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Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry. Edited by Ronnie Ancona and ELLEN GREENE. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. 372. $55.00 (cloth).
The study of gender in the Roman world and in Latin literature is a growing and vibrant field, and this volume makes an impressive and thoughtprovoking contribution to the subject. It is a collection of thirteen essays, most published here for the first time, about the complexities of gender in Latin amatory poetry. It is designed to contribute to the developing discussion of gender and sexuality in classics in general and particularly to the increasing interest in the importance of Latin love poetry as a site for the construction of and anxiety about male and female identity in Rome. Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid are the poets examined here, with the majority of essays concentrating on either Propertius or Ovid.
While the collection is aimed mainly at classics scholars and students, there is much here that should be of interest to those working in other areas of gender studies, and some of the essays take the needs of nonspecialists into consideration. Some of the essays give very full background information in the footnotes, with dates of works and explanations of technical terms, but others have mainly bibliographical notes, and some references may be unclear for those without specific background in Latin poetry. All the passages from Latin and Greek texts are given both in the original language and translated, but generally the entire poem or poems under discussion are not given in the book, however, so the reader will have to find the texts elsewhere. There is also no index locorum, which would have been a valuable addition, since there are many passages cited and many close readings of individual texts.
Included are essays of particular value for scholars who are not specialists in Latin poetry or even classics. The first essay, Trevor Fear's "Propertian Closure: The Elegiac Inscription of the Liminal Male and Ideological Contestation in Augustan Rome," outlines the relationship between the elegiac male lover (young, elite, and deliberately resisting maturation into a productive adult) and the rejection, promotion, or accommodation of the normative ideals of Augustan Rome. Fear uses the example of the closural motifs of Propertius 's...