Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World

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.