WOMEN LATIN POETS:LANGUAGE, GENDER & AUTHORITY FROM ANTIQ PAPER: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century

by Jane Stevenson

Women Latin Poets addresses women's relationship to culture between the first century B.C. and the eighteenth century A.D. by studying women's poetry in Latin. Based entirely on original archival research in twelve countries, Stevenson recovers an aspect of history often deemed not to exist: women who achieved public recognition in their own time, sometimes to a startling extent. Presenting, often for the first time, the work of more than three hundred women Latin poets, all translated and included in a comprehensive finding guide, Women Latin Poets substantially revises received opinion on women's participation in, and relation to, élite culture. The sheer number of female Latin poets will require women's historians to completely re-evaluate the idea that all women had "no access to education" before the nineteenth century.

684 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dr. Jane Stevenson (born 1959) is a UK author who was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing and Bonn. She has lectured in history at Sheffield University, and teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen. Her fiction books include Several Deceptions, a collection of four novellas; a novel, London Bridges; and the historical trilogy made up of the novels The Winter Queen, The Shadow King, and The Empress of the Last Days. Stevenson lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Her academic publications include Women Latin Poets (Oxford University Press), Early Modern Women Poets with Peter Davidson (Oxford University Press) and The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, co-edited with Peter Davidson (Prospect Books).

Reviews

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this book! It was indispensable as I prepared to teach a course on Women Latin Writers, and it's an absolute treasure trove of sources and materials. It was a long book but I wouldn't have wanted it to be a page shorter, since it was so well-researched and comprehensive.

My only complaint was that as a woman Latinists, I know so many writers in Latin today and I wish the book had ended on more of a positive note... Because we DO write Latin novellas, emails, etc. and we are excited to add our voice to this 2000 year tradition of women writing in Latin!

[K.A. Masters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I desperately wanted to like this book. It is clearly a labor of love, and I am so grateful that the author provided such rich scholarship and research as a foundation for future scholars in the field. That having been said, I am severely disappointed in the book as a whole. I feel like the book is an endless series of missed opportunities. The entire premise of the introduction is that women authors were often unfairly criticized by male scholars for being inadequate, yet it never occurs to the author to include these texts so that we can read and judge them for ourselves. There are 600+ pages of text, but only one or two actual Latin poems per chapter. Most of the Latin passages are men talking about women, instead of the actual women's voices themselves. I feel like this book would have been better in anthology format, allowing the actual women's voices to shine, instead of showcasing what men thought about these author's works.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine but not fantastic.