Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity by Lauren Caldwell

Abstract

196 PHOENIX verbal reuse does not necessarily have to go back to the original context in the imitated text. Taking examples from Paulinus and Claudian, Pelttari concludes that they are not competing with Vergil in the same way as earlier poets did, nor in the same ways as Vergil himself engaged in aemulatio with his models. All of this adds up to a strikingly bold and original contribution to debates about the nature of late antique intertextuality and indeed to the larger question of the history of Latin poetic intertextuality . I am not sure that I am convinced by all of what Pelttari has to say. It is most surprising to see no reference whatsoever to G. N. Knauer’s fundamental work on Vergil and Homer, still by far the best study of an intertextual relationship involving a Latin poet.3 Nor am I convinced that Pelttari’s take on nonreferential allusion does justice to some of the things I see going on in the text of Claudian, for example, whose techniques seem to me to be closer to those of Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan than Pelttari allows. This book will clearly provoke discussion and disagreement, but one of its achievements is to have shown just how much work still needs to be done on the intertextual practices of the still underestimated poets of late antiquity. Pelttari deserves our admiration and our thanks for a difficult job well done. University of Geneva Damien Nelis Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity. By Lauren Caldwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pp. vi, 188. Regrettably we have comparatively little information on elite Roman girlhood, the focus of Caldwell’s study. By carefully surveying an extensive range of sources (including medical texts, controversiae, and juristic commentaries, as well as, to some extent, visual evidence), Caldwell reconstructs the circumscribed life that formed the background of the educated, often very wealthy, and somewhat autonomous matrona of elite Roman society. This book should be widely read by scholars and undergraduates in classical and gender studies. In her Introduction, Caldwell positions this volume as distinct from earlier investigations , which discuss the unmarried elite girl either as part of “a broader topic such as women’s education, women’s health, marriage, or the demarcation of various life-states” or in terms of the marriage ritual and bridal costume (8). Caldwell clarifies that she will “concentrate mainly on girlhood among the families who were the focus of the Augustan legislation” (6), because it is for these girls that we have the most evidence and they were the ones who were most affected by the pattern of early marriage in their early to mid-teens. Subsequent chapters explore various concerns, including “fertility, sexual purity, modesty, education, dowry, and politics” (7), that underlay this pattern and informed Roman social and legal institutions. Though Caldwell cautions the reader that the sources, written by men and primarily for men, present mainly the male view of girlhood, which in certain areas is not only ambiguous but also incomplete and even sketchy, she presents a nuanced picture and raises interesting questions about the aspects for which evidence is missing. In Chapter One, “Formal Education and Socialization in Virtue,” Caldwell focuses on how young girls were guided in their development and preparation for wifehood. She 3 G. N. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen 1964). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 197 argues that girls were expected to internalize the necessity of protecting their virginity through modest behavior, but also that they were urged to be courageous in doing so through such exempla as the story of Cloelia. Caldwell points to a group of funerary reliefs and statues of young daughters of wealthy freedmen which depict the girls as a young Amazonian Diana; while these mythological figures are virginal, Caldwell introduces an additional interpretation, suggesting that, although young, the girl is configured as protecting her virtue by cultivating aggression. Caldwell also notes here that ancient attitudes to the education of girls varied: while Juvenal and other writers such as Valerius Maximus express negative judgments, many girls who died young are praised, often lavishly, for their learning in their epitaphs. Caldwell cites Pliny the Younger, who couches his...