Ancient Lifeworlds in Discourse: Body, Gender, and Social Order

How was gender understood in antiquity, how was social order legitimized, and what role did the (female) body play in medicine and religion? The diversity of ancient social realities finds its equivalent in our recent publications through a broad range of scholarly perspectives.
The spectrum of these studies extends from analyses of marriage and family as foundational elements of ancient life to the exploration of gender variance and female agency in medicine. In this context, the plurality of ancient ways of life corresponds to the diversity of modern analytical approaches: the publications featured here from our program document a vibrant research process that highlights, by turns, the persistence of normative institutions, the fluidity of identities, or the refraction of established patterns in the face of specific temporal concepts. Taken together, they invite us to rediscover antiquity beyond simplified narratives – as a space of nuanced configurations and both complementary and competing interpretations.