Whoa...Sitting here knitting and listening to the hip-hop, I just caught Talib Kweli reference Octavia Butler and her incredible book Parable of the Sower. I'm sure it will change, but at the moment it feels like the older I get, the more I understand, like there is hidden knowledge that ties the entire universe together. Of course, the search for that type of knowledge was what drove Smeagol under the Misty Mountains, what twisted him into Gollum. I think I'm up too late.
I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household
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