This engaging book, which belongs on the Classicist's shelf next to R. Pfeiffer's History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (1976), is a critically informed and accessible investigation of the regimes of privilege and constraint that have shaped the preservation, rediscovery and interpretation of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds since about 1500. Nineteen essays, mostly contributions to a conference entitled ‘Women as Classical Scholars’ held at King's College London in 2013 in celebration of the centenary of the birth of Jacqueline de Romilly, focus on the lives and work of individuals and do an excellent job of explaining how those lives relate to broader historical and cultural patterns. Women who learned Latin and Greek in this period laid claim to an expertise generally restricted to men, and elite men at that. These women each had mentors (often their fathers were scholars) who made it a priority to provide them with a state-of-the art education equal to what was available to boys and young men. The men who supported women's intellectual aspirations and activities often did so partly as a way of making a larger case for equitable access to education.
C. McCallum-Barry gathers case studies from early modern Italy and England: Isotta Nogarola (1418–66), Cassandra Fedele (1470–1558), Alessandra Scala (1475–1506), Margaret More (1504–44), Mildred Cooke (1526–86) and Lady Jane Lumley (1537–78). Her analysis emphasises the ways that women who pursued scholarly work in Latin and Greek also needed to prove that they were modest and chaste, family-centred rather than aiming for a life in public: ‘the choices [for scholarly women] then were marriage, learned seclusion or derision’ (p. 35). S. Frade considers the case of Luisa Sigea (c. 1522–60), who, along with her sister Ângela and her brothers, received an excellent education from their father, tutor to the children of the Portuguese Duke of Bragança, and joined the humanist circle of D. Maria, Infanta of Portugal, as the Infanta's Latin tutor.
W. explores the lives and work of Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) and Anne Dacier (1647–1720) against the background of debates about the education of women. Van Schurman argued for the education of women in letters and in a Latin treatise, although later in life she renounced those views. Dacier was educated by her father the humanist Tanneguy Le Fèvre; eventually she produced translations of Classical texts that were published by Pierre Daniel Huet. While Dacier and van Schurman were targets of criticism about their private lives (p. 76 n. 79), they, along with other women scholars, were each celebrated as exemplars in Gilles Ménage's Historia Mulierum Philosopharum (1690). As W. makes clear, Ménage's representation of Dacier as a (proto-feminist) proponent of education for women overstates the case: her scholarly achievements ‘had not led her to try to argue for other women to enjoy the same education as she had’ (p. 73). J. Fabre-Serris turns to Dacier's translations of Sappho (1681), comparing them to translations by Renée Vivien (1903), emphasising both Dacier's and Vivien's reputations for sexual freedom (pp. 80–3). Both Dacier and Vivien are careful, literal, scholarly translators, and also project their own communities onto their versions of the texts.
H.’s discussion of women who published translations of Classical texts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focuses mainly on the lives and work of Lucy Hutchinson (1621–81) and Sarah Fielding (1710–68). Hutchinson produced a ‘dazzling’ (p. 130) translation of Lucretius, probably the first translation of De rerum natura into English. H. highlights the relation of Lucretius’ atomism to Hutchinson's Puritan outlook and her somewhat self-deprecating description of working on the translation while doing tapestry work in her children's schoolroom (p. 120). Fielding, a novelist and sister of Henry Fielding, published a ‘graceful, lucid and accurate’ (p. 128) translation of Xenophon's Memorabilia and Apology of Socrates (1762) and perhaps inspired some of her brother Henry's satirical depictions of educated women. Throughout, H. brings to the surface persuasive evidence for the joy some women found in intellectual work, using as a touchstone Bathusa Makin's assertion in 1673 (inspired by Aristotle's account of the pleasure inherent in learning at Poetics 1448b13–15) that ‘there is in all an innate desire of knowing, and satisfying this is the greatest pleasure’ (pp. 111 and 131, quoting Makin (1998 [1673], pp. 131–2).
J. Wallace's account of Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) emphasises ‘ambiguities and tensions’ (p. 133), contrasting Carter's early publication of a jaunty translation of verses by Anacreon in the Gentleman's Magazine with her subsequent turn towards finding exemplars of moral virtue in Classical texts, especially in her translation of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Even there, Wallace argues, there is ambivalence, for in the translation Carter felt free to elide or eliminate phrases or images that seemed ‘distasteful’ (p. 146) while in the footnotes ‘the reader is repeatedly warned about the dangerous implications of Stoic philosophy’ (p. 148). While Carter was a pioneer as a scholarly translator, critics who celebrated her accomplishment did so partly by asserting how unusual it was: such views reinforced the idea that Classical scholarship in general was not for women to do.
As the nineteenth century advanced, institutions of higher education expanded, and women achieved greater access to them. E. Gloyn documents the teaching of Classics at Cambridge's Newnham College from 1882 to 1922. The detailed texture of the College's records make it possible to trace the many small and large curricular and hiring decisions that brought the institutional teaching of Classics into women's hands and developed networks that advanced and sustained many women's scholarly careers. R. Mayer traces the teaching and scholarly career of Margaret Alford (1868–1951), who published on Latin prose and made important contributions to the production of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Liddell–Scott–Jones’ A Greek–English Lexicon: Mayer provides a careful reading of her scholarship on Latin prose authors to argue that her philological expertise and judgement ‘challenged male academics on their own ground’ (p. 248).
M.V. Ronnick's account of the pursuit of Classics by African American women concisely outlines the policies and actions that aimed to prevent African Americans from having access to Classics and higher education more generally. Ronnick discusses individuals whose study of Classics was foundational for their subsequent roles within institutions that worked to dismantle those obstacles. These include Lucy Craft Laney (1854–1933), Frazelia Campbell (1849–1930), Fannie Jackson-Coppin (1837–1913), Anna Julia Cooper (c. 1858–1964), Charlotte Hawkins Brown (1883–1961) and Helen Maria Chestnutt (1880–1969): each is an inspiring example of indomitable dedication, and it is sobering to acknowledge the obstacles that they each faced. Ronnick also briefly addresses the reception of Classical texts in the work of African American female writers including Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), Audre Lorde (1934–92) and Jesmyn Ward (1977–).
Grace Harriet Macurdy (1866–1946) rose from economically straitened circumstances to graduate from the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) in 1888. B. McManus traces her hiring at Vassar, her pursuit of a Ph.D. at Columbia (1903), her scholarly work on women in monarchies and her feminist outlook in scholarship and in life. J. Hallett contributes two chapters, one on Edith Hamilton (1867–1963), whose best-selling books were widely influential treatments of Classical topics, and one on three women who earned the Ph.D. at Yale in the first half of the twentieth century: Barbara Philippa McCarthy (1929), Margaret E. Taylor (1933) and Hazel Barnes (1941).
C.P. Roth addresses the life and career of Ada Sara Adler (1878–1946), who edited the more than 30,000 entries in the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda. Roth usefully compares Adler's work to that of pioneering female astronomers who took on the painstakingly detailed work of cataloguing stars (pp. 275–6). N.V. Braginskaya's narrative of Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955), a ‘philosopher of culture who used the material of the ancient world for her work’ (p. 305), and a cousin and well-known correspondent of Boris Pasternak, places Freidenberg's comparative approach to culture and her research on connections between the Greek novels and the Acts of Paul and Thecla within the larger context of the study of Classics in post-revolutionary Russia. Freidenberg was the first woman to defend her thesis in Classical philology from Petrograd University, and in time she suffered through the blockade of Leningrad and Stalinist persecutions. The determination that produced her body of work was monumental. M.E. Irwin considers the contributions of Kathleen Freeman (1919–2001), whose works on Greek topics, including the Presocratic philosophers, have had lasting appeal and impact, and who also wrote (under the name Mary Fitts) mystery novels and books for children. Freeman's projects aimed to make knowledge of the Greek world and its distinctive legal and political institutions more widely known and more deeply appreciated as the challenges of the mid-twentieth century unfolded. L. Parker gives a detailed account of the brilliant A.M. Dale's (1901–67) work on Greek lyric metre and her editions with commentary of Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen. R. Fowler's chapter on the work of Betty Radice (1912–85) as translator and as editor of Penguin Classics contains many lively anecdotes about her interactions with authors and emphasises the ways in which Radice ‘broadened the canon of the “Classics” and diversified their readership’ while combining ‘meticulous philological accuracy with an ear for tone and style’ (p. 358).
Simone Weil (1909–43) wrote ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’ before and after the fall of France during World War II. B.K. Gold draws comparisons with other twentieth-century translations of the Iliad to investigate what remains so distinctive and compelling about Weil's response to Homer's poem of war. R. Webb argues that ‘the personal … turns out to permeate the scholarly’ (p. 379) in the life of Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010), writing of de Romilly's ‘deep conviction that the “luminosity” of Ancient Greece, the triumph of reason and tolerance that it embodied, could and should be a beacon to modern Europe’ (p. 382).
Each lively chapter is meticulously documented, yielding a bibliography for the volume that runs to nearly 50 pages. The editors and contributors have also gone to considerable trouble to include portraits of as many of these women as possible.
As with all excellent scholarship, this collection opens the way to many further questions. What other women have been part of this story? What social or institutional obstacles are now keeping interested individuals away from the study of the Greeks and Romans? What can each of us who have enjoyed the privilege and pleasures of studying the ancient world contribute to understanding and dismantling those obstacles so as to keep the fountain flowing?
