Explores and expands on scholarly debates on the status and representation women in antiquity; invaluable reading for all students and teachers of ancient history.The study of gender in classical antiquity has undergone rapid and wide-ranging development in the past two decades. This collection of new assessments has been written by some of the most influential experts in this field from all over the world. The contributors reassess the role of women in diverse contexts and areas, such as archaic and classical Greek literature and cult, Roman imperial politics, ancient medicine and early Christianity. Some offer original interpretations of topics which have been widely discussed over the last twenty years; others highlight new areas of research.Women in Antiquity: New Assessments reflects and expands on existing scholarly debates on the status and representation of women in the ancient world. It focuses on methodology, and suggests areas for research and improvement. It is invaluable and engaging reading for all students and teachers of ancient history.

Explores and expands on scholarly debates on the status and representation women in antiquity; invaluable reading for all students and teachers of ancient history.

Archaeology is one of our most powerful sources of new information about the past, about the lives of our ancient and not-so-ancient ancestors. The contributors to Women in Antiquity consider the theoretical problems involved in discerning what the archaeological evidence tells us about gender roles in antiquity. The book includes chapters on the history of gender research, historical texts, mortuary analysis, household remains, hierarchy, and ethnoarchaeology, with each chapter teasing out the inherent difficulty in interpreting ancient evidence as well as the promise of new understanding. Women in Antiquity offers a fresh, accessible account of how we might grasp the ways in which sexual roles and identities shaped the past.

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.

Examining the perishable nature of the history of women’s lives

This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents. Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as "Amazons" or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply—a society "before sexuality"—where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real. Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.

Women's mobility is central to understanding cultural constructions of gender. Regarding ancient cultures, including ancient Greece, a re-evaluation of women's mobility within the household and beyond it is currently taking place. This invites an informed analysis of female mobility in Greek myth, under the premise that myth may open a venue to social ideology and the imaginary. Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth offers the first comprehensive analysis of this topic. It presents close readings of ancient texts, engaging with feminist thought and the 'mobility turn'. A variety of Olympian goddesses and mortal heroines are explored, and the analysis of their myths follows specific chronological considerations. Female mobility is presented in quite diverse ways in myth, reflecting cultural flexibility in imagining mobile goddesses and heroines. At the same time, the out-of-doors spaces that mortal heroines inhabit seem to lack a public or civic quality, with the heroines being contained behind 'glass walls'. In this respect, myth seems to reproduce the cultural limitations of ancient Greek social ideology on mobility, inviting us to reflect not only on the limits of mythic imagination but also on the timelessness of Greek myth.