Thursday 10th February, 16:30-18:00 UK time

Elisa Daga (University of Pisa and Siena)

Female Justice and Greek Epigraphy 

I approach Gender Identities in the Ancient World through the lens of Greek epigraphy. The so-called prayers for justice witness appeals to gods made by victims of several crimes seeking for justice and retaliation against the culprits.

From these inscriptions emerge female identities who express their anger and their desire of vengeance. In the sanctuary of Demeter at Knidos, thirteen lead tablets have been found, dated to the second century BC and containing women’s invocations to Demeter, Kore and gods in order to punish culprits of theft and slander. The authors of these prayers for justice are Antigone, Artemis, Nanas, Prosodion and others whose names are missing. These women shared a common religious and social context that provided them with the possibility to ask gods for vengeance through a common tool: writing and maybe performing their prayers in the sanctuary of Demeter at Knidos.

Far away from Knidos, in the Locri of the third century BC, in Italy, is again a woman, Kollyra, who is asking the attendants of an unspecified goddess to punish the culprits of a double embezzlement.

Prayers for justice are heterodox witnesses of reactions to injustices. We are not dealing with orations or historiographical accounts written by free adult males, but instead in several cases with the productions of women in particular conditions of misery and sometimes isolation, who probably have no other tools to obtain justice; these documents show an alternative to the patriarchal view witnessed by the literature.

Looking deeply at the vocabulary of these texts, at the shape of these materials and at the common religious mentality, I will try to show unheard female voices. I believe that these case studies would be useful to develop a discussion on gender and power, and on alternative and unusual justice practices. 

Mengdie Zhao (Harvard University)

Writing Her Scandal Out: Elite Women and the Justice System in Late Imperial China

In late imperial China, women seeking to file lawsuits usually had to be represented by a male relative. Despite this inconvenience, archival records show that women were active participants in the legal system. Most of these women whose names are recorded in these archives were poorer or lower-class. Elite families, however, usually refrained from recording family scandals, and elite women were careful to avoid becoming involved in legal disputes. We must therefore rely on literary and anecdotal sources to fill in these gaps in the archival records. This paper examines poetry attributed to female litigants who lived in the fifteenth century, including the Song of Longing and Long-Lasting Resentment ('Xiangsi changhen ge' 相思長恨歌) and Regret ('Zi hui' 自悔). These women were from gentry families and found themselves caught up in unfruitful premarital relationships. Unable to defend themselves directly in court or seek informal mediation due to socio-cultural pressure, they eventually wrote their sufferings in poems and sent them to the judges as a last attempt to get justice done. The poems they composed for the court were framed as literary biographical works, but in practice, they served as accusations and evidence against the alleged wrongdoers. In this way, although the women got themselves into trouble due to their pursuit of a companion well-versed in literature, they were also able to right the wrong with their own literary talent. While the extent to which these poems reflect historical 'fact' is unclear, as works of literary imagination, they provide literary critiques from a female point of view of elite women’s lack of participatory access to the legal system.