Motherhood and Infancies in the Mediterranean and Antiquity ed. by Margarita Sánchez Romero and Rosa Maria Cid López (review)

This edited volume stems from the seminar "Maternities and Childhood: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives" held at the University of Granada (2016), with the addition of invited articles. Chronologically, almost all the papers deal with the ancient world, ranging from the Bronze Age to late antiquity, while two focus on modern Spain. The topics of the individual papers also cut across class lines, thus presenting motherhood as a phenomenon that spans a broad chronological and social spectrum. The role of patriarchy in shaping the social construction of motherhood is a recurring theme of the volume, but so is the investigation of evidence that can bring to light female and children's agency.

Burial practices as indicators of maternal and communal behavior are at the heart of four of the papers. Despite the difference in source material, coming from Bronze Age Iberia (Gonzálen Marcén), the Punic world (Ferrer), Iron Age western Mediterranean (López-Bertran), and Latin epigrams from Iberia (Cid López), they emphasize the bonds between children and mothers as well as highlight the results that can be produced by a more careful analysis of our evidence, be it material or textual. Three of the papers also show how having multiple strands of enquiry together with great attention to detail can yield illuminating results on the work and socialization of children (Alarcón Garcia et al.), the death of pregnant women (Delgado Hervás and Rivera Hernández), and the different meanings of maternity in Iberian societies (Rueda Galán et al.). The last paper, dealing with archaeological material, focuses on the representation of children and mothers in Athenian art (Reboreda Morillo).

The status of women, the importance and meaning of motherhood, and the construction of the relationship between mothers and children in ancient law are focal points in four of the papers: in the Near East, also including non-legal sources in the discussion (Garcia-Ventura), in Athens (Molas Font), Athens and Gortyn (Pepe), and the Roman world, including late antiquity (Núñez Paz). The representation of royal mothers in our sources and an exploration of the power in the hands of these women is the topic of two of the papers, one on Hellenistic royal mothers (Mirón Pérez) and one on the last Severan imperial mother, Iulia Mamaea (Conesa Navarro). Motherhood as a social obligation and construct is discussed in three of the papers: in evidence discussing endowments for children (Domínguez-Arranz), in Plutarch's Roman Lives (Méndez Santiago), and in Latin love elegies (Marina Sáez), while the limits of motherhood are discussed in Rubiera Cancelas' analysis of material relating to slave mothers. The last two papers examine how mothers and children are presented or omitted in modern Spanish teaching curricula (Medina Quintana, Garcia Luque).

On the whole, this is a welcome addition to the literature on mothers and children in the ancient world, especially since it brings archaeological material mostly from the western Mediterranean together with literary and epigraphic evidence from ancient Greece and Italy, thus joining worlds that are usually divided in scholarship. The papers succeed in presenting motherhood and the relation between mothers and children as a socially constructed phenomenon whose study has been obscured by biology and thus has been regarded as timeless, static, non-changing, and common in its expression across the Mediterranean. They highlight the context-specific meanings of motherhood, the existence of child-free females, as well as the different meanings enmeshed in their bodies (compare the papers of Garcia-Ventura and Marina Sáez), maternity as a social and civic virtue, and how the relationship between mothers and children could be culturally defined and expressed.

There are a few issues, the least of which is the presence of typos and syntactical errors throughout the book. Material culture is underrepresented, as only seven out of twenty...