Download or read book Gender Domesticity and the Age of Augustus written by Kristina Milnor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early Roman Empire, women's domestic roles were given new public prominence. Through an examination of early imperial representations of women's activities and responsibilities within the household, Kristina Milnor argues that this emphasis on private morality is actually a new way of understanding the nature of political life.

Download or read book Gender Domesticity and the Age of Augustus written by Kristina Milnor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of Augustus has long been recognized as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on `traditional' feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Kristina Milnor takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and Columella, she argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted Roman public life.

Download or read book Naming the Witch written by Kimberly B. Stratton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kimberly B. Stratton investigates the cultural and ideological motivations behind early imaginings of the magician, the sorceress, and the witch in the ancient world. Accusations of magic could carry the death penalty or, at the very least, marginalize the person or group they targeted. But Stratton moves beyond the popular view of these accusations as mere slander. In her view, representations and accusations of sorcery mirror the complex struggle of ancient societies to define authority, legitimacy, and Otherness. Stratton argues that the concept "magic" first emerged as a discourse in ancient Athens where it operated part and parcel of the struggle to define Greek identity in opposition to the uncivilized "barbarian" following the Persian Wars. The idea of magic then spread throughout the Hellenized world and Rome, reflecting and adapting to political forces, values, and social concerns in each society. Stratton considers the portrayal of witches and magicians in the literature of four related periods and cultures: classical Athens, early imperial Rome, pre-Constantine Christianity, and rabbinic Judaism. She compares patterns in their representations of magic and analyzes the relationship between these stereotypes and the social factors that shaped them. Stratton's comparative approach illuminates the degree to which magic was (and still is) a cultural construct that depended upon and reflected particular social contexts. Unlike most previous studies of magic, which treated the classical world separately from antique Judaism, Naming the Witch highlights the degree to which these ancient cultures shared ideas about power and legitimate authority, even while constructing and deploying those ideas in different ways. The book also interrogates the common association of women with magic, denaturalizing the gendered stereotype in the process. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of discourse as well as the work of other contemporary theorists, such as Homi K. Bhabha and Bruce Lincoln, Stratton's bewitching study presents a more nuanced, ideologically sensitive approach to understanding the witch in Western history.

Download or read book Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation written by Lynn R. Huber and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn R. Huber argues that the visionary aspect of Revelation, with its use of metaphorical thinking and language, is the crux of the text's persuasive power. Emerging from a context that employs imagery to promote imperial mythologies, Revelation draws upon a long tradition of using feminine imagery as a tool of persuasion. It does so even while shaping a community identity in contrast to the dominant culture and in exclusive relationship with the Lamb. By drawing upon the work of medieval and modern visionaries, Huber answers a call to examine the way 'real' readers engage with biblical texts. Revealing how Revelation continues to persuade audiences through appeals to the visual and provocative imagery she offers a new sense of how the text metaphorical language simultaneously limits and invites new meaning, unfurling a range of interpretations.

Download or read book Women in the New Testament World written by Susan E. Hylen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern readers of the New Testament often notice its varying ideas about women. Some passages encouraged women to be submissive and remain silent. Yet in others, women characters owned property, headed households, or spoke with approval. Women in the New Testament World helps readers understand this conflicting evidence. It argues that social norms of the time encouraged traditional feminine virtues. However, as Susan Hylen argues, women in the culture enacted these virtues in a variety of ways, including active leadership in households, associations, and cities. In contrast to earlier approaches that divided the evidence into groups that either allowed or forbade women's leadership, this book points to a tension that was pervasive across different groups and regions of the Roman world. Society widely viewed women as inferior to men yet applauded their active pursuit of familial and civic interests. Thus, it was not the case that some women led while others were silent; instead, women were praised for modesty at the same time as they exerted influence in their communities. Elaborating on this rich historical background, Hylen illuminates new possibilities in New Testament texts.

Download or read book A Modest Apostle written by Susan E. Hylen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and mainline pastors tell a familiar narrative about the roles of women in the early church-that women held leadership roles and exercised some authority in the church, but, with the establishment of formal institutional roles, they were excluded from active leadership. Evidence of women's leadership is either described as "exceptional" or relegated to (so-called) heretical groups, who differed with proto-orthodox groups precisely over the issue of women's participation. For example, scholars often contrast the Acts of Paul and Thecla (ATh) with 1Timothy. They understand the two works to represent discrete communities with opposite responses to the question of women's leadership. In A Modest Apostle, Susan Hylen uses Thecla as a microcosm from which to challenge this larger narrative. In contrast to previous interpreters, Hylen reads 1Timothy and the ATh as texts that emerge out of and share a common cultural framework. In the Roman period, women were widely expected to exhibit gendered virtues like modesty, industry, and loyalty to family. However, women pursued these virtues in remarkably different ways, including active leadership in their communities. Reading against a cultural background in which multiple and conflicting norms already existed for women's behavior, Hylen shows that texts like the ATh and 1Timothy begin to look different. Like the culture, 1Timothy affirms women's leadership as deacons and widows while upholding standards of modesty in dress and speech. In the ATh, Thecla's virtue is first established by her modest behavior, which allows her to emerge as a virtuous leader. The text presents Thecla as one who fulfills culturally established norms, even as she pursues a bold new way of life. Hylen's approach points to a new way of understanding women in the early church, one that insists upon the acknowledgment of women's leadership as a historical reality without neglecting the effects of the culture's gender biases.

Download or read book Daughters of Hecate written by Kimberly B. Stratton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture. The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and material culture. The authors probe the foundations of, processes, and motivations behind gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture's earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer's Odyssey. Daughters of Hecate provides a nuanced exploration of the topic while avoiding reductive approaches. In fact, the essays in this volume uncover complexities and counter-discourses that challenge, rather than reaffirm, many gendered stereotypes taken for granted and reified by most modern scholarship. By combining critical theoretical methods with research into literary and material evidence, Daughters of Hecate interrogates a false association that has persisted from antiquity, to early modern witch hunts, to the present day.

Download or read book Women and the Roman City in the Latin West written by Emily Hemelrijk and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman Cities, as conventionally studied, seem to be dominated by men. Yet as the contributions to this volume—which deals with the Roman cities of Italy and the western provinces in the late Republic and early Empire—show, women occupied a wide range of civic roles. Women had key roles to play in urban economies, and a few were prominent public figures, celebrated for their generosity and for their priestly eminence, and commemorated with public statues and grand inscriptions. Drawing on archaeology and epigraphy, on law and art as well as on ancient texts, this multidisciplinary study offers a new and more nuanced view of the gendering of civic life. It asks how far the experience of women of the smaller Italian and provincial cities resembled that of women in the capital, how women were represented in sculptural art as well as in inscriptions, and what kinds of power or influence they exercised in the societies of the Latin West.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of New Testament Gender and Sexuality written by Benjamin H. Dunning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over several decades, scholarship in New Testament and early Christianity has drawn attention both to the ways in which ancient Mediterranean conceptions of embodiment, sexual difference, and desire were fundamentally different from modern ones and also to important lines of genealogical connection between the past and the present. The result is that the study of "gender" and "sexuality" in early Christianity has become an increasingly complex undertaking. This is a complexity produced not only by the intricacies of conflicting historical data, but also by historicizing approaches that query the very terms of analysis whereby we inquire into these questions in the first place. Yet at the same time, recent work on these topics has produced a rich and nuanced body of scholarly literature that has contributed substantially to our understanding of early Christian history and also proved relevant to ongoing theological and social debates. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in the New Testament provides a roadmap to this lively scholarly landscape, introducing both students and other scholars to the relevant problems, debates, and issues. Leading scholars in the field offer original contributions by way of synthesis, critical interrogation, and proposals for future questions, hypotheses, and research trajectories.

Download or read book Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity written by Lisa C. Nevett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the wider cultural framework in which we should study the housing in the Greek and Roman worlds.

Download or read book Ovid s Heroides and the Augustan Principate written by Megan O. Drinkwater and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ovid's "Heroides" and the Augustan Principate, Megan O. Drinkwater makes a compelling case for the importance of Ovid's Heroides as a historical and literary testament, elegantly illustrating how Ovid's literary innovation expresses the unease felt by a citizenry subject to the erosion of their public identity.

Download or read book Contextualizing Gender in Early Christian Discourse written by Caroline Vander Stichele and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Vander Stichele and Penner introduce their own gender-critical approach to the New Testament and other early Christian writings. Building on feminist and post-colonial insights, they explore the importance of gender in both text and context and discuss the diverse issues involved in interpretation as they relate to gender, sex, and sexuality. The authors also set out their methodology and highlight the various hermeneutical issues involved, such as the complexity of gendered and sexed identities in antiquity and the gap that exists between modern and ancient conceptions thereof. They further illustrate their gender-critical approach with concrete examples from the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla, in order to demonstrate how a gender-critical approach works in practice. As such, this book is unique in terms of its range as well as in the explicit methodological focus that is fostered throughout.

Download or read book Western Historiography in Asia written by Q. Edward Wang and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a unique and critical perspective on how Chinese, Japanese and Korean scholars engage and critique the West in their historical thinking. It showcases the dialogue between Asian experts and their Euro-American counterparts and offers valuable insights on how to challenge and overcome Eurocentrism in historical writing.

Download or read book Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity written by Lin Foxhall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up-to-date, theoretically informed historical survey of the practices and performance of gender in ancient Greece and Rome.

Download or read book Augustus written by Jonathan Edmondson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a selection of the most important scholarship on Augustus and the contribution he made to the development of the Roman state in the early imperial period.

Download or read book Killing Hercules written by Richard Rowland and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?

Download or read book Latin Love Poetry written by Denise Eileen McCoskey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.