Occasionally I am guilty of thinking that we have exhausted our sources for the study of women in antiquity, and then a book like this one comes along to show me how much I, and we, have yet to learn. The volume under consideration originated in a conference on ‘Gender and the Roman City’, held at the University of Amsterdam in 2011, which must have been a fascinating event. The resulting book — preserving, as it does, only the papers, but not the discussion around them — makes absorbing, if occasionally frustrating, reading, as the chapters are little in dialogue with one another and the editors' brief introduction offers context but not much synthesis. On the other hand, almost every paper offers some useful observation or piece of information to stimulate further investigation into the timely topic.

The volume opens with a short introduction in which the editors note the centrality of the city to Roman history and historiography. Yet scholarly investigations of women in the city have been limited, although the editors do tip their hats to Riet van Bremen, The Limits of Participation: Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (1996). Indeed, the existence of van Bremen's volume may in part explain the focus of the current volume on western cities, something which is not otherwise defended. The editors do note that they have actively, and to a large degree successfully, avoided Rome, for the sensible reasons that it is both well represented in existing scholarship and somewhat sui generis. But also not defended or even described is the division of the volume into five sections: ‘Civic Roles’, ‘Participation in Cult’, ‘Public Presentation’, ‘Economics’ and ‘Mobility’. Although these sections do, to a certain extent, serve to orientate the reader, some discussion of how they relate to one another or to the general topic of the volume would have been welcome.

Turning to the individual papers then, one of the things which emerges loudly and clearly is the importance of wealth in granting women visibility. All of the papers in the first section, ‘Civic Roles’, deal at least in part with women's euergetism, sometimes in their own right and sometimes in company with male relatives. Those papers which find women as merely reflecting or supporting the prestige of their families (W. Eck, C. Witschel) are less interesting to me than those which try to see women's benefactions as having their own language (F. Cenerini, E. Hemelrijk). A. Cooley's point that women outside Rome should not be seen as merely following the road to public prominence mapped by female members of the imperial family is well taken and important.

‘Participation in Cult’, the second section, has only three papers, but they are especially interesting for their different methodologies in tackling a subject which has a substantial scholarly history elsewhere. Each takes on cult participation from a different perspective: J. North looks at the admission criteria and gender orientation of the cults of Mithras, Isis and Attis; J. Rives considers from both a theoretical and evidentiary standpoint the question of women's presiding over animal sacrifices; and W. Spickermann uses inscriptional evidence to show that women participated as religious functionaries in the cult of Magna Mater, even occasionally standing in for the goddess in rare but remarkable (male) self-castration ceremonies. The movement of quite abstract (North) to very concrete (Spickermann) offers a useful overview of the ways in which the question has been, and can be, approached. Incidentally, wealth plays a rôle here too, in the importance of female benefactors outlined in Rives' and Spickermann's contributions.

Part 3, ‘Public Representation’, is somewhat misleadingly titled, as ‘representation’ really means visibility — that is, how women were seen in public spaces. Thus, two papers (G. Davies, S. Dillon) consider statues, while the other two focus on dress (M. Harlow, U. Rothe). Davies here echoes Cooley in emphasizing that élite women were not simply imitating empresses, but otherwise concludes rather unsatisfyingly that public and funerary portraits are ‘not fundamentally different – but not quite the same either’ (198). Dillon makes a compelling case that Delos is an important site for writing the history of female portraiture in antiquity. The two chapters on dress both offer remarkable insights: Harlow makes some very useful observations on the ways that ancient women lived with, and within, their clothing, although the fact that she eschews all evidence from Roman painting is puzzling to me. Rothe offers an extremely provocative analysis of local variations in ‘native’ versus ‘Roman’ female dress on funerary monuments, and concludes that women may be seen as ‘display cases’ for a family's ethnicity in places of greater ‘identity stress’ (265).

Although I would argue that ‘Economics’ has run as a theme throughout the collection, the four papers in the fourth section offer a refreshing window onto women's economic activities outside the élite. R. Flemming describes women's participation in medical care, both of men and other women, and makes the insightful observation that the social inferiority of doctors generally meant that female practitioners were able to find a place in the profession. M. Groen-Vallinga's contribution is burdened rather than elucidated by her theoretical model, but she still asks some provocative questions, such as what actually is a family economy in Rome (301)? Both she and C. Holleran (on women in retail) perceptively observe that one barrier to poor freeborn women's participation in the workforce must have been how they would learn a trade: barred by custom from apprenticeships, they would also not have been (like some slaves and former slaves) educated by their masters. C. van Galen uses the extremely scarce evidence to look at the possibility that women received the grain dole in Rome, but along the way makes some interesting remarks on women as legal and economic subjects.

The final section is entitled ‘Mobility’, and encompasses two papers (by Woolf and L. Foubert) which inform each other in useful ways, albeit only implicitly: Woolf offers an overview of the evidence to argue that Roman women generally only travelled, or migrated, in company with male relatives; Foubert discusses two case studies of women who were travelling with their husbands and looks at what they actually did. Thus, Woolf's rather unsurprising conclusion is enriched and elaborated by Foubert's more detailed analysis. Finally, E. Greene considers the evidence of a female network in the Vindolanda tablets, offering compelling, if fragmentary, evidence that a social world of women existed within, or parallel to, the male military world of the camp. This last contribution is a refreshing acknowledgement that women do not just have relationships with men, but also with one another. Although, as the editors remark in their introduction, ‘women never formed a society apart’ (2), it is also important to recognize that the male social world never encompassed their lives fully. Overall, then, this collection makes for fascinating reading and offers a good, if rather scattershot, view of Roman women in the western city.