The talk offers a critical survey of recent historiographical approaches to women’s ritual agency in Roman religion, with particular attention to scholarship published after 2014. It argues that the older model of female marginality has been replaced by a more differentiated interpretation of ritual competence, visibility, and participation. The discussion begins with the expansion of the field beyond the Vestal Virgins and examines priestly couples, matronal rituals, female priesthoods, auxiliary cultic functions, and epigraphically attested forms of local religious activity. I will then consider the significance of municipal and provincial evidence, military communities, collegia, and urban space for reconstructing women’s public religious roles. A further section discusses recent work on visibility, temporality, and spatial rhythms in Republican Rome. Finally, the talk introduces cognitive and sensory approaches to ancient religious experience and asks how ritual shaped female agency through bodily practice, affect, memory, and embodied knowledge. Rather than presenting Roman women as either excluded from or emancipated by religion, I propose a model of differentiated ritual presence: women acted within an asymmetrical social order, but their actions were normatively meaningful and often indispensable for the functioning of Roman cult.
Přednášku lze sledovat online: https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/92646426435
