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81 Abstract This thesis argues that motherhood as depicted in Toni Morrison's novels Song of Solomon, Beloved and A Mercy is a site of female empowerment. Its emancipating potential is set against the context of slavery and patriarchy found in the narratives and shows how mothers are able to resist oppressive structures and secure their children's well-being. Slavery practices severed family ties and caused its dismemberment by separating parents from their children. In the novels under study the recovery of those ties happens in an imaginative re-writing of history. Mother figures, such as Beloved's Sethe, come to terms with the re-embodiment of a painful familial past and deal with its traumatizing effects to be able to renounce it and move on. Others like Song of Solomon's Pilate cling to their past and act as mediators between the community's history and its descendants. A re-writing of history is urgent for African American writers and peoples who share slavery pasts, and who thus need to deal with their lasting legacies in the present. Motherhood is thus identified in several recurring patterns. Toni Morrison describes physical aspects of mothering from the point of view of the mother and uses the female body as a life-giving source that cancels the objectification of female slave bodies....

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As a writer of medical summaries and compendia, Oribasius has often been dismissed as a harbinger of late antique medical decline. This dissertation challenges this long-lived assumption by revaluating the compiler and his writings, and the place of medicine in the cultural and social landscape of late antiquity. Chapter one examines the scholarly biases that surround Oribasius’ career, positing that his Medical Collections were produced in response to the intellectual priorities of the Emperor Julian’s scholarly circle. Moreover, both the medical art and the physician were highly regarded in the fourth century, as chapter two demonstrates. Not only do the Collections reflect the priorities and order of empire, but the idea of the medical encounter granted both emperor and bishop a symbolic language with which to pose and articulate social questions in this period. Chapters three and four outline the ways Oribasius engaged with the medical realities of his day, by retaining in his compilation a sense of personal experience and patient interaction. In his borrowed case histories, female subservience in the face of medical authority is expected; whilst the hierarchy of the elite household is shown to dictate his approach to the patients within it. A messier reality of female agency in their own physical and spiritual care is better captured by Christian writers in the miracle account and sermon, in part because Christians like the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom imbued female choice with new theological meaning. Chapter five sets Oribasius’ approach to the female patient in the broader context of late antique social shifts. The compiler’s careful delineation of responsibility and blame in dealings with vulnerable pubertal and pregnant women reflect an attempt to reaffirm an unwritten social contract with the elite and the paterfamilias; a social priority which is also apparent in the legal compendia of the period. Christian writers, meanwhile, drew metaphorically upon medical discourses of generativity and patrimony to distinguish Christian society from the classical past, as chapter six demonstrates. In the final analysis, Oribasius’ Collections are shown to be intimately and variously in dialogue with the society that produced them, reflecting both the high standing of the art in late antiquity, and its symbolic role in defence of the social world, patriarchy and empire. Christian interactions with medicine are shown to reflect many of these same priorities, and to engage with medical norms in more pervasive ways than has often been noted. But it is only in the Christian text that the medical writers’ woman transcends the determinisms of her traditional generativity and physical inferiority, so central to the writings of Oribasius and his classical predecessors.