Roman Family Festivals
The social significance of family festivals for Roman families and society
Description
Fanny Dolansky’s Roman Family Festivals explores the vital role religious ritual played in domestic life for Roman families from 200 BCE to 200 CE. Seven festivals, from the Parentalia in February to the Saturnalia in December, are reconstructed and analyzed from varied perspectives, including those of men, women, and children who were free, enslaved, or formerly enslaved. The festivals addressed key concerns for families, such as relations between freeborn and enslaved members of the household, spouses, adults and children, and the living and the dead, and played an important role in the ongoing processes of socialization and enculturation of Roman identity. Integrating literary, epigraphic, papyrological, archaeological, and art historical sources, the study pays careful attention to the critical categories of age, gender, and juridical status to understand better who celebrated the festivals and how, and what their participation meant to them individually and to the collective. Roman Family Festivals demonstrates the longevity of family festivals and their continued relevance in late antiquity, despite a rapidly changing religious and cultural landscape.
Fanny Dolansky is Associate Professor of Roman Social History, Latin Literature, and Roman Religion at Brock University.
Reviews
“Roman Family Festivals is beautifully written, rich, and exhaustively researched. This book is a tremendous achievement, as we know so little of Roman domestic family rituals, and Fanny Dolansky is the perfect person to write this important monograph.”
- Kelly Olson, Western University, Ontario
“Following in the footsteps of Beryl Rawson and Keith Bradley, Fanny Dolansky bridges family history and the history of religion and dislodges a century of misconceptions, probing the different meanings of the same festivals for slave and free, especially women. Covers the empire from Beirut to Vindolanda, Augustus to John Lydus, with strong use of inscriptions and of comparanda from the antebellum South.”
- Amy Richlin, University of California Los Angeles
“Fanny Dolansky makes a real effort to understand how nonelite Roman households celebrated festivals and is well attuned to gender distinctions, as well as to how enslaved persons might have experienced these occasions. Roman Family Festivals makes a major methodological and historical contribution to the field, and should be welcomed by a wide variety of scholars.”
- Eric Orlin, University of Puget Sound