Making Silence Speak

This collection attempts to recover the voices of women in antiquity from a variety of perspectives: how they spoke, where they could be heard, and how their speech was adopted in literature and public discourse. Rather than confirming the old model of binary oppositions in which women's speech was viewed as insignificant and subordinate to male discourse, these essays reveal a dynamic and potentially explosive interrelation between women's speech and the realm of literary production, religion, and oratory. The contributors use a variety of methodologies to mine a diverse array of sources, from Homeric epic to fictional letters of the second sophistic period and from actual letters written by women in Hellenistic Egypt to the poetry of Sappho. Throughout, the term 'voice' is used in its broadest definition. It includes not only the few remaining genuine women's voices but also the ways in which male authors render women's speech and the social assumptions such representations reflect and reinforce. These essays therefore explore how fictional female voices can serve to negotiate complex social, epistemological, and aesthetic issues. The contributors include Josine Blok, Raffaella Cribiore, Michael Gagarin, Mark Griffith, Andr?? Lardinois, Richard Martin, Lisa Maurizio, Laura McClure, D. M. O'Higgins, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Marilyn Skinner, Eva Stehle, and Nancy Worman. Andr?? Lardinois is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Minnesota and the coauthor, with T. C. Oudemans, of Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sophocles' Antigone (Leiden). Laura McClure is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton). Endorsements: 'There is no other collection that approaches the issue of women's voices in antiquity from such a broad perspective. Making Silence Speak will interest classicists and nonspecialists alike.'--Froma I. Zeitlin, Princeton University 'An important and interesting collection that supports its claim that women's speech is not 'separate from and subordinate to male discourse,' but rather interrelated with it. This volume contains something of value for practically every Hellenist, and the individual pieces complement one another in a variety of suggestive ways.'--Sarah T. Mace, Union College Another Princeton book by Laura McClure: Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama.