This is a study of the legal rules affecting the practice of female prostitution at Rome approximately from 200 B.C. to A.D. 250. It examines the formation and precise content of the legal norms developed for prostitution and those engaged in this profession, with close attention to their social context. McGinn's unique study explores the "fit" between the law-system and the socio-economic reality while shedding light on important questions concerning marginal groups, marriage, sexual behavior, the family, slavery, and citizen status, particularly that of women.

This is a study of the legal rules affecting the practice of female prostitution at Rome approximately from 200 B.C. to A.D. 250. It examines the formation and precise content of the legal norms developed for prostitution and those engaged in this profession, with close attention to their social context. McGinn's unique study explores the "fit" between the law-system and the socio-economic reality while shedding light on important questions concerning marginal groups, marriage, sexual behavior, the family, slavery, and citizen status, particularly that of women.

From streetwalkers in the Roman Forum to imperial concubines, Roman prostitutes defined what it meant to be a 'bad girl'.

This collection of essays seeks to establish Roman constructions of sexuality and gender difference as a distinct area of research, complementing work already done on Greece to give a fuller picture of ancient sexuality. By applying feminist critical tools to forms of public discourse, including literature, history, law, medicine, and political oratory, the essays explore the hierarchy of power reflected so strongly in most Roman sexual relations, where noblemen acted as the penetrators and women, boys, and slaves the penetrated. In many cases, the authors show how these roles could be inverted--in ways that revealed citizens' anxieties during the days of the early Empire, when traditional power structures seemed threatened. In the essays, Jonathan Walters defines the impenetrable male body as the ideational norm; Holt Parker and Catharine Edwards treat literary and legal models of male sexual deviance; Anthony Corbeill unpacks political charges of immoral behavior at banquets, while Marilyn B. Skinner, Ellen Oliensis, and David Fredrick trace linkages between social status and the gender role of the male speaker in Roman lyric and elegy; Amy Richlin interrogates popular medical belief about the female body; Sandra R. Joshel examines the semiotics of empire underlying the historiographic portrayal of the empress Messalina; Judith P. Hallett and Pamela Gordon critique Roman caricatures of the woman-desiring woman; and Alison Keith discovers subversive allusions to the tragedy of Dido in the elegist Sulpicia's self-depiction as a woman in love.

This book explores the institution of manumission-the freeing of slaves-in ancient Rome from a gendered perspective. Rome was unique among ancient polities in that it bestowed freed slaves with full citizenship, granting them rights nearly equal to those of freeborn individuals. The sexual identities of a female slave and a female citizen were fundamentally incompatible, as the former was principally defined by her sexual availability and the latter by her sexual integrity. Accordingly, those evaluating the manumission process needed to reconcile a woman's experiences as a slave with the expectations and moral rigor required of the female citizen.

This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. "Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History