Considering the sources and material evidence available from Rome, this chapter focuses on the evidence of women’s associations with these soldiers of the different units stationed in the capital. These women were often labeled as “wives” in written documentation. By analyzing the available evidence, predominantly on funerary monuments, the authors expand the discussion of the social expectations and realities of women associated with the military in the context of the Empire’s center. The evidence gives us a rich image of an aspect of society that has not yet been explored, while at the same time providing a new perspective on the life of Roman soldiers. The origin of the women and their social background is treated as a relevant factor for their integration in the military community and – as inhabitants of Rome – in the community of the city. In this context it is interesting to consider the origin of personal relationships. In some cases, it seems that women accompanied soldiers to Rome from a provincial location and other cases suggest the relationship began in the capital itself.

The role of women in the religious sphere of the military world has been underserved. This chapter turns to the epigraphic record to illuminate the role of women in military households and communities in both public and private contexts. Visual and epigraphic material is a rich source of information for our understanding of women’s roles in public military settings and private military households, and especially how women expressed religiosity on behalf of themselves, their soldier-husbands, and their households broadly. The evidence is not overwhelming, but there is enough to start building an image of the religious aspects of the lives of women associated with the army. With this aim in mind, this chapter illuminates the lives of women in military communities through the lens of religion as one aspect of daily life. By investigating precisely what women were doing in the military community, this contribution addresses the increasing trend to see the families of soldiers – whether living in the fort or extramural settlement – as a direct part of the military community, rather than a “civilian” counterpart that has often been discussed in pejorative terms or as an appendage population that is located there only by chance.

This chapter examines the presence and role(s) played by elite women in military camps during the early Principate. The chapter starts with a consideration of our sources for elite women and the nature of Roman authors’ treatment of military women. Status consciousness was ever present so the authors define which women could be considered as elite in military settings. After reviewing evidence for elite women in camps the authors examine elite women through the lens of Agrippina the Elder. As a member of the imperial family Agrippina received an unusual level of attention from ancient authors which results in more evidence about her activities in camp. Comparing Agrippina’s behavior with the diverse evidence for other elite women yields a sense of how these women were comporting themselves in military settings. The study reveals that elite women were not disruptive troublemakers. Perhaps not surprisingly, elite women behaved in accordance with Roman culture expectations and elite gender norms, as would have been expected of a Roman matrona.

This chapter explores the topic of Roman military families’ mobility in the late first through third centuries CE by discussing a case study of British families abroad. It surveys the evidence for families that came from Roman Britain and settled on the continent. In doing so, the author assesses and compares various types of evidence (literary, epigraphic, and archaeological) to discuss the case of British military families on the move, families that had been present in the Roman Empire but not accounted for in the modern scholarly literature. The sources analyzed include literary texts, inscriptions, military diplomas and personal dress accessories that the members of such families took with them as part of personal possessions during their travels. Since most sources available to trace such families come from the Roman military context, the focus lies on emigrant soldiers’ families. The first section relies heavily on the historical texts and epigraphic material while the second part is devoted to the discussion of the potential and limitations of material culture in our search for migrant communities. The chapter provides a case to support the view that British military families traveled far and wide in the empire.

Milton's divorce tracts create a political ideology of marriage and husbands which increasingly sees wives as the problem for male citizens. Like Habermas in creating a fantasy of the public sphere that excludes women, and like Charles I in Eikon Basilike, Milton in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Martin Bucer tracts imagines a hapless husband who needs to be freed from both paternal oversight and wifely constraints if he is to be a public authority in England. Inviting Parliament to see divorce itself as not just an analogy for anti-monarchy movements but as itself a key linchpin in the new commonwealth, Milton, in the divorce tracts, creates the perfect male citizen as the man who can repudiate his wife.

Chapter 3 traces, for the first time, the role of women as mistresses of apprentices, using their membership of the freedom to set up businesses and train girls in them. Some became free after apprenticeship themselves and went on to establish generations of female artisans stretching into the eighteenth century: as single women, they had a unique and characteristic pattern of business. Others, as wives and widows, gained their role through and after marriage, producing an interesting position where they were training girls without formal training themselves, in a system that ran effectively parallel to that of male apprenticeship. The particular features of female apprenticeship fit flexibly around women’s lives, as well as reflecting the contingency of women’s economic autonomy. The last section of the chapter reconstructs the kinship and friendship networks through which mistresses and apprentices were bound together, creating a capillary system of skills, favours and credit.

The first chapter deals with women's various roles within their families and households and covers women of all classes indiscriminately (except for the imperial family). It starts with their central positions as wives, throwing light on the traditional wifely virtues and Roman marital ideals but also on marital problems, including divorce and even murder. The first part is followed by separate parts on women's roles as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, siblings and other relations such as aunts and nieces, and on women's roles in foster families and step families, thus presenting a lively overview of women's various familial roles in the course of their lives and the expectations that went with these different roles. The inscriptions and graffiti record feelings of joy at childbirth, love and praise for a happy marriage, attachment between mothers and children and mourning and anger at bereavement. Many epitaphs express the wish to have died first or the hope to be reunited in death.

The introduction begins with a discussion of previous scholarship on Roman frugality and a critique of its shortcoming. The second part consists of a theoretically informed reconsideration of frugality, which identifies four areas of special interest: (a) the lived realities and the husbandry of small-scale farmers and their discursive reflection in other settings; (b) ‘the frugal subaltern’: slaves and freedmen and their economic interests and acumen, as well as ‘the thrifty wife’; (c) Rome’s political culture, in particular its political economy, i.e. the interface of wealth and power; (d) the (literary/rhetorical) projects of specific individuals, not least those who invested in virtue signalling and shows of self-restraint in their self-promotion and/or authorial self-fashioning. The introduction concludes with a survey of the place and function of modes of moderation in Roman history and culture.

In this chapter we turn to Bodin’s political, moral, and legal analysis of the conjugal relationship. Bodin thought that the conjugal relationship was the most important of the three governmental relationships in the household. The gender relationship in marriage determined the roots and the nature of sovereignty. The conjugal relationship was central to understanding Bodin’s notion of power, and especially the power of the sovereign. It linked Bodin’s arguments about the relationship of family and commonwealth, which we have discussed earlier, directly to his notion of absolute sovereignty. But, for his theory to be congruent, Bodin needed a wife who was always subjected to her husband, and we shall see that he had to attack the tradition we have studied earlier, thereby considerably bending Roman legal argument and inventing a tradition of female subjection. We will see that contemporaries picked up on this, and we will study a forceful response to Bodin by Antonio Montecatini.

The chapter begins with some etymological discussions of the meaning of the words ‘household’, ‘home’ and ‘family’, and concentrates – but not to the exclusion of those social ranks below and above – on the urban bourgeoisie, from among whom Chaucer himself came, and from members of whom his audience was, probably, mostly drawn. It then goes on to consider servants and apprentices, as inevitable accompaniments of this rank, and also looks at the relations between husband and wife, including the roles of wives and widows, and the architecture of urban bourgeois homes. It concludes by looking at those above and below this rank, particularly the nobility, whose ‘great households’ have left considerable evidence of their organisation, but also includes the humbler households, about whom we can say comparatively little, because of the limitations of the evidence.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.