What activities did the women of ancient Greece perform in the sphere of ritual, and what were the meanings of such activities for them and their culture? By offering answers to these questions, this study aims to recover and reconstruct an important dimension of the lived experience of ancient Greek women. A comprehensive and sophisticated investigation of the ritual roles of women in ancient Greece, it draws on a wide range of evidence from across the Greek world, including literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and vase-paintings, to assemble a portrait of women as religious and cultural agents, despite the ideals of seclusion within the home and exclusion from public arenas that we know restricted their lives. As she builds a picture of the extent and diversity of women’s ritual activity, Barbara Goff shows that they were entrusted with some of the most important processes by which the community guaranteed its welfare. She examines the ways in which women’s ritual activity addressed issues of sexuality and civic participation, showing that ritual could offer women genuinely alternative roles and identities even while it worked to produce wives and mothers who functioned well in this male-dominated society. Moving to more speculative analysis, she discusses the possibility of a women’s subculture focused on ritual and investigates the significance of ritual in women’s poetry and vase-paintings that depict women. She also includes a substantial exploration of the representation of women as ritual agents in fifth-century Athenian drama.

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Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, free, and independent hetaira well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society. Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

From vampires and demons to ghosts and zombies, interest in monsters in literature, film, and popular culture has never been stronger. This concise Encyclopedia provides scholars and students with a comprehensive and authoritative A-Z of monsters throughout the ages. It is the first major reference book on monsters for the scholarly market. Over 200 entries written by experts in the field are accompanied by an overview introduction by the editor. Generic entries such as 'ghost' and 'vampire' are cross-listed with important specific manifestations of that monster. In addition to monsters appearing in English-language literature and film, the Encyclopedia also includes significant monsters in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African and Middle Eastern traditions. Alphabetically organized, the entries each feature suggestions for further reading. The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters is an invaluable resource for all students and scholars and an essential addition to library reference shelves.

Foregrounding critical questions about the tension between the study of drama as literature versus the study of performance, Melinda Powers investigates the methodological problems that arise in some of the latest research on ancient Greek theatre. She examines key issues and debates about the fifth-century theatrical space, audience, chorus, performance style, costuming, properties, gesture, and mask, but instead of presenting a new argument on these topics, Powers aims to understand her subject better by exploring the shared historical problems that all scholars confront as they interpret and explain Athenian tragedy. A case study of Euripides’s Bacchae, which provides more information about performance than any other extant tragedy, demonstrates possible methods for reconstructing the play’s historical performance and also the inevitable challenges inherent in that task, from the limited sources and the difficulty of interpreting visual material, to the risks of conflating actor with character and extrapolating backward from contemporary theatrical experience. As an inquiry into the study of theatre and performance, an introduction to historical writing, a reference for further reading, and a clarification of several general misconceptions about Athenian tragedy and its performance, this historiographical analysis will be useful to specialists, practitioners, and students alike.

Despite the crucial roles they often play, no study yet compares the off-stage assemblies, armies, and populations found in surviving Athenian dramatic works. Covering fifth- and early fourth-century tragedy and comedy, Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama analyses how off-stage groups influence and respond to events on stage, and how characters interact with these groups. Drama exploits these groups' off-stage nature by depicting them through different characters' viewpoints: characters often struggle to define, predict, or control off-stage groups, which obscures and challenges the audience's ability to interpret them. The interaction between multivalent and sometimes contradictory narratives of off-stage groups demands a new interpretive framework. Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama provides this framework, offering new readings of several prominent comedies and tragedies. However, the importance of this framework extends beyond drama. The first chapter surveys depictions of group decision-making in fifth-century prose, in order to demonstrate how Athenian drama responds to prose depictions of group psychology. Athenian drama engages with the early ideas of group psychology circulating in fifth- and early fourth-century Athens; it creates fictive worlds where stereotypical depictions of collective emotion can be probed, explored and taken to their logical extremes. Studying off-stage groups therefore allows us to rethink our understanding of narrative, politics, and social psychology in drama, and the ways in which these fields intersect.

Drawing together new research from emerging and senior scholars, this selection of papers from the decennial Greek Drama V conference (Vancouver, 2017) explores the works of the ancient Greek playwrights and showcases new methodologies with which to study them. Sixteen chapters from a field of international contributors examine a range of topics, from the politics of the ancient theatre, to the role of the chorus, to the earliest history of the reception of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Employing anthropological, historical, and psychological critical methods alongside performance analysis and textual criticism, these studies bring fresh and original interpretations to the plays. Several contributions analyse fragmentary tragedies, while others incorporate ideas on the performance aspect of certain plays. The final chapters deal separately with comedy, naturally focusing on the plays of Aristophanes and Menander. Greek Drama V offers a window into where the academic field of Greek drama is now, and points towards the future scholarship it will produce.