Social Control in Late Antiquity

The Violence of Small Worlds

Kate Cooper, Jamie Wood

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108479394
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108808002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds explores the small-scale communities of late antiquity – households, monasteries, and schools – where power was a question of personal relationships. When fathers, husbands, teachers, abbots, and slave-owners asserted their own will, they saw themselves as maintaining the social order, and expected law and government to reinforce their rule. Naturally, the members of these communities had their own ideas, and teaching them to 'obey their betters' was not always a straightforward business. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from across the late Roman Mediterranean, from law codes and inscriptions to monastic rules and hagiography, the book considers the sometimes conflicting identities of women, slaves, and children, and documents how they found opportunities for agency and recognition within a system built on the unremitting assertion of the rights of the powerful.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Violence of Small Worlds: Rethinking Small-Scale Social Control in Late Antiquity
• Part I Women and Children First: Autonomy and Social Control in the Late Ancient Household
• Part II 'Slaves, be subject to your masters': Discipline and Moral Autonomy in a Slave Society
• Part III Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence: The Aesthetics of Control in Christian Pedagogy
• Part IV Vulnerability and Power: Christian Heroines and the Small Worlds of Late Antiquity
• Bibliography
• Index