiquity offers an opportunity to see how material and cultural forces intersected. I argue that our explanations for the important changes to the architectural design of baths in late antiquity must be sought in the nature of politico-administrative change, economic and fiscal trends and the local and municipal level, and shifting patterns and modes of patronage. In chapter five, I analyze the imperial thermae of Rome in the city's late antique landscape. I argue that the thermae's polyvalent meanings ensured their survival in times of stress and change in late antique Rome. The thermae were important monuments to imperial power, aspects of the built environment through which the emperors propagated a propagandistic stance and image of themselves toward their subjects, one rooted in their power, benevolence, and status as connoisseurs and supporters of classical culture. Chapter six concludes the study by summarizing the dissertation's arguments, drawing some broader connections between chapters, and looking to the Byzantine and Islamic periods. An appendix discusses directions for future work. The dissertation carries implications for how scholars understand the evolution of concepts of the body in late antiquity and the nature of Christianization itself, especially the limits imposed upon the Church when confronted with social practices that were deeply rooted in Roman imperial history. Yet it also demonstrates that bathing in public remained central to daily life at this time.

A provocative account of Jewish encounters with the public baths of ancient Rome Public bathhouses embodied the Roman way of life, from food and fashion to sculpture and sports. The most popular institution of the ancient Mediterranean world, the baths drew people of all backgrounds. They were places suffused with nudity, sex, and magic. A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse reveals how Jews navigated this space with ease and confidence, engaging with Roman bath culture rather than avoiding it. In this landmark interdisciplinary work of cultural history, Yaron Eliav uses the Roman bathhouse as a social laboratory to reexamine how Jews interacted with Graeco-Roman culture. He reconstructs their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the baths and the activities that took place there, documenting their pleasures as well as their anxieties and concerns. Archaeologists have excavated hundreds of bathhouse facilities across the Mediterranean. Graeco-Roman writers mention the bathhouse frequently, and rabbinic literature contains hundreds of references to the baths. Eliav draws on the archaeological and literary record to offer fresh perspectives on the Jews of antiquity, developing a new model for the ways smaller and often weaker groups interact with large, dominant cultures. A compelling and richly evocative work of scholarship, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse challenges us to rethink the relationship between Judaism and Graeco-Roman society, shedding new light on how cross-cultural engagement shaped Western civilization.

Byzantine medicine remains a little known and misrepresented field not only in the context of debates on medieval medicine, but also among Byzantinists themselves. It is often viewed as 'stagnant' and mainly preserving ancient ideas, and our knowledge of it continues to be based to a great extent on the comments of earlier authorities, which are often repeated uncritically. This volume presents the first comprehensive examination of the medical corpus of, arguably, the most important Late Byzantine physician: John Zacharias Aktouarios (c.1275-c.1330). Its main thesis is that John's medical works show an astonishing degree of openness to knowledge from outside Byzantium combined with a significant degree of originality, in particular, in the fields of uroscopy and human physiology. The analysis of John's edited (On Urines and On Psychic Pneuma) and unedited (Medical Epitome) treatises is supported for the first time by the consultation of a large number of manuscripts, and is also informed by evidence from a wide range of medical sources, including those previously unpublished, and texts from other genres, such as epistolography and merchants' accounts. The contextualization of John's corpus sheds new light on the development of Byzantine medical thought and practice, and enhances our understanding of the Late Byzantine social and intellectual landscape. Through examination of his medical observations in the light of examples from the medieval Latin and Islamic worlds, his theories are also placed within the wider Mediterranean milieu, highlighting the cultural exchange between Byzantium and its neighbours.

This text reviews and analyzes the structure, function and design of baths, seeking to integrate their architecture with the wider social and cultural custom of bathing, and examining in particular the changes this custom underwent in Late Antiquity and in Byzantine and Islamic cultures.

Infrastructures are fundamental means through which societies create spaces, but little is known about the precise ways in which this occurs. How have infrastructures animated certain understandings of space? How do infrastructures stabilize, or undermine, the spatial formats in which we live, which shape our everyday practices and which regulate access to services and resources? And, conversely, how do spaces frame the ways infrastructural provision is organized? How do existing spaces shape infrastructural development and the scope and forms of access to vital services such as transport and water? In this volume, historians and sociologists draw on a range of fascinating case studies and provide compelling answers to these questions. Exploring, among others, the provision of irrigation water in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, the invention of airport transit zones, and the infrastructural practices of homeless people in Berlin, the book demonstrates how the making of spaces through infrastructure is deeply political. Intent on revealing uneven geographies of provision and hierarchies of access, the contributors highlight how infrastructures are products of global entanglements.

The corpus of astrological material ascribed to the Egyptian priest Manetho consists of six books of poetry. This book serves as the companion to the one published by OUP in 2020, which was the first commentary in any language on the earliest three books of Manetho's poetry (two, three, and six as they appear in the manuscript). This volume supplies the remainder (books four, one, and five). Manetho was credited with a series of didactic poems which list outcomes for planetary set-ups in a birth chart. The books covered in this volume are not as easily dated as those in the first volume, but the most recent is probably no later than the fourth century and they are still Egyptian. As in the first volume, their descriptions of the kinds of person who are born under happy and unhappy configurations of stars speak to the lived realities, aspirations, and fears of the astrologer's clientele. Unlike in the first volume, however, the individual books treated here have different authors, and there is more emphasis on profiling individual poets in terms of style, metre, and mannerisms. As in the first volume, there is a Greek text with English translation and an apparatus with parallel material to enable comparison with related works. But this volume pays more attention to the transmission of traditional material from one author to another, and to the special approach required of an editor of material which, being in practical use, circulated in unstable and minutely-varying textual forms.