This paper reconsiders premature child death in ancient Greece and Rome by challenging the assumption that high infant mortality prevented deep parental attachment. Following Adrienne Rich, it distinguishes between motherhood as institution and mothering as embodied practice. Building on Sara Ruddick’s concept of “maternal thinking,” it argues that early death marked the collapse of an ongoing project of preservation and growth.
Placing material evidence at the center, the paper examines how vulnerability and loss were negotiated through objects, bodies, and ritual spaces. Funerary terracottas of nurses and pedagogues, burial assemblages, epigraphic monuments, and protective amulets reveal dense networks of caregiving practices. Drawing on Susan Sered’s analysis of women-centered religious domains, it situates childbirth, infant protection, and mourning within gendered spheres of ritual expertise embedded in lived religion.
Material practices of protection and commemoration demonstrate that ancient communities did not normalize infant death but ritually engaged its destabilizing force.