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This volume features a group of select peer-reviewed papers by an international group of authors, both younger and senior academics and researchers. It has its origins in a conference held at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, which aimed to bring up the frequently-neglected popular cult and other ritual practices in prehistoric and ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. The topics covered by the chapters of the volume include the interplay between elite and popular ritual at cemeteries and peak sanctuaries just before and right after the establishment of the first palaces in Minoan Crete; the use of conical cups in Minoan ritual; the wide sharing of religious and other metaphysical beliefs as expressed in the wall-paintings of Akrotiri on the island of Thera; the significance of open-air sanctuaries, figurines and other informal cult and ritual paraphernalia in the Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant from the late bronze age to the archaic period; the role of figurines and caves in popular cult in the classical period; the practice of cursing in ancient Athens; and the popular element of sports games in ancient Greece.

Examining women's property rights in different societies across the entire medieval and early modern Mediterranean, this volume introduces a unique comparative perspective to the complexities of gender relations in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities. Through individual case studies based on urban and rural, elite and non-elite, religious and secular communities, Across the Religious Divide presents the only nuanced history of the region that incorporates peripheral areas such as Portugal, the Aegean Islands, Dalmatia, and Albania into the central narrative. By bridging the present-day notional and cultural divide between Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds with geographical and thematic coherence, this collection of essays by top international scholars focuses on women in courts of law and sources such as notarial records, testaments, legal commentaries, and administrative records to offer the most advanced research and illuminate real connections across boundaries of gender, religion, and culture. 1. 'Pro mea hereditate materna,' Perpignan c.1250-1350: Can the Historian Distinguish between Inheritance through and by Women? (Rebecca Winer) 2. Medieval Coptic Canon Law and its Articulation of Gender Relations and Sexuality (Maryann Shenoda) 3. The Boundaries of Affection: Women and property in Late Medieval Avignon (Joelle Rollo-Koster) 4. Women in Venetian Courts (14th Century) (Linda Guzzetti) 5. Testamentary Bequests of Croatian Noble Women (14th Century) (Branka Grbavac) 6. Dowry and Inheritance in Late Medieval Bologna and its Contado (Shona Kelly Wray) 7. 'In the Shadow of the Campo:' Sienese Women and Family Life (Elena Brizio) 8. Resistances, Negotiations, and Self-Government: Forms of Women's Agency in a Male-Oriented Inheritance System in Late Medieval Portugal (Maria de Lurdes Rosa) 9. Propertied Women in Dowry Systems: Florence and Venice Compared (14th-16th centuries) (Isabelle Chabot) 10. Jewish Women in Early Modern Modena: Individual, Household and Collective Properties (Federica Francesconi) 11. Women and Property in Early Modern Spain: Diversity in Dotal and Inheritance Systems (Maria Margerita and Birriel Salcedo) 12. Mothers-in-law in early modern Portugal (Jutta Sperling) 13. Gender, Kinship and Property in Mamluk Society (Yossef Rapoport) 14. Women, Family, and Property in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Anna Bellavitis 15. Women as Outsiders: the Inheritance of Agricultural Land in the Ottoman Empire (Colin Imber) 16. ‘Clandestine marriage’ or Bride-price: Customary Law as Narrated by Franciscan Missionaries (Aleksandra Djajic and Albanian Horváth) 17. Christian and Muslim Women's Choice of Courts in the Ottoman Empire (16th century) (Evgenia Kermeli) 18. Counting on Kin: Women and Property in Eighteenth-Century Cairo (Mary Ann Fay) 19. Women of Modest Means: Property and Estates of Ottoman Women in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Fariba Zarinebaf) 20. Kin and Marriage in two Aegean Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Evdoxios Doxiadis) Jutta Sperling , Hampshire College. Her main publications include Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice 1550-1650 (1999) as well as articles on the abolition of clandestine marriages at the Council of Trent and on Portuguese women's property rights. Her current research interests focus on iconographies of lactation in Renaissance and Baroque art. Shona Kelly Wray , University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research incorporates various aspects of the social history of fourteenth-century Bologna. She has published articles on women, family, and inheritance, notarial culture, the social experience of the Black Death, and peace and dispute settlements. Her first book, Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death , was published in 2009.

The nature and meaning of kingship has been hotly debated by anthropologists and scholars of religion since the middle of the last century, and the richness of this topic is by no means exhausted. In this fascinating book, comprising a series of published and unpublished essays, Grottanelli focuses on the subject of kingship in the ancient world. The essays explore the ways in which centralized state power, as epitomized by the sacred king, encounters other oppositional forms of power, such as those possessed by prophets, tricksters, and women. Grottanelli’s special concern is the way in which mythic narratives and other forms of religious discourse both reflect this tension and play a role in the historic struggles between these competing forms of power. As the first book-length presentation of the work of a brilliant and innovative thinker, this book should hold great interest for scholars across a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, anthropology, and classics.

\"This volume examines the evolving role of the city and citizenship from classical Athens through fifth-century Rome and medieval Byzantium. Beginning in the first century CE, the universal claims of Hellenistic and Roman imperialism began to be challenged by the growing role of Christianity in shaping the primary allegiances and identities of citizens. An international team of scholars considers the extent of urban transformation, and with it, of cultural and civic identity, as practices and institutions associated with the city-state came to be replaced by those of the Christian community. The twelve essays gathered here develop an innovative research agenda by asking new questions: What was the effect on political ideology and civic identity of the transition from the city culture of the ancient world to the ruralized systems of the middle ages? How did perceptions of empire and oikoumene respond to changed political circumstances? How did Christianity redefine the context of citizenship?\"-- Provided by publisher.

This book offers an archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. That seafaring was fundamental to prosperity under Rome is beyond doubt, but a tendency to view the grandest long-distance movements among major cities against a background noise of small-scale, short-haul activity has tended to flatten the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction and coastal life into a featureless blue Mediterranean. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, this work takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal facilities. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration—despite certain interregional disintegration—into Late Antiquity. Through this model of seaborne interaction, the study advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade.

This volume offers the first comprehensive look at the role of women in the monarchies of the ancient Mediterranean. It consistently addresses certain issues across all dynasties: title; role in succession; the situation of mothers, wives, and daughters of kings; regnant and co-regnant women; and role in cult and in dynastic image, and examines a sampling of the careers of individual women while placing them within broader contexts. Written by an international group of experts, this collection is based on the assumption that women played a fundamental role in ancient monarchy, that they were part of, not apart from it, and that it is necessary to understand their role to understand ancient monarchies. This is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the role of women in antiquity.