Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.

Princeton University Press, Princeton / Woodstock, 2007. 1st ed. XV,27,415p. Original black cloth with pictorial dust wrps. Spine gilt titled. Gift intention as well as blind tooling ex libris stamp to free endpaper. Nice copy. ?In recent years there has been a rise in the amount of attention paid to the role of women in world religions, and Ancient Greece is no exception. (?) Although the interest in this subject is not new, an updated, systematic discussion that brings together the literary epigraphic and archaeological record was very much needed. This is what makes this book all the more valuable: it is a well-documented and well-illustrated study of the role of female cult agents in Greek religion and society. The first chapter (pp.1-25) is an introduction that identifies the chronological and geographical scope of this study, and describes its source material and methodological framework presented as the contemporary, ?third wave? deconstructive feminism that arose in the 1980s. The rest of the book is arranged in a sequence of chapters following the different stages in the life of the Greek priestess. (?) In the conclusions in Chapter 10 (pp.275-281) C. argues strongly against the modern paradigm of interpretation of the social status of Classical Greek women and ?the widely accepted commonplace of silent, submissive, ?invisible? women confined to the privacy of their households and wholly dominated by their men? (p.275). This paradigm has influenced the modern presentation of the strut of the Greek priestess as a marginal one, a picture to which C. opposes one of women who ?were accorded enormous respects in their own rights by the cities and citizens that honoured them? (p.279).? (CLEMENTE MARCONI in The Classical Review (New Series), 2008, pp.510-512).