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Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2020

Katharine P. D. Huemoeller
Katharine P. D. Huemoeller*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
katharine.huemoeller@ubc.ca
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Abstract

This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

Keywords

Roman lawslaverymanumissionwomenLatin epigraphymarriage
Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 110 , November 2020 , pp. 123 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

I thank my research assistants Luc Radelet and Dora Gao, as well as Liv Yarrow, Tristan Husby, Matthew Perry, Jared Benton, Tara Mulder and Toph Marshall for their feedback on this project. I am grateful too to the Editor, Christopher Kelly, and JRS readers for their engagement with this article and their suggestions. Finally, I owe thanks to Daria Lanzuolo, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and Maria Grazia Granino for assistance in securing and permission to reproduce photographs of the altar. All dates are c.e. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

References

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