Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity

Description

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.

Lin Foxhall is Professor of Greek Archaeology and History at the University of Leicester. She has worked in Greece and southern Italy and currently co-directs a field project in Calabria. She has written extensively on agriculture, land use and gender in classical antiquity. Her publications include Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (2007), two books on masculinity edited with John Salmon, Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition and When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity (1998), as well as Money, Labour and Land: Approaches to the Economics of Ancient Greece (2002), edited with Paul Cartledge and Edward Cohen.

'Foxhall, a prominent archaeologist and scholar on gender in antiquity, offers a fine overview of gender in classical Greece and Rome.' Choice '... well written, entertaining, and informative, and the author is clear and concise.' Bryn Mawr Classical Review