TY  - CHAP
A1  - Carlà-Uhink, Filippo
A1  - Wieber, Anja
T1  - Introduction
T2  - Orientalism and the reception of powerful women from the ancient world
N2  - In 1932, Grace Harriet Macurdy, Professor of Greek at Vassar College, wrote about Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s lifestyle in Egypt: In a manner of living as though taken from the Arabian Nights Entertainment, they gambled, drank, hunted and fished together, and wandered about Alexandria by night in disguise.  .  . Even Macurdy – the author of a pioneering study on Hellenistic queens and ‘woman-power’, in which she stressed the necessity of evaluating powerful women by the same standards as their male counterparts – could not avoid using an Orientalist flair when describing the most famous Ptolemaic queen. It is the aim of this book to show that Macurdy was and is anything but alone, and that discourses and images developed by the Orientalist imagination have dominated the ways in which powerful ancient women have been represented in modern reception. The reason for this, we argue, is...
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57102
SN  - 978-1-3500-5011-2
SN  - 978-1-3500-7741-6
SN  - 978-1-3500-5010-5
SP  - 1
EP  - 15
PB  - Bloomsbury Academic
CY  - New York
ER  -