Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Bond, Sarah E., author

Title Trade and taboo : disreputable professions in the Roman Mediterranean / Sarah E. Bond
Published Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction: Roman pride and prejudices -- Quamvis indignus: criers, status, and soundscapes -- Touch, pollution, and the mortuary trades in the Roman Mediterranean -- Scent and sensibilities: tanners in the ancient Mediterranean -- Currency and control: legal disrepute and associations of mint workers -- Catering to pleasure: sensual trades in the later Roman Empire -- Conclusion: inheriting the prejudices of Rome
Summary Trade and Taboo" investigates the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. It tracks the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity by following groups of professionals - funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers - and asking how they coped with stigmatization. The goal of this book is to reveal the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, the volume shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets. Sarah E. Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. Her volume expands on anthropological theories of pollution by exploring individuals who regularly came intocontact with corpses and other polluting materials, then considers communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers called praecones. Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners, while the book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman empire. Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about the economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45BCE and 565 CE
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-310) and index
Notes Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher
Subject Professions -- Rome -- History
Occupations -- Rome -- History
Social status -- Rome -- History
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Labor.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Labor & Industrial Relations.
HISTORY -- General.
Occupations.
Professions.
Social conditions.
Social status.
SUBJECT Rome -- History -- Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85115128
Rome -- Social conditions. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh95006770
Subject Rome (Empire)
Genre/Form History.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020707060
ISBN 9780472122257
0472122258