Fertility, Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Reproduction at Rome

Winner of the 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)Winner of the 2024 Mark Golden Book PrizeRoman women bore children not just for their husbands, but for the Roman state. This book is the first comprehensive study of the importance of fecunditas (human fertility) in Roman society, c. 100 BC - AD 300. Its focus is the cultural impact of fecunditas, from gendered assumptions about infertility, to the social capital children brought to a marriage, to the emperors’ exploitation of fecunditas to build and preserve dynasties. Using a rich range of source material - literary, juristic, epigraphic, numismatic - never before collected, it explores how the Romans shaped fecunditas into an essential female virtue.