Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily

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.