PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Arts and Sciences: Classics

This dissertation offers the first focused scholarly analysis of the understudied and, as I demonstrate, misunderstood virgo stock character of republican era fabulae palliatae. The generic plot structures of Roman Comedy consistently circulate around a young man's desire to possess this virgo, the revelation of her true status, and the securing of her socially desirable marriage to a citizen man. In the works of the playwright Publius Terentius Afer (also known as Terence), the virgo is nearly always an offstage character—she is named and central to the plot, but almost never appears or speaks for herself. Because she is absent, I argue, the audience's view of the virgo is necessarily indirect, accumulative, and contradictory, shaped by the perceptions, motives, and experiences of the onstage characters who describe her and attempt to control her future. Although scholarship on these plays typically treats the lovesick young man as the genre's protagonist, my approach decenters the adulescens and reveals instead the extent of the physical and emotional suffering that he inflicts upon the virgo, such that any testimony that he provides about the mutuality of their affection is inherently untrustworthy (Chapter 1). I therefore focus on the speech, characterization, and identities of the plays' onstage women (matronae and ancillae), applying feminist standpoint theory to demonstrate how the epistemic advantage of their intersectional, marginalized identities positions them to recognize the complex social risks that citizen girls must navigate and to assess and reject the young man's abusive behaviors (Chapters 2 and 3). Through female characters across social classes, I conclude, Terence frames the citizen girl's marriage not as a happy ending but as a pragmatic survival response to rape (Conclusion); the result is a serious indictment of Roman citizen values concerning marriage and girls.

Committee: Caitlin Hines Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Anna Conser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kelly Shannon-Henderson Ph.D. (Committee Member); THM Gellar-Goad Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History

While the history of slavery in the Middle Ages remains a hotly debated subject, most traditional narratives posit a significant decline in the use of slavery in the Latin West at some point in the early Middle Ages, leaving slaves to be found only in insignificant numbers or in `peripheral' regions to the north. There is substantial reason to revise this narrative, however, particularly in light of the evidence from the German duchy of Bavaria in the years between 975 and 1225 CE. There, a significant and economically important population of slaves can still be found in the twelfth century, along with a diminished but still active local slave trade. The evidence for the continued vitality of slavery in central-medieval Bavaria is contained mostly in the records of donation to monastic and ecclesiastical institutions that were collected in libri traditionum. From a survey of the donation records contained within the surviving libri traditionum of twenty-seven Bavarian monasteries and churches, it is possible to reconstruct the past condition of servile individuals manumitted as tributary freedmen of the Church, and to discover the still substantial population of slaves owned by the Church itself.

Committee: Alison Beach Ph.D. (Advisor); Christina Sessa Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sara Butler Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: European History; History; Medieval History; Middle Ages; Religious History