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Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
DOI link for Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean book
Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
DOI link for Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
Women's Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean book
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ABSTRACT
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
part |2 pages
PART I Objects and offerings
chapter 1|21 pages
The forgotten things: Women, rituals, and community in Western Sicily (eighth–sixth centuries BCE )
chapter 2|14 pages
Materiality and ritual competence: Insights from women’s prayer typology in Homer
chapter 3|19 pages
Power through textiles: Women as ritual performers in ancient Greece
chapter 4|30 pages
Silent attendants: Terracotta statues and death rituals in Canosa
part |2 pages
PART II Authority and transmission
chapter 7|18 pages
Owners of their own bodies: Women’s magical knowledge and reproduction in Greek inscriptions
part |2 pages
PART III Control and resistance
chapter 9|17 pages
Women’s ritual competence and domestic dough: Celebrating the Thesmophoria, Haloa, and Dionysian rites in ancient Attica
chapter 10|15 pages
Inhabiting/subverting the norms: Women’s ritual agency in the Greek West
part |2 pages
PART IV Denial and contestation