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Female agency in the ancient world has long been implicitly, and on a few occasions explicitly, examined in classical scholarship, but few of these studies begin with a unified theoretical framework or set of approaches (with some notable exceptions). Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World departs from these important studies by beginning with a definition of the aforementioned concept of ’female agency’ that acknowledges that all social agents, female and otherwise, were and are relational and multidimensional beings, and that agency was and is relational. This volume’s conceptual points of departure allow contributors to consider women as social agents in ancient cultures and as relationally embedded and integrated in various cultural systems, even under conditions of oppression, by providing contextualised examples of women acting on their varying degrees of agency.
Contributions are organised broadly chronologically in order to trace the breadth and shifting patterns of female agency throughout the ancient Mediterranean world from the 7th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Case studies include Katherine McDonald on the dynamics of female agency in pre-Roman through a close examination of the epigraphic record; Karolina Frank on women’s oracular inquiries at Dodona and Brenda Longfellow on how Pompeian women, through their funerary inscriptions, can show, from different angles, the needs, desires, and agency of women from a range of social circumstances.
