| Sumario: | <p>This thesis uses visual culture to build a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of ordinary women in Late Antiquity and the impact of gender on their everyday lives. While much scholarship has examined women and gender in this period through literary sources, such texts provide almost exclusively elite male perspectives. In this thesis, I instead centre the representation of normal women in visual culture, from their donor portraits and funerary images to depictions on jewellery and graffiti. Analysis of this underexplored evidence allows me to undertake new evaluations of key themes such as education and family life, and to examine previously unrecognised aspects of women’s experience. Throughout the thesis I integrate diverse textual sources into my analysis, from literary and legal texts to documentary papyri, inscriptions, and letters, where possible highlighting texts composed by women. By taking such an holistic approach I am able to demonstrate how attention to material and visual culture can corroborate, challenge, and complicate traditional textual histories.</p>
<p>The thesis is divided into an introduction, conclusion, and four main body chapters which examine the cultivation of beauty through the toilet, the popularity of depicting women as learned, the vicissitudes of female experience through the life course, and opportunities for women to engage with their communities as donors. Through these analyses I show that ordinary women were involved in late antique society to a far greater degree than is allowed for in texts, from changes in urban life and elite display to new forms of civic patronage. Christianity emerges repeatedly as a factor driving change in women’s intellectual and public lives, as do transformations in governance and administration. At other times a marked continuity with earlier centuries is demonstrated where we would expect significant change, such as in the roles of widows and virgins. I also question several of the methods we use to study ancient lives, in particular with regard to definitions of education and learnedness, arguing for greater flexibility in order to adequately study women and non-elite groups. My thesis also demonstrates the importance of women’s homosocial relationships, both in informal social situations and the more formal segregation of the monastery.</p>
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