Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 989 kr

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Sicilian curse practices have often been misread through Athenocentric paradigms. This book repositions Sicily at the centre of inquiry, offering the first holistic analysis of legal curse tablets (defixiones iudiciariae) from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with particular focus on Selinous, Akragas and Kamarina. Moving beyond isolated textual readings, it situates these inscriptions within the legal, social and political environments that shaped their production. The study provides new editions and drawings of key tablets - revisited after decades of neglect - while addressing palaeographic, chronological and editorial issues. For the first time, it also assembles a complete set of images of all major examples, making them fully accessible. By embedding curses within civic life and predominantly elite rivalries, it reveals them as 'paralegal' instruments in the renegotiation of status, authority and power. Sicilian legal curses thus emerge as independent from, rather than appendices to, their better-known Attic and Athenian counterparts.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-08-31
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor440
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781009691567

Tillhör följande kategorier

Politik och statsskick inom Samhälle och politik
Rättshistoria inom Juridik
Forntidens historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Sofia Bianchi Mancini is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies and co-PI of the SFB TRR 294 sub-project A01, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She is also the editor of One Cult, Multiple Cultures (with L. Pérez Yarza, and J. Herrera Rando, 2025) and of Reaching the Superhuman (with C. Di Serio and S. Fogliazza, 2025), and author of Epica antica (with J. Rüpke, 2025).

Introduction; 1. The Emergence of Sicilian Legal Systems: Written Laws and Dispute Resolution; 2. The Invention of Legal Curse Tablets: Politics and Law in Sixth-Century Selinous; 3. The Earliest Legal Curses from Ancient Sicily; 4. The Political Culture of the Elites: Mobility, Distress, and the Origins of Curse Practice; 5. The Politics of Legal Curses in the First Half of the Fifth Century; 6. The Evolution of Selinountine Legal Curses; 7. Demeter Malophoros and the Shift in Curse Practice; 8. From Tyranny to Legal Curse Tablets: The Socio-Political Evolution of Akragas; 9. Inscribed (In)justice: The Other Side of the Akragantine Elite; 10. When the Old Meets the New: Kamarina in the Late Fourth Century; 11. Towards a New Era of Legal Curse Practices; Conclusion.