Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean

Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean builds up an important and exciting source of inter–disciplinary information for the study of gender and the body in history. Ranging over the formation of the gendered body in the ancient Near East, Greece, Rome and Judaea, the volume examines ancient bodies as crucial sites for the display, containment or transgression of gender difference.

Gender and the Body demonstrates the central role of antiquity in the developing cultural formation of the gendered body as a concept and a practice in modern societies. Its findings will be extremely useful for the professional historian of gender, as well as an invaluable aid to students investigating women, sexuality, gender and the body (both ancient and modern).

Introduction (Maria Wyke).

Articles.

The Essential Body: Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Gendered Body (Julia M. Asher–Greve).

Auguries of Hegemony: The Sex Omens of Mesopotamia (Ann Kessler Guinan).

With This Body I Thee Worship: Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Mary Beard and John Henderson).

Men Without Clothes: Heroic Nakedness and Greek Art (Robin Osborne).

Women s Costume and Feminine Civic Morality in Augustan Rome (Judith Lynn Sebesta).

The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest (Lynn E. Roller).

Why Aren t Jewish Women Circumcised? (Shaye J. D. Cohen).

Creation, Virginity and Diet in Fourth–Century Christianity: Basil of Ancyra s On the True Purity of Virginity (Teresa M. Shaw).

Thematic Reviews.

Engendering Egypt (Lynn Meskell).

Re(ge)ndering Gender(ed) Studies (Alison Sharrock).

Manhood in the Graeco–Roman World (Jonathan Walters).

Getting/After Foucault: Two Postantique Responses to Postmodern Challenges (Paul Cartledge).

Reading the Female Body (Helen King).

Gendered Religions (Gillian Clark).

Gender and Sexuality on the Internet (John G. Younger).

Notes on Contributors.

Index