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“This is an essay about bodies: how they are represented and what that representation reveals about the fears, desires, and attitudes of the society that produced them. Concepts of physiology and corporeality determine identity--both male and female, but especially female--throughout ancient texts. I am interested in discovering how Roman satire defined the relationship between body and "self" for women: how it shaped, controlled, and represented the female self through the gendering of the body. My original intention in writing this essay was to examine the bodies of women as they are represented in the Roman satirists. But I soon realized that I was both confining myself too narrowly and also spreading myself over too wide an area. As I reread the texts, two things became clear: female bodies could only be examined in the context of bodies in general, and Juvenal has a unique way, among all the Roman satirists, of focalizing bodies.” -Preface of “The House I Live In Is Not My Own”: Women’s Bodies in Juvenal’s Satires, Barbara Gold

Hamilton Professor of Classics Barbara Gold, in conjunction with Professors of Classics Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter, examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.