Narrating Women: Greek Literary Texts (200–600 AD)

This volume discusses how women were narrated in extant literary texts from the third to the sixth century AD and how they can be narrated now in the cases when the paucity, disconnectedness and / or bias of late antique sources make it difficult to reconstruct ancient narratives pertaining individuals or collectives. In particular, this book sets out to describe and analyse narratives featuring at least one woman in late antique literary texts of various genres: historiography, epistolography, medical writings, philosophy, theology, epic, and novel. None was written as an aseptic assessment and all of them amalgamate a number of rhetorical, linguistic and stylistic elements from earlier traditions to create complex discourses. Their combined exploration seeks to understand how individual women and groups were spoken of and to highlight the variety of concurrent and parallel discourses on them.