Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing and Hygiene from Antiquity Through the Renaissance: Vol 11

These essays offer scholars, teachers, and students a new basis for discussing attitudes toward, and technological expertise concerning, water in antiquity through the early Modern period, and they examine historical water use and ideology both diachronically and cross regionally. Topics include gender roles and water usage; attitudes, practices, and innovations in baths and bathing; water and the formation of identity and policy; ancient and medieval water sources and resources; and religious and literary water imagery. The authors describe how ideas about the nature and function of water created and shaped social relationships, and how religion, politics, and science transformed, and were themselves transformed by, the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature.

Contributors are Rabun Taylor, Sandra Lucore, Robert F. Sutton, Jr., Cynthia K Kosso, Kevin Lawton, Evy Johanne Håland, Hélène Cazes, Alexandra Cuffel, Mark Munn, Brenda Longfellow, Gretchen Meyers, Sara Saba, Scott John McDonough, Etienne Dunant, E. J. Owens , Mehmet Taşlıalan, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, John Stephenson, Lin A. Ferrand, Paul Trio, Anne Scott, Misty Rae Urban, Ruth Stevenson, Charles Connell, Alyce Jordan, Ronald Cooley, and Irene Matthews.

Cynthia K. Kosso, Ph.D. (1993) History and Classics from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a Professor of Ancient History in the Department of History at Northern Arizona University. She is author of The Archaeology of Public Policy in Late Roman Greece (2003). She co-edited, with A. Scott, Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2002).

Anne Scott, Ph.D. (1988) in Literature, Brown University, is Associate Professor in English and Director of the Honors Program at Northern Arizona University. She has published on Chaucer, medieval romances, and saints’ legends. She has also co-edited, with C. Kosso, a volume of interdisciplinary essays on fear in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2002) and is, with Kosso, completing a co-edited volume on poverty and prosperity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (forthcoming)