Reviews
A stimulating, well-researched, and insightful book that offers extensive investigation of an area of Roman literature that has not received sufficient attention. Panoussi offers nuanced readings of a wide variety of texts. There is no piece of scholarship currently available that provides such a comprehensive examination of women's ritual in Roman literature.
Brides, Mourners, and Bacchae is a marvelous achievement. Through brilliant readings of poetry and prose, Panoussi reveals how Roman writers deployed women's ritual actions to question social hierarchies. Her book demands attention from scholars of literature and ritual across eras.
Panoussi offers a very appealing analysis of how religious rituals traditionally associated with women in antiquity—marriage, mourning, and Bacchic ecstasy—are represented in Latin literature. Scholars and students alike will appreciate the range of texts and authors she discusses, combining familiar with less familiar and offering at times surprising juxtapositions.
Brides, Mourners, Bacchae offers new, insightful readings of a broad range of late Republican and early imperial texts through the lens of women's religious rituals. Panoussi sheds exciting light on the importance of female experience in ancient Rome and invites our fresh evaluation of the Roman literary canon.
This wide-ranging and stimulating book looks at women's agency and empowerment through ritual and its representations in Roman literature, from Livy and Petronius to Catullus and Statius. It is an important intervention in the study of Latin literature and Roman religion, which goes beyond describing patriarchal norms to explore possibilities for resistance and change.
Panoussi opens up a fruitful dialogue between the findings of scholars of Roman religion and specialists in Latin literature. Her research documents the central role played by ancient Roman women in civic and familial rites from marriage to death, Bacchic frenzy to sober matronal rituals. This exciting volume emphasizes women's crucial agency in the domestic and social contexts of Roman religion addressed in Latin literature.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Texts Used
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Brides
1. The Roman Wedding
2. Sexuality and Ritual: Catullus' Wedding Poems
3. Isis at a Wedding: Gender, Ethnicity, and Roman Identity in Ovid
Acknowledgments
Texts Used
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Brides
1. The Roman Wedding
2. Sexuality and Ritual: Catullus' Wedding Poems
3. Isis at a Wedding: Gender, Ethnicity, and Roman Identity in Ovid's Metamorphoses
4. Wartime Weddings: Lucan's Civil War and Seneca's Trojan Women
5. Quartilla's Priapic Weddings in Petronius' Satyrica: Female Power and Male Impotence
Part II. Mourners
6. Roman Burial Rites
7. Mourning Orpheus: Poetry and Lament in Ovid's Metamorphoses 10 and 11
8. A New Hope: Burying the War Dead in Statius' Thebaid 12
Part III. Bacchae
9. Bacchic Rites in Greece and Rome
10. Roman Bacchae: Dionysiac Mysteries, Masculinity, and the State in Livy's Bacchanalian Narrative
11. Philomela's Bacchic Justice: Ritual Resistance and Abusive Authority in Ovid's Metamorphoses 6
12. Hypsipyle's Bacchic Pietas: Ritual, Exemplarity, and Gender in Valerius and Statius
Part IV. Women-Only Rituals
13. Women-Only Rituals in Rome
14. Spinning Hercules: Gender, Religion, and Geography in Propertius 4.9
15. Hercules and the Founding Mothers: Mater Matuta and the Matralia in Ovid's Fasti 6
16. Dancing in Scyros: Masculinity and Young Women's Rituals in Statius' Achilleid
Epilogue: Tacita's Rites and the Story of Lara in Ovid's Fasti 2
Notes
Bibliography
Index