Description: Building on the important work by Emily A. Hemelrijk, this volume endeavours to bring ancient women out of the domestic sphere and to examine their presence and activities in the public domain, for example as rulers, patrons, priestesses, wives, athletes and pilgrims. Covering the period 500 BCE to 650 CE and ranging across the Mediterranean and beyond, it fruitfully employs a great variety of source types and thematic approaches to argue that women in the ancient world were active in many parts of the public domain, including the civic, the religious and at times even the political and military spheres.
Review Quotes: "Contributors to this volume were invited to build on Hemelrijk's work in relation to their own respective research topics. (...) Despite divergent approaches and the wide-ranging research focus of the various authors, Hemelrijk's work proves to be a solid anchor to bring them together. It is to be expected that many readers will zoom in on only one of the contributions in this volume. Let this review serve as a call against that, however, as reading a single contribution is certainly worthwhile, but diminishes the book's greatest merit: Reading all the papers together offers a thought-provoking overview of the current state of the art and the road ahead for any study of women and gender in Antiquity."
Miriam Groen-Vallinga in BMCR 2024.05.25