Social Control in Late Antiquity : The Violence of Small Worlds
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 41331776
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.1017/9781108783491
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781108479394
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This co-edited volume (Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds, Cambridge University Press, 2020) is the result of a ten-year conversation that began as a British Academy Small Research Project with Cooper as Principal Investigator and Wood as Research Associate. Over time, the original workshop developed into an on-going international scholarly collaboration exploring the small-scale communities of late antiquity – households, monasteries, and schools. The aim, which Cooper and Wood unfold in the volume’s introduction (‘The Violence Of Small Worlds Rethinking Small Scale Social Control In Late Antiquity’, pp. 1-12), is to re-conceive Roman power through the lens of personal relationships: when fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and masters asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, teaching women, children and slaves to obey these men was not always a straightforward business. (While women could exert power in their own right under certain conditions, it is male rule that is the focus in this edited collection.) Drawing on a wide variety of sources from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, it also considers the, sometimes, conflicting opportunities discovered by women, slaves and children to attain agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of powerful men. As well as devising and driving the project, Cooper's individual chapter, 'A Predator and a Gentleman: Augustine, Autobiography, and the Ethics of Christian Marriage' (pp. 76-102), argues that Augustine of Hippo's acute and uncomfortable recognition of the asymmetric power balance of male-female sexual relationships lies behind his attempt to propose a vision of Christian marriage that challenged some (but not all) of the received ideas of his day about the sexual exploitation of women.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
