Women classical scholars : unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly
Rosie Wyles (Editor), Edith Hall (Editor)
This book is the first written history of the pioneering women born between the Renaissance and 1913 who played significant roles in the history of classical scholarship. Working in the shadows of husbands, fathers, and brothers, excluded from institutional support, denigrated for being lightweight or over-ambitious, women have nevertheless taught, edited, translated, analysed, elucidated, and compiled Latin and Greek texts for more than 500 years. Twenty essays by international specialists, arranged in broadly chronological order, and accompanied by images, trace the lives, obstacles, and lasting contributions of women to the field of classical philology. The essays explore case studies of women working during the Italian, Iberian and Portuguese Renaissance, in Early Modern France and Holland, in Civil War and Enlightenment England, and in early educational institutions for women, including former slaves, in the USA, the UK, in Stalinist Soviet Union, in Denmark, and in occupied France. Some case studies feature women already famous in their own countries, such as Madame Anne Dacier, but neglected in the previous, male-centred, accounts of the evolution of classical scholarship; several identify women who have been almost completely lost from mainstream cultural memory. This book provides classical scholars working today with the female intellectual ancestors they did not know they had
eBook, English, 2016
Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2016