Despite elegy’s newfound aetiological and epicizing strains in Propertius 4, the book is a veritable chorus of female voices: Arethusa, Tarpeia, Acanthis and Cornelia join Cynthia (in her belated return) to articulate private sentiment and personal experience in the patriarchal world of which, dead or moribund, they are collatoral damage. This chapter explores how Propertius connects his female cast (which includes cameos also from the legendary Cassandra, a priestess of the Bona Dea, and Cleopatra) with the women of Virgil’s Aeneid, who likewise are evanescent (yet never silenced) victims. Chief among these heroines is the ‘elegiac’ Dido, her volubility in life and silence in the underworld refracted in the monologues of Arethusa, Tarpeia and Cynthia. Present too throughout the book are Dido’s Virgilian analogues (e.g., Camilla, Cleopatra and, perhaps, Helen), while the action of the Aeneid as a whole, from the sack of Troy to the Latin war and death of Turnus, are variously rewritten – by Propertius and Horos in opposing programmes, by Cynthia in the militia amoris of her last hurrah and by Cornelia, in whose ghostly allusion to the Danaids echo the final lines of the Aeneid.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter explores the medical systems developed in precolonial and colonial Nigeria, the social, economic, and political processes which impacted the development of said medical institutions/practices, and how these systems, in turn, impacted the social, economic, and political landscape of colonial Nigeria. This chapter will use several significant pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, to explain how Nigeria’s medical and nonmedical systems interacted during immense medical stress. The medical practices and policies explored were highly regionalized, and each Indigenous population had its specialized form of healthcare. When Nigeria was brought under the colonial fold, certain regions received more or less assistance in developing medical facilities. These developments were primarily driven by economic interests underpinned by a racist political and social system, often leading to disastrous consequences.

The second chapter turns to the roots of Roman drama, a popular art form throughout our period. It locates Rome’s particular kind of theatre in the larger Italic context, outlines the major playwrights, who exist mostly in fragments, and devotes most of its energy to discussion of Plautus and Terence, the two comedic dramatists whose work survives in sufficient quantity. Themes include the importance of Greek models, the experience of attending a show, the style and tone of comedies, major plot structures, and important characters.

The conclusion brings together the themes that have emerged throughout the book, provides comparative perspectives, teases out some of the wider implications for the study of gender and suggests directions for future research. It also comes back to the multitude of animals that have appeared sporadically throughout the different chapters, discussing the role they played in gender construction and the potential of human/animal connections to decentre the man in the process of creating male subjectivities.

Take a broad look at American family and friendhip ntworks, examining marriage, child-rearing, and other family and personal relations among the consuls and members of the American community in the Mediterranean.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical framework of the book by defining the two main lenses through which the material is viewed: scholarly masculinity and clerical masculinity. In doing so, it clarifies their relationship to other types of masculinities and highlights the role of animals in gender formation. This chapter also situates the book in its broader historiographical context, within both Byzantine and Western medieval Studies.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

Hanne Løland Levinson’s “Gendered Imagery in Isaiah” looks at one of the most significant and striking features of Isaiah: its repeated use of feminine imagery for God. She begins with an advanced yet accessible discussion of how metaphors work, then goes on to analyze how the use of imagery comparing God to a pregnant woman, a midwife, and a breastfeeding mother—alongside more widespread masculine imagery—combine to challenge and transform the ways in which readers perceive God. In conclusion, she points out the importance of female god-language in a world in which gender continues to be a basis for inequality and exclusion.

Making the child-rights identity detached from its social context and the possibility of self-identification serves to protect the child from traditional and social harmful practices directed toward children. At the same time, the monist identity of the child becomes placed out of reach of democratic deliberations and self-determination. The intersectionality of race and gender becomes two socially constructed concepts that cannot be addressed within the child-rights identity, which both serves to protect the child from discrimination but also risks making child rights detached from addressing crucial structural inequalities based on race and gender.

Clare Siviter and Emmanuela Wroth begin their chapter by establishing France’s best known women actors, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, as a barometer for the hypervisibility of French women performers’ bodies. Siviter and Wroth explore two case studies that paved the way for the late nineteenth-century celebrity which Bernhardt and Rachel embodied: the ‘Bataille des Dames’ between Mlle George and Mlle Duchesnois at the start of the nineteenth century and the Restoration rivalry between Classicism and Romanticism personified by Mlle Mars and Marie Dorval. They focus on three particular sites: the women’s physical presence and experience of their gendered bodies including their voices; their often sexualized fetishization in contemporary print; and their memorialization both in their autobiographies and in theatre history. Having analysed the roles of class, gender and sexuality, they return to the hypervisibility of Rachel and later Bernhardt’s bodies, and the important questions these women’s bodies raise regarding other marginalized identities, especially in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’.

The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.