Contents
List of Letters
Illustrations
How This Book Came to Exist
The Organization of the Book
Citations and Images
Chapter 2: Why Women's Letters?
Whose Voices Are We Hearing?
Which Women?
The Distinctive Value of Letters
Generalizations and Particulars
Chapter 3: About the Corpus of Letters
Changes in Letter Writing from Ptolemaic to Byzantine Times
Women’s Letters in Coptic
The Chronological Distribution of the Letters
Archives, Excavations, and Plundering
How This Book Is Organized
Chapter 4: Late Medieval Letters as Comparative Evidence
Four Wealthy Families
Handwriting
Language
Writing Materials
Letter Writing: Dual Letters
Getting Letters Delivered
Chapter 6: Handwriting
Typology
Final Greetings: Second Hand versus Second Style
A Woman’s Hand
Women Write: The Archives
Women Write: The Isolated Letters
Coptic Letters
Dating Handwriting
Chapter 7: Language
Greek and Egyptian in Literate Society
Dictated versus Composed versus Autograph: Orality of Letter Prose
Assessing Levels of Education: The Use of Rare Words
The Ptolemaic Letters
Roman Archives
Property
Offices
After the Fourth Century
Childbirth
Rearing Children
Weaving and Other Textile-Related Activity
Household Management
Women’s Travels and Freedom of Movement
Chapter 10: Practical Help in Reading the Letters
Kinship Terms
Greeting Formulas
The Proskynema Formula
Money
Dating
Letters
A. Archives and Dossiers
B. Themes and Topics
Bibliography
Index
Index of Letters
Bibliographical Update