Non dolet, Paete: Regarding the Pain of Women in Roman Antiquity
- Autores: Elina Pyy
- Localización: Gynecia: Studies on Gynaecology in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Texts / coord. por Cristina Santos Pinheiro, Gabriel A.F. Silva, Rui Carlos Fonseca, Bernardo Machado Mota, Joaquim Pinheiro, 2022, ISBN 9789723619775, págs. 91-112
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The article examines the relationship between pain and gender in the Roman antiquity, and the ways in which the pain of women, in particular, was understood in the Roman society and culture. It explores three different literary traditions – the Roman medical texts, the philosophical writing, and the exemplary historiography from the imperial period – in order to understand how (or if) the pain of women was defined as different from that of men. Were women considered as more sensitive to pain in Roman thinking? Were the lives of women understood as particularly painful, because of conditions such as pregnancy, menstruation or childbirth? What about the ways of expressing pain and reacting to it – how gendered were these phenomena in the Roman philosophical discourse and in the exemplary tradition? The article puts forth that the Roman understanding of pain was phenomenological in a sense that it distinguished between the physical sensation and the meaning attributed to it – for the overall experience of pain, the latter was far more important, and it was also the factor where gender could make a difference for how the pain ‘felt’.
