Finding Persephone Women's Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean [Paperback]

Drawing upon the latest research in gender studies, history of religion, feminism, ritual theory, performance, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, Finding Persephone investigates the ways in which the religious lives and ritual practices of women in Greek and Roman antiquity helped shape their social and civic identity. Barred from participating in many public arenas, women asserted their presence by performing rituals at festivals and presiding over rites associated with life passages and healing. The essays in this lively and timely volume reveal the central place of women in the religious and ritual practices of the societies of the ancient Mediterranean. Readers interested in religion, women's studies, and classical antiquity will find a unique exploration of the nature and character of women's autonomy within the religious sphere and a full account of women's agency in the public domain.

Maryline Parca teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of The Franchetti Collection in Rome: Inscriptions and Sculptural Fragments.

Angeliki Tzanetou teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on women's rituals and politics in Greek drama.

[T]his volume has advanced the study of women and men and ritual in the ancient Mediterranean, an area which has rightly entered the mainstream of classical scholarship.[This] volume spans nearly a millennium of the Greco-Roman world. It offers a snapshot of the best work in a burgeoning subfield. Especially welcome is the fresh attention paid to issues of female agency, local differentiation in cult practices, and the precise literary, material, and socio-political contexts of our evidence. August, 2011[T]he scholars who contributed to this volume have done a fine job of initial recovery with careful re-interpretation of their maddeningly fragmentary primary sources. 69.1, 2010As the excellent introduction makes clear, there are good reasonlóc