By their social and material context as markers of graves, dedications and public signs of honour, inscriptions offer a distinct perspective on the social lives, occupations, family belonging, mobility, ethnicity, religious affiliations, public honour and legal status of Roman women ranging from slaves and freedwomen to women of the elite and the imperial family, both in Rome and in Italian and provincial towns. They thus shed light on women who are largely overlooked by the literary sources. The wide range of inscriptions and graffiti included in this book show women participating not only in their families and households but also in the social and professional life of their cities. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse of women's own voices. Marital ideals and problems, love and hate, friendship, birth and bereavement, joy and hardship all figure in inscriptions, revealing some of the richness and variety of life in the ancient world.
EMILY A. HEMELRIJK is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on Roman women and gender. Her books include Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Élite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (1999/2004), Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Roman West (2015) and Women and the Roman City in the Latin West (2013, edited with Greg Woolf).
Introduction; 1. Family Life; 2. Legal Status, Citizenship and Ethnicity; 3. Occupations; 4. Social Relations, Travel and Migration; 5. Religion; 6. Public Life; 7. Imperial Women
'Hemelrijk (Univ. of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) has produced a remarkably informative and useful work … what makes the book particularly valuable to scholars as well as students is the separate downloadable PDF (available on the publisher's website) of the original Greek and Latin texts of all the inscriptions, edited in accordance with modern epigraphical conventions. Anyone interested in the ancient world will learn much from this excellent work … Highly recommended.' M. J. Johnson, Choice Magazine
