War and Masculinity in Roman and Medieval Culture

Jaakkojuhani Peltonen is Adjunct Professor (title of Docent) at Tampere University, Finland. In 2018, he joined the Department of Classics at King’s College London, working there for two years as a Visiting Fellow. Routledge published an expanded version of his doctoral thesis, Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire: 150 BC to AD 600, in 2019, as well as a monograph titled Masculine Ideals and Alexander the Great: An Exemplary Man in the Roman and Medieval World in 2023. His research interests include the use of history, ideas of masculinity, and the ideology of war in ancient Rome.Elina Pyy is a historian of antiquity based in the University of Helsinki, Finland. She specializes in the Roman late Republican and early Imperial periods; her research interests include ancient gender studies, classical reception studies, and themes of violence and the body. Pyy has published two monographs, The Semiotics of Caesar Augustus (2018) and Women and War in Roman Epic (2020), as well as several articles dealing with the themes of identity, gender, and heroism.Jussi Rantala is Adjunct Professor (title of Docent) at Tampere University, Finland. Rantala’s publications include Travel, Pilgrimage and Social Interaction from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2019, as an editor); Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World (2019, as an editor); and The Ludi Saeculares of Septimius Severus: The Ideologies of a New Roman Empire (2017). He has published several articles dealing with his research interests, including historiography, identity, and ideologies of war in ancient Rome.

• Introduction 1. Take It Like a Roman: Pain and Masculinity in Imperial War Epic 2. Beyond Lucretia. War and Sexual Violence in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita 3. Women and War: Unveiling Female Agency in Roman Historiography 4. War Scenes in Pompeian Homes? Military virtus and the Roman Domestic Realm 5. The Roman Imperial Rhetoric of Emasculation in Visual Representations of War 6. Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The viri fortes in Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res gestae 7. Brains and Brawn: Intellectual and Physical Manliness in Agathias’ Histories 8. War and Masculinity in Tenth Century Byzantium: The History of Leo the Deacon 9. Warriors and Women in Northern Europe 400-1000 CE 10. Saints Day Sermons and Knightly Virtues: Late Medieval Sermons on Saint George