Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity

Key Themes in Ancient History

by Lin Foxhall

This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity, is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Classics, Read For School

123 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Lin Foxhall is a Professor in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester. She was Head of the School at the time of the discovery and has been directly involved in much of the subsequent research, analysis and publication.

Reviews

[Bungaku Shoujo · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, "gender" here is taken to mostly mean "women", though Foxhall also discusses men when she can, especially in the chapter on housing.

Since Foxhall is a historian of Greece, she sometimes make errors with the Roman material (prior to the reign of Hadrian, a woman had to undergo a form of coemptio in order to make a will, but Foxhall claims that Hadrian revoked a blanket ban on women writing wills. This is an especially odd error given that there are various stories relating to women's wills before Hadrian's time, such as Junia Tertia's, and you'd have to wonder what the point would be in granting women property rights if they couldn't pass it down.) Because of this, the book may be of somewhat limited utility as a synthesis of both Rome and Greece, though I had no real objections to the Greek part.

[juulia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what this added to the discourse, especially considering the fairly recent publication date. Rather than exploring the gender diversity in the ancient world, this book largely focused on normative and idealised gender roles. With the discussion on magic in particular, I felt that the examples chosen only further reinforced gender norms (look! man spell aggressive, woman spell gentle) rather than displaying the actual diversity in spells and spell-casters, despite attempts to avoid the typical sexist narrative of all witches being prostitutes. The book could easily have been twice as long, and should probably have had several contributors in order to tackle such a vast topic with any depth and nuance.

[D.İrem · Rating 4 out of 5]

biraz yüzeysel bir çalışma olmuş

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a very great synthesis and is very approachable to readers of all kinds of backgrounds in the classics.