Motherhood And Infancies In The Mediterranean In Antiquity

This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore the social and cultural constructions of motherhood and childhood throughout prehistoric and classic societies in Antiquity.

This edited collection examines concepts and realities of motherhood in the ancient world. The collection uses essays on the Roman Empire, Mesoamerica, the Philippines, Egypt, and India to emphasize the concept of motherhood as a worldwide phenomenon and experience. While covering a wide geographical range, the editors arranged the collection thematically to explore themes including the relationship between the mother, particularly ruling mothers, and children and the mother in real life and legend. Some essays explore related issues, such as adaptation and child custody after divorce in ancient Egypt and the mother in religious culture of late antiquity and the ancient Buddhist Indian world. The contributors utilize a variety of methodologies and approaches including textual analysis and archaeological analysis in addition to traditional historical methodology.

This volume offers the first comprehensive look at the role of women in the monarchies of the ancient Mediterranean. It consistently addresses certain issues across all dynasties: title; role in succession; the situation of mothers, wives, and daughters of kings; regnant and co-regnant women; role in cult and in dynastic image; and examines a sampling of the careers of individual women while placing them within broader contexts. Written by an international group of experts, this collection is based on the assumption that women played a fundamental role in ancient monarchy, that they were part of, not apart from it, and that it is necessary to understand their role to understand ancient monarchies. This is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the role of women in antiquity.

The last forty years of research have cast new light on the lives of ancient Mediterranean women in the penumbra of our patriarchal sources, including the pervasive risks they faced in becoming mothers. Current demographic models suggest that perhaps as many as one in five children would have lost their mothers by age ten. The inescapable conclusion is that the absence of ancient mothers is not merely an artifact of bias in our sources, but also a fundamental condition of antiquity, with profound implications for ancient family life and the experience of childhood. Missing Mothers: Maternal Absence in Antiquity is the first volume dedicated to studying mother absence as an integrated phenomenon in the ancient Mediterranean, from its obvious manifestation as total absence in the wake of maternal death, to the partial absences of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and occasionally choice. The fifteen essays collected here explore the gaps left by absent mothers and how individuals, families, and societies in the ancient Mediterranean conceptualized, represented, and responded to those gaps, practically, psychologically, artistically, and politically between the 5th century BCE and late antiquity.

Papers in this volume aim to reevaluate the importance of women as active and powerful social agents in the definition of ancient cultures, their contribution to the economic and social development of the community and to the position, reputation, and prestige of their families.

This book tells the story of women in archaeology worldwide and their dedication to advancing knowledge and human understanding. In their own voices, they present themselves as archaeologists working in academia or the private and public sector across 33 countries. The chapters in this volume reconstruct the history of archaeology while honoring those female scholars and their pivotal research who are no longer with us. Many scholars in this volume fiercely explore non-traditional research areas in archaeology. The chapters bear witness to their valuable and unique contributions to reconstructing the past through innovative theoretical and methodological approaches. In doing so, they share the inherent difficulties of practicing archaeology, not only because they, too, are mothers, sisters, and wives but also because of the context in which they are writing. This volume may interest researchers in archaeology, history of science, gender studies, and feminist theory. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This comprehensive study of families in the Mediterranean world spans the Bronze Age through Late Antiquity, and looks at families and households in various ancient societies inhabiting the regions around the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to break down artificial boundaries between academic disciplines.

This book investigates religious rituals and gender in modern and ancient Greece, with a specific focus on women’s role in connection with healing. How can we come to understand such mainstays of ancient culture as its healing rituals, when the male recorders did not, and could not, know or say much about what occurred, since the rituals were carried out by women? The book proposes that one way of tackling this dilemma is to attend similar healing rituals in modern Greece, carried out by women, and compare the information with ancient sources, thus providing new ways of interpreting the ancient material we possess. Carrying out fieldwork—being present during, often, enduring rituals within cultures, despite other changes—teaches one whole new ways of looking at written and pictorial records of such events. By bringing ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination, this text also has relevance beyond the Greek context both in time and space.