This collection of essays sees itself as part of the ‘rising chorus’ of works whose aim is to assess the power and agency of imperial women in the enclosed setting of the imperial court. The clever title of the collection is not only an obvious pun on the multiple meanings of the expression ‘in-waiting’ but is a meaningful allusion to ‘the complicated question of the formal and informal power’ of both late antique empresses and female courtiers avant la lettre (1).

Essay collections are often (and, sometimes, unfairly) criticised for their lack of cohesion; Empresses-in-Waiting preempts this kind of criticism by buttressing its structure with a strong and compelling framework. The ten essays that make up the bulk of the volume are framed very effectively by the two excellent chapters that form the Introduction and by the brilliant Conclusion. In the first introductory essay, the editors of the volume, Christian Rollinger and Nadine Viermann, give a lucid and pointed overview of the scholarly context for their endeavour before outlining the twofold aim of Empresses-in-Waiting to study ‘the underlying mechanisms of female involvement in imperial politics and court procedure’ and assess the effect of that involvement on ‘the functioning of imperial rule at large’ (13). As Rollinger and Viederman point out, the essays in the volume find unity in their common focus on the imperial court as the institutional context in which to study the political agency of imperial women.

Anja Wieber opens the second chapter of the Introduction (ch. 1) with a persuasive and enlightening critique of what can be described as the ‘fairy tale’ bias in historiography, which systematically and programmatically denies any political agency to ancient women and dismisses their intervention in historical events as romantically or emotionally motivated. Similarly to the essay by the editors, Wieber’s chapter offers a sharp-eyed and engaging account of the scholarship about such hotly debated topics as the empress’ status and the segregation of women within the palace. Wieber revisits and re-proposes her own concept of ‘matronage’, a pointedly ‘less patriarchal’ term that she uses to describe a system parallel to and as widespread as the better studied system of patronage.

In her masterful conclusion, Julia Hillner identifies three sets of themes that emerge from the three parts in which the ten essays of the volume are organised, namely, the idea of co-rulership (koinonia) and the related issue of the ‘presence of imperial women at court and their relations to ceremonial and governmental spaces’ (262–4), the ‘perception of imperial women as vessels of dynastic legitimacy’ (265–7) and the ‘spectre of violence surrounding imperial women’, particularly during regime changes (268). Hillner not only draws connections across the three parts of the volume, thus reinforcing its cohesion, but, more importantly, her brilliant analysis of these issues outlines future lines of inquiry.

The ten essays that constitute the volume and are devoted to individual case studies are divided into three sections. In Section I, five essays explore the ‘political agency and power brokerage’ of four women, namely the Empress Eusebia, the anonymous imperial women mentioned in John Chrysostom’s Letter to a Young Widow, the Empress Sophia and the Empress Martina. I found this section exceptionally well structured and compelling, starting with Silvia Holm’s ch. 2, which offers an admirably clear and persuasive reassessment of Eusebia’s role in consolidating the Constantinian dynasty while strengthening and cementing her husband’s status as well as her own (44). As is the case with Holm, Martine Viermann (ch. 6) provides a template on how to ‘leave aside the misogynistic stereotypes that the sources confront us with’ by reading between the lines, and her portrait of Martina as a ‘woman who tried to break out of her ascribed role as wife and mother’ is not only powerful, but convincing (154). Equally persuasive is ch. 3 by Belinda Washington, who uses the Letter to a Young Widow of John Chrysostom to trace the history of imperial women after regime change in the fourth century. The two chapters on Sophia by Silvio Roggo (ch. 4) and Lewis Dagnall (ch. 5) complement each other with Roggo’s persuasive critique of modern assessments of Sophia as ‘regent’ and Dagnall’s careful reassessment of Sophia’s involvement in foreign policy and his reminder that ‘the serious study of empresses, often treated as a discrete field within the historiography of the later Roman Empire, can also be of vital importance to “mainstream” political topics’ (117).

My one (minor) criticism concerns not the quality of the remaining essays, but the way in which they are organised. The two essays in Section 2 are devoted to ‘Performance and Representation’. Mads Ortving Lindholmer (ch. 7) wrestles with Procopius’ problematic evidence and makes the intriguing suggestion that Theodora may have been the first consort to appear at the adoratio. In her excellent essay (ch. 8), Pavla Gkantzios Drápelová outlines the rise of the representation of the emperor’s consort as his ‘partner in reign’ by examining the coinage of Justin II. Both essays offer much food for thought, and they whetted my appetite for more studies along these lines. Given the brevity of this section, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the volume’s essays couldn’t have been reorganised in the way that Hillner outlines in her Conclusion.

Similarly, the three essays in Section 3 are thought-provoking and well-argued, but the slightly awkward title of the section with its reference to ‘non- and near-imperial women’ seems an afterthought, especially because in their introduction Rollinger and Viermann offer a capacious and persuasive definition of imperial women. As in Section 1, the three essays are devoted to an examination of the power and agency of three ‘non- and near-imperial women’. I found Geoffrey Nathan’s painstaking essay on Anicia Juliana (ch. 9) both bold and persuasive. Nathan’s narrative attributes to Juliana an extraordinary independence of action, but the carefulness of his argument puts the burden of proof on the sceptics. As in the case of Lindholmer’s chapter, the essay by Christopher Lillington-Martin (ch. 10) contends with Procopius’ knotty evidence to offer a balanced account of the role of Belisarius’ wife Antonina, and in the final chapter (ch. 11) Marco Cristini examines the potential agency of the Gothic princess Matasuintha in light of the imperial court to both control and exploit her ‘symbolic potential’.

The volume is carefully edited, with few misprints, and the layout is reader-friendly with perfectly calibrated footnotes. Overall, the editors have assembled a stimulating and beautifully constructed collection of essays that will be the basis for future studies on the political agency of Roman women.