Women and Justice: Female Legal Agency in Late Antiquity and Beyond

Women and Justice brings together classicists, historians, theologians, scholars of Judaism and of early Islam to examine female legal agency in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in an interdisciplinary fashion. Based on careful readings of laws and legal commentary in combination with historical narratives, polemical treatises, private letters, hagiography, papyri, epigraphy and religious texts, the book uncovers how far women of diverse social and regional backgrounds were able to act on behalf of their own and others' interests to pursue legal or financial objectives. Together, its chapters investigate the role women played in the application of law in civil and criminal affairs as well as in dealings with central state powers in the period of late antiquity broadly conceived, that is, in the late Roman empire and the post-Roman West, as well as in Jewish, Byzantine and early Muslim communities between the third and twelfth centuries CE.