Women's ritual competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Women's ritual competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
Routledge, 2017
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Contributions in this volume demonstrate how, across the ancient Mediterranean and over hundreds of years, women's rituals intersected with the political, economic, cultural, or religious spheres of their communities in a way that has only recently started to gain sustained academic attention. The volume aims to tease out a number of different approaches and contexts, and to expand existing studies of women in the ancient world as well as scholarship on religious and social history.
The contributors face a famously difficult task: ancient authors rarely recorded aspects of women's lives, including their songs, prophecies, and prayers. Many of the objects women made and used in ritual were perishable and have not survived; certain kinds of ritual objects (lowly undecorated pots, for example) tend not even to be recorded in archaeological reports. However, the broad range of contributions in this volume demonstrates the multiplicity of materials that can be used as evidence - including inscriptions, textiles, ceramics, figurative art, and written sources - and the range of methodologies that can be used, from analysis of texts, images, and material evidence to cognitive and comparative approaches.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Matthew P. Dillon, Esther Eidinow, and Lisa Maurizio
I. OBJECTS AND OFFERINGS
The Forgotten Things: Women, Rituals and Community in Western Sicily (8th-6th Centuries BCE) - Meritxell Ferrer
Materiality and Ritual Competence: Insights from Women's Prayer Typology in Homer - Andromache Karanika
Power through Textiles: Women as Ritual Performers in Ancient Greece - Cecilie Brons
Silent Mourners: Terracotta Statues and Death Rituals in Canosa - Tiziana D'Angelo and Maya Muratov
II. AUTHORITY AND TRANSMISSION
Shared Meters and Meanings: Delphic Oracles and Women's Lament - Lisa Maurizio
Priestess and Polis in Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris - Laura McClure
Owners of Their Own Bodies: Women's Magical Knowledge and Reproduction in Greek Inscriptions - Irene Salvo
III. CONTROL AND RESISTANCE
Bitter Constraint? Penelope's Web, and "Season Due" - Laurie O'Higgins
Women's Ritual Competence and Domestic Dough: Celebrating the Thesmophoria, Haloa, and Dionysian Rites in Ancient Attika - Matthew P. Dillon
Inhabiting/Subverting the Norms: Women's Ritual Agency in the Greek West - Bonnie MacLachlan
IV. DENIAL AND CONTESTATION
Women's Ritual Competence and a Self-Inscribing Prophet at Rome - J. Bert Lott
"A Devotee and a Champion": Re-interpreting the Female "Victims" of Magic in Early Christian Texts - Esther Eidinow
"What the Women Know": Plutarch and Pausanias on Female Ritual Competence - Deborah Lyons
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"