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Women in Fragments
Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic
Jessica H. Clark (Author)
9780299357801
Hardback, published 25 August 2026
218 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg
“A clear-eyed yet optimistic assessment of our extant, mostly fragmentary, historical sources on women in the Roman Republic that offers compelling evidence for women’s integration within the Roman civic body. A must-read for all of us who teach Roman political history as though only men made it.” - Alison Keith, author of Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic "Imaginatively explores the evolving representations of women within the Roman Republican historiographical tradition. Clark vividly conveys how male authors mold and remold images of women to meet evolving political needs." - Matthew Roller, author of Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla
Our sources of knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic are flawed. Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently. In the historiography handed down by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who assumed the Roman Republic to be fully androcentric. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In this detailed and insightful volume, Jessica H. Clark returns to the source material to gain insight into how Roman men understood the lives, roles, and contributions of the women they wrote about. Reexamining the puzzle pieces of ancient literature, Clark proposes that the earliest Roman historians represented women in complex ways, revealing their appreciation of women's communities and women's engagement in the project of the Republic, in contrast to the attitudes assumed by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She attributes those scholars' assumptions to the social and political circumstances of their own times and demonstrates how these assumptions have continued to inform our own perceptions of Roman women and therefore Roman society more generally. This study ultimately uncovers not only the women of the Roman Republic but also how modern preconceptions have distorted their image and the stories we tell about ancient Rome.
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Fragmentation and Restoration
Chapter 1: Imagining Women: Fragments Before the Foundation
Chapter 2: “
Roman”
Women: The Fragments That Built the City
Chapter 3: Cato the Elder: Fragmentary Assumptions
Chapter 4: Chiomara: Fragments of Real Life
Conclusion: Naturalized Selection
Appendix: Authors Discussed in the text
Notes
References
Index
Index Locorum