Among the many recent studies of magic in the ancient world, this volume wisely and elegantly focuses on the specific, and important, topic of gender. Many of the articles face the same theoretical problem: How should modern scholars interpret the polemical and stereotypical accusations against women? In one of the few articles that takes a psychological approach to this issue, “Magic, Abjection, and Gender in Roman Literature,” Kimberly Stratton explains the attacks on women by adopting Julia Kristeva's concept of “abjection.” Kristeva argues that in order to gain a sense of self and for society to regulate itself, individuals must reject the abject, the disturbing mother-imago that is part of every child's development. Stratton, who also supplies a thoughtful, analytic introduction to the volume, offers a judicious antidote to those scholars who simply repeat ancient stereotypes. Her argument compliments the stimulating psychoanalytically informed historical work of scholars such as Lyndal Roper (Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe [Routledge, 1994]), but the application of psychoanalytic ideas to unpack ancient literary sources may remain controversial for some readers.

Elizabeth Ann Pollard's “Magic Accusations against Women in Tacitus's Annals” is a convincing and fine-tuned tracing of the charges against women in Tacitus's writing which clearly demonstrates that friends in high places could lead to both charges of magic and protection from those charges. Elite husbands and friends could bring advantages or result in disaster. Both results are seemingly based on forces that remain opaque to modern investigators (friendships gone sour, other political demands that are obscured in the extant evidence, personality issues, and so on).

Dayna Kalleres effectively disarms scholars who rely on the church fathers to reconstruct the social role of accusations against women. She argues that patristic literature offers a window that is “an intentionally contorted one.” Ancient stereotypes became even more distorting of social practices with the church fathers as they recycled hostile depictions of devious women from previous time periods (241). More complicated, and perhaps beyond the scope of a single article, is Kalleres's point that these polemics “reconfigure or readjust social relations and power hierarchies in the family” (222). How the Christian family differed from the non-Christian version remains a major question.

In “Gendering Heavenly Secrets? Women, Angels, and the Problem of Misogyny and ‘Magic,’” Annette Yoshiko Reed effectively breaks down the overly simple connection between women and negative attacks made by modern scholars. The ancient texts are much more diverse and nuanced including, for example, positive associations between women and alchemy (128). Her stimulating argument that in the Book of the Watchers references to vision are best understood as transformations of the viewer may be more complicated than the text requires, but opens up new approaches.

David Frankfurter counters Matthew Dickie's formulation of church fathers’ caricatures of women into valid depictions of social context (a critique also made by Kalleres on p. 322) in “The Social Context of Women's Erotic Magic In Antiquity.” Instead, Frankfurter modifies the more benign view of female agency posited by Christopher Faraone, who argues that women used only the less aggressive “magical” ritual techniques and then only when in dire need. Frankfurter draws attention to the “tight social constraints” under which women operated, constraints that forced them to turn to magic in hopes of some self-determination. The bottom line is that women engaged in these practices “despite, and often in response to, these cultural suspicions and mythic nightmares of magical powers and its female wielders” (333). These points are convincing, but women may also have had different views of their practices. Ancient courtesans may have thought they were employing “trade secrets” that involved sexual aids and not engaging in magic. So too modern practitioners of Wicca insist that the negative depictions of witches on television are hostile distortions of a very different reality.

Fritz Graf carefully surveys gravestones for charges of death by magic in “Victimology or: How to Deal with Untimely Death,” finding that such charges appear in a surprisingly small number of cases. In a fundamental observation that warrants close attention, Graf notes that accusations of magic are salient only in certain social contexts. The minutes from the same Roman Senate trial Tacitus writes about show that it concerned political issues only and “the accusation of sorcery remained rumor and family lore” (389). For a general theory of the social contexts that led to charge and counter-charge, Graf returns to Mary Douglas's location of accusations in “small enclosed groups, where movement in and out is restricted, when interaction is unavoidably close, and where roles are undefined or so defined that they are impossible to perform” (402). Douglas, Malinowski, and other anthropologists cited in the volume attempt to substitute more rational, instrumental explanations based on conflict for the nonsensical and irrational magic accusations. Reconstructing these social contexts always has a defensive air that may unwittingly undercut ancient views less critical of “irrational” means. Malinowski's natives, other anthropologists pointed out, engaged in their rites not because these actions were thought likely to be successful, but because it was the best they could do in bad circumstances. The same may be true for some of the rites women engaged in, no matter how others viewed their actions.

Ultimately Graf concludes that “‘real’ witches . . . were very rare in the world of Imperial Greece and Rome, unlike what ancient and modern fiction would make us believe” (406). So too Michael Satlow argues that rabbinic charges of magic against women are the most hollow of all social stereotypes of women (“Fictional Women: A Study in Stereotypes,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, ed. P. Schåfer [J. C. B. Mohr, 2002], 3:225–243). This is a different way of cutting the knot of magic accusations. It correlates very nicely with the recent historical research done by James Rives (“Magic in the XII Tables Revisited,” Classical Quarterly 52, no. 1 [2002]: 270–290; “Magic in Roman Law: The Reconstruction of a Crime” Classical Antiquity 22, no. 2 [2003]: 313–339; “Magic, Religion, and Law: The Case of the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis,” in Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome, ed. Clifford Ando & Jörg Rüpke [Franz Steiner, 2006], 47–67) which is not cited in the volume; by not accepting magic as a theoretical category, he does not have to row backwards from accusations of magic to a particular social context. The fresh and sophisticated articles in this important volume show us how to row forward instead.