Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 April 8

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April 8

How did people view nature before the Enlightenment?

[Moved here from Language]

I was reading Mother Nature, claiming that people before the Enlightenment believed that God and nature were not separated. So... what's that supposed to mean? That hurting or cursing at nature is somehow equivalent to blasphemy against God? Eh? What's the significance of the separation? Has there been any philosophical or theological support or refutation for this separation? 140.254.226.232 (talk) 20:51, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Can you give a direct quote or link to the section? The claim is absurd, since nature was seen as the creation of God over which he gave dominion to man. Nature is also corruptible, while god is not. Spinoza was probably the first modern to identify nature with a singular God. His definition of God was Natura Naturans, roughly "nature naturing". μηδείς (talk) 21:04, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

It's a short article. But here you go.140.254.226.232 (talk) 21:20, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, that statement in that article reads like bullshit. Generally, it depends on what you mean by "nature". If you mean Wilderness, then people generally feared it, because it eats you. If you mean "all the stuff that isn't people" like horses and cows and wheat and barley and oranges and stuff, then people of the Judeo-Christian world viewed it through the lens of the Bible, and reading the first few chapters of Genesis would give you a good perspective of the relationship between Nature and Humans that God establishes. Just a hint, it isn't that "nature is God" idea that you read in that section. That concept was actually developed in the Enlightenment, by people like Spinoza, and by believers in Deism, which was an Enlightenment concept. Such ideas didn't exist in the pre-Enlightenment Europe. --Jayron32 01:30, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't think reading scripture is helpful. Reading interpretative traditions based on scripture may be more helpful, because it offers an opinion on how to interpret a particular passage. I can read scripture with a completely modern frame of mind, but that completely modern frame of mind would be anachronistic to what was actually believed. In summary, reading scripture is useless. 140.254.136.167 (talk) 15:23, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I think what you are looking for is Animism. --TammyMoet (talk) 11:31, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Women during menstruation in antiquity

How did women clean themselves during their menstrual periods in antiquity, before menstrual pads and related stuff were invented? 140.254.226.232 (talk) 21:33, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Rags, perhaps? See Sanitary napkin. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:43, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I read that page. It says nothing about women in antiquity. 140.254.226.232 (talk) 21:45, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

There's actually a fair amount of writing on this, and it's not entirely guesswork or theory: women in living memory, and still in many parts of the world, get by without manufactured sanitary products. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get specifics on this topic for specific ancient cultures, as oppose to general approaches women have used in general, because there doesn't tend to be much surviving reference to it. Hippocrates apparently wrote about tampon use, and ancient Egyptian descriptions of tampon-like contraceptives exist. Jewish law includes measures for a woman's period that includes inserting white cloth in the style of a tampon, and Islamic stories exist involving Muhammed giving advice to menstruating women involving the use of pads and even a tray to catch the (non-menstrual) blood while a woman prayed. I suggest starting at this website (better than it initially looks): Museum of Menstruation. The front page has blurbs that lead to more detailed articles, like this:

"Did many women intentionally menstruate into their clothing in 17th-century Britain?

"Dr Sara Read of Loughborough University (U.K.) writes (pdf in large gray box) that

"many might have considered that normal. She kindly sent me her article, which also discusses the origins of the menstrual taboo and other fascinating cultural :"details, including religious.

"And I believe that many - most? - women of later eras might have also done so.

"A reader responded with this:

""Hi, Just read your article about menstruating and devices used when menstruating in earlier times. My mother was from England and i know that going back to her great grandmothers they made pads with cotton or wool in them to absorb the blood. They attached them to their underwear with safety pins or straight pins that they blunted and bent under. She showed me a couple that she had saved when i started. They would boil them clean." "

So you get a combination of sourced information, links to further reading, and anecdotal data that really helps you develop a picture for how practices worked and developed. 86.146.28.229 (talk) 22:18, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

It's also worth noting that many women would only have had a few periods during their entire lives due to the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding, which has the side effect of preventing periods. A woman (like my great grandmother) who had 16 children over a 36 year span (between 16 and 54) may have only had about a dozen periods between marriage and menopause! --TammyMoet (talk) 11:26, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

There was a similar question some time back, Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2011 April 12#Infant hygiene in artic environment (though one reference is dead). Inuit women used moss, foxes (Arctic fox) and other furred animals. I would suspect that women in other places used moss as well. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 21:43, 9 April 2014 (UTC)