The author shows that understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from the archaic period, songs for female choruses and characters in tragedy, and lyrical representations of women's rituals and cults. The book discusses poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors. It demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets. The book traces the evolution of female-voice lyric from 600 to 100 BCE and includes Alcman, Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, other lyric poets, lyric in the drama, and the Hellenistic poets Nossis, Theocritus, and Bion.

Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets.

In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.

The songs of working women are reflected in Greek poetry and poetics. In ancient Greece, women's daily lives were occupied by various forms of labor. These experiences of work have largely been forgotten. Andromache Karanika has examined Greek poetry for depictions of women working and has discovered evidence of their lamentations and work songs. Voices at Work explores the complex relationships between ancient Greek poetry, the female poetic voice, and the practices and rituals surrounding women’s labor in the ancient world. The poetic voice is closely tied to women’s domestic and agricultural labor. Weaving, for example, was both a common form of female labor and a practice referred to for understanding the craft of poetry. Textile and agricultural production involved storytelling, singing, and poetry. Everyday labor employed—beyond its socioeconomic function—the power of poetic creation. Karanika starts with the assumption that there are certain forms of poetic expression and performance in the ancient world which are distinctively female. She considers these to be markers of a female “voice” in ancient Greek poetry and presents a number of case studies: Calypso and Circe sing while they weave; in Odyssey 6 a washing scene captures female performances. Both of these instances are examples of the female voice filtered into the fabric of the epic. Karanika brings to the surface the words of women who informed the oral tradition from which Greek epic poetry emerged. In other words, she gives a voice to silence.

The second edition of the “milestone” work of history that focuses on female musicians through the ages (College Music Symposium). This updated, expanded, and reorganized edition of Women and Music features even more women composers, performers, and patrons, even more musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music outside Europe and North America. A popular university textbook, Women and Music is enlightening for scholars, a good source of programming ideas for performers, and a pleasure for other music lovers.

Faint though the voices of the women of Greek and Roman antiquity may be in some cases, their sound, if we listen carefully enough, can fill many of the gaps and silences of women s past.From the beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C. and ending with Hypatia and Egeria in the fifth century A.D., Jane McIntosh Snyder listens carefully to the major women writers of classical Greece and Rome, piecing together the surviving fragments of their works into a coherent analysis that places them in their literary, historical, and intellectual contexts.While relying heavily on modern classical scholarship, Snyder refutes some of the arguments that implicitly deny the power of women's written words the idea that women's experience is narrow or trivial and therefore automatically inferior as subject matter for literature, the notion that intensity in a woman is a sign of neurotic imbalance, and the assumption that women s work should be judged according to some externally imposed standard.The author studies the available fragments of Sappho, ranging from poems on mythological themes to traditional wedding songs and love poems, and demonstrates her considerable influence on Western thought and literature. An overview of all of the authors Snyder discusses shows that ancient women writers focused on such things as emotions, lovers, friendship, folk motifs, various aspects of daily living, children, and pets, in distinct contrast to their male contemporaries concern with wars and politics. Straightforwardness and simplicity are common characteristics of the writers Snyder examines. These women did not display allusion, indirection, punning and elaborate rhetorical figures to the extent that many male writers of the ancient world did. Working with the sparse records available, Snyder strives to place these female writers in their proper place in our heritage.

The study of women in the ancient Mediterranean world is a topic of growing interest among classicists and ancient historians, and also students of history, sociology and women's studies. This volume is an essential resource supplying a compilation of source material in translation, with suggestions for further reading, a general bibliography, and an index of ancient authors and works. Texts come from literary, rhetorical, philosophical and legal sources, as well as papyri and inscriptions, and each text will be placed into the cultural mosaic to which it belongs. Ranging geographically from the Greek mainland and the communities along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to Egypt and the Greek West (modern day southern Italy and Sicily), the volume follows a clear chronological structure. Beginning in the eighth century BCE the coverage continues through Archaic and Classical Athens concluding with the Hellenistic era.