The editors, Carlà-Uhink and Wieber, have put together a complex and sophisticated collection that explores the link between ‘the feminine and the Oriental’, both ‘perceived as Others to a normative, masculine, Western point of view’ (p. 1). All the chapters focus on the ways in which effeminacy and Orientalism conceptually overlap and interact within the imaginative frameworks of both antiquity and modernity, an effect the editors term ‘double estrangement’ (p. 1). The collection's diverse and well-chosen case studies serve as a useful introduction to the subject to specialists and non-specialists alike: while the editors begin their introduction with one of the most famous women of antiquity, Cleopatra, the collection's chapters continue to explore its subject in-depth through the inclusion of a diverse range of figures such as Fulvia Flacca Bambula, Messalina, Šīrīn, Theodora and Zenobia. For the fields of Classics, reception studies and gender studies this collection makes an important scholarly contribution that is able to interweave different analytic frameworks into a unified whole. Chapter 10, C. Bishop's ‘The Dark Gaze of Galla Placidia’, also features a welcome reflection on the limitation of a modern perspective on the women discussed in the collection, which is a disclaimer applicable to much modern scholarship on ancient figures. Likewise, the contrast Bishop's chapter outlines between E. Pound's and C. Jung's reception of Galla Placidia is an effective way of showcasing just how malleable an ‘archetype’ many of these women have become over the course of their long reception histories.
The volume undoubtedly fills an important gap in existing research on antiquity and its reception by outlining the reception history of ‘Orientalised’ female figures, a topic Carlà-Uhink and Wieber rightly identify as currently under-explored in scholarship (pp. 4ff.). To draw attention to the ubiquity of this link between feminisation and Orientalism, the editors purposefully include a breadth of historical contexts and modes of reception, and even more seldom studied frameworks such as TV series and fan fictions. Usefully, they do not limit their case studies to biological women but identify femininity as a framework that can also be applied to men, as is outlined, for instance, in A.-C. Harders's discussion of the way in which Persian Bagoas ‘blurs the line when it comes to pin down gendered notions of desire’ (p. 51) in Chapter 3 (‘The Persian Boy, the Bactrian Girl and the Man from Macedon: Gender and Orientalisms in Mary Renault's Alexander the Great-Trilogy’). Likewise, they emphasise that ‘[n]either “East” nor “West” are monolithic concepts’ (p. 3), but instead pertain to shifting and blurred definitions that are applied and re-applied throughout many of the long reception histories of effeminised ancient figures. So, while the collection includes examples of straightforwardly ‘Eastern’ queens, such as Chapter 12 on the reception of Šīrīn in Iran (by I. Madreiter), there are also chapters that outline Rome's ‘obsessive’ preoccupation with the Orient and the ways in which Roman women have been construed as ‘Eastern’ even in their own time – such as Fulvia Flacca Bambula, who is discussed in P. Keegan's ‘Colon(ial)izing Fulvia: (Re)Presenting the Military Woman in History, Fiction and Art’.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the chapters are not organised into clear-cut sections that might be arranged by the time periods the contributors focus on or the women's geographical origins. What may be lost in terms of clear arrangement is more than made up for by the fact that this decision allows the editors to clearly emphasise one of the main ideas of their research project, namely that this imaginative connection between powerful women and Orientalism manifests in various, often comparable ways and cannot be limited to specific time periods or geographical locations. This encourages readers to draw connections for themselves, even between reception contexts that might otherwise seldom be discussed in conjunction. The first two chapters alone – ‘Semiramide in India: the Reception of an Ancient Oriental Warrior Queen in Baroque Opera’ (K. Droß-Krüpe) and ‘Carian Queens from the Orient to Greece and Back: the Reception of Artemisia I and Artemisia II’ (I. Berti) – allow the comparative study of such varied texts as opera, tapestries, films and comic books, while both remain focused on unpacking the ‘double estrangement’ that has occurred when framing and re-framing female figures from antiquity. The collection thus effortlessly places not only different case studies and reception contexts alongside one another, but also different art forms and representations, spanning women's depictions in anything from traditional ‘high culture’, such as opera, to texts that mainly operate in the realm of popular culture, such as fan fiction and comic books, while also paying attention to the depiction of women on, for instance, ancient coins.
Internally, the chapters follow the same structure of first engaging with ancient sources, then mapping out the female figures’ reception history across either one or several periods, before ending with a conclusion that summarises general reception trends. This allows the reader to understand the collection as a cohesive study that examines the same phenomenon within a range of different contexts and through a range of analytical lenses, and it helps to counterbalance the seeming lack of structure on the contents page. One minor inconsistency that is notable across some of the chapters is the level of detail that the primary texts are engaged with. For instance, in Chapter 2 Berti hints at interesting iconographical similarities between Artemisia in The 300 Spartans and J. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra. Giving the chapter more room to expand on this connection would have allowed for a deeper exploration of the ways in which visual signifiers are used to tap into the cultural memory of consumers of visual media. By contrast, S. Müller's ‘Drypetis in Fact and (Fan)Fiction’ features a large number of direct quotations from fan fictions, which are often used to exemplify the author's claims, but are seldom treated as primary sources to be analysed in detail. It remains unclear why so many quotations have been included and often in such long form when Müller did not intend to comment on the style or format of the passages.
The volume as a whole features a consistent and historically sensitive focus on how and why reception trends occur and remain successful. It is particularly welcome in Droß-Krüpe's and Wieber's contributions, which feature a discussion of trends across cultural memory, as the methodological link between reception and memory studies carries a lot of analytic potential, but often remains under-explored in scholarship. Droß-Krüpe's chapter on ‘Semiramide in India’ features a useful discussion of the way in which trends in cultural memory operate in the Renaissance, while Wieber's chapter, ‘The Palmyrene Queen Zenobia in Syrian TV’, makes use of P. Nora's concept of ‘realms of memory’. The impact of (trans-)cultural / collective memory could have been an even more consistent point of engagement across the collection. Given the often fundamental changes female characters undergo over the course of their reception history, using the analytic lens of ‘memory’ – and utilising current research on shifting cultural memory spheres – might have been an angle worth exploring across more of the chapters, especially since concepts that lie close to the interest of memory studies, such as topoi and archetypes, are mentioned at different points in the collection.
Any consideration of modern reception histories needs to include a consideration of the impact of technological advancements and especially of the digital shift in recent decades, and Carlà-Uhink and Wieber give appropriate room to this discussion, in addition to including extensive discussions of the women's reception histories within antiquity itself. In the introduction the editors usefully summarise how ‘a further crucial form of Otherness appeared [since the twentieth century]: the technological’, and they quote R. Braidotti's claim that ‘the ambivalence of fear and desire towards technology is re-cast in the mode of an ancestral patriarchal suspicion towards powerful women and women in positions of power’ (Braidotti [2013], pp. 105–7, quoted on p. 7). Several of the chapters focus on shifts within women's reception histories that cinema and TV have facilitated, including, for instance, Berti's ‘Carian Queens from the Orient to Greece and Back’ and M. García Morcillo's ‘Exotic, Erotic, Heroic? Women of Carthage in Western Imagination’, while Müller's chapter on Drypetis discusses a medium that is entirely reliant on regular communication via the internet. In Chapter 9 Wieber also usefully explores the ways in which modern TV productions allow for a Pan-Arabic reception of Zenobia, whereby ‘TV Zenobia … figure[s] as a Syrian role model and an ambassadress of Arab identity at the same time’ (p. 148). Readers who are primarily interested in the reception side of the project might have welcomed a more coherent focus across the volume on the ways in which modern technological shifts have fundamentally changed the reception landscape and thereby impacted the way in which female characters may be (re-)cast in their Orientalist roles. However, given that the collection is trying to bridge interests from readers across feminist studies, reception studies, Orientalist studies and classical studies, the level of detail the editors have already managed to include in this regard is impressive.
The editors have put together a collection of the highest academic standard to address the intersection of feminisation and Orientalism – ‘double estrangement’ – from antiquity to the modern age. Despite the complexity of the subject and the breadth of case studies and reception periods discussed within the collection, the contributions are generally accessible to scholars less familiar with reception methodologies, Classics or gender studies while providing a valuable overview of the history of scholarship on women in antiquity to both experts and newcomers to the field alike. It is a project admirable in both its ambition and execution, and one whose flexible and open-ended approach to different modes of reception deserves to set a precedent for future editions on reception studies.
