The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece

Routledge, 1998. Paperback. New. New trade softcover in printed wraps. 8vo. (6.17 x 9.21 inches) Text is clean and free of marks or underlining. Includes bibliography, index, photos, and illustrations. 204 pp.
Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. What was woman's role in the religion of the ancient Greek Polis?

In Classical Greece women were almost entirely excluded from public life. Yet the feminine was accorded a central place in religious thought and ritual. The public symbolism of religion included powerful figures like Hera, Artemis and Athene; female worshippers often breached the boundary between public and private space; and both men and women negotiated gendered identities through their performance of ritual.

This volume explores the often paradoxical centrality of the feminine in Greek culture, showing how out of sight was not out of mind. The contributors adopt perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, art history,
psychology and anthropology in order to investigate various aspects of religion and cult, including the part played by women in death ritual, the role of heroines, and the fact that goddesses had no childhood, at the same time posing questions about how we know what rituals meant to their participants.

The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece is a lively and colourful exploration of the ways in which religion and ritual reveal women's importance in the Greek polis, showing how ideologies about female roles and behaviour were both endorsed and challenged in the realm of the sacred.