Jane Draycott

Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen

Cleopatra's Daughter

A first biography of Cleopatra Selene – the daughter of Cleopatra VII.

The first modern biography of one of the most fascinating, and unjustly neglected, female rulers of the ancient world: Cleopatra Selene. Princess, prisoner, African queen - and surviving daughter of Cleopatra VII.In 1895, archaeologists excavating a villa at Boscoreale, outside Pompeii, uncovered a spectacular hoard of high-quality Roman silverware. In the centre of one especially fine gilded dish was a bust of a female figure with thick curly hair, deep-set eyes, a slightly hooked nose and a strong jaw, sporting an elephant's scalp headdress. Modern scholars believe it likely that she represents Cleopatra Selene, one of three children born to Cleopatra VII of Egypt and the Roman triumvir Mark Antony.Using the Boscoreale discovery as her starting-point, Jane Draycott recreates the life and times of a remarkable woman - the sole member of the Ptolemaic dynasty to survive following her parents' defeat at the Battle of Actium. Unlike her siblings, who were either executed as threat to Rome's new ruler, Augustus, or simply forgotten, Cleopatra Selene not only survived but prospered. Brought up in the household of Octavia the Younger, Augustus' sister, she married a north African prince, Juba II of Numidia, and became co-ruler with him of the Roman client kingdom of Mauretania.Cleopatra Selene was a princess who became a prisoner; a prisoner who became a queen; an Egyptian who became Roman; and a woman who became a powerful ruler in her own right at a time when most women were marginalised. Her life shines new and revelatory light on Roman politics, society and culture in the early years of the Empire, on Roman perceptions of Egypt, and on the relationship between Rome and one of its most significant allied kingdoms.

Lesley Saunders

Christina the Astonishing

Martin Lindner

Filippo Carlà-Uhink

Kate Cook

Introduction / Jane Draycott and Kate Cook -- Playable girls in ancient worlds : Athena (1986) opens the door / Dunstan Lowe -- A historical overview of women in ancient-period video games / Jordy Orellana Figueroa -- Dangerous defaults : demographics and identities within and without video games / Marcie Persyn -- The maiden, the mother and the monster : the monstrous-feminine in historical and archaeological video games / Dan Goad -- Bringing down the divine patriarchy through Deicide in Apotheon (2015) / Amy Norgard -- Argonautic women? : gender and heroic status in Rise of the Argonauts / Sophie Ngan -- Good riddance : refiguring Eurydice in Supergiant's Hades / Kira Jones -- Reception and representation of Greco-Roman goddesses in Smite : battleground of the gods / Katherine Beydler -- Aphrodite, a caricature of female sexuality / Olivia Kinsman -- Violence against women in classical video games / Hannah-Marie Chidwick -- Playing Cleopatra in Assassin's Creed Origins / Jane Draycott -- Playing Salammbô? : orientalism, gender and gaming with the Punic world / Andrew Dufton -- Kassandra's odyssey / Richard Cole -- "We do what we must to survive" : prostitution and power in Assassin's creed odyssey / Roz Tuplin -- "It's the most freedom a woman can have" : gender, genre and agency in choices : a courtesan of Rome / Kate Cook.

Women in Classical Video Games

Despite the prevalence of video games set in or inspired by classical antiquity, the medium has to date remained markedly understudied in the disciplines of classics and ancient history, with the role of women in these video games especially neglected. Women in Classical Video Games seeks to address this imbalance as the first book-length work of scholarship to examine the depiction of women in video games set in classical antiquity. The volume surveys the history of women in these games and the range of figures presented from the 1980s to the modern day, alongside discussion of issues such as historical accuracy, authenticity, gender, sexuality, monstrosity, hegemony, race and ethnicity, and the use of tropes. A wide range of games of different types and modes are discussed, with particular attention paid to the Assassin's Creed franchise's 21st-century ventures into classical antiquity (first in Origins (2017), set in Hellenistic Egypt, and then in Odyssey (2018), set in classical Greece), which have caught the imagination not only of gamers, but also of academics, especially in relation to their accompanying educational Discovery Modes. The detailed case studies presented here form a compelling case for the indispensability of the medium to both reception studies and gender studies, and offer nuanced answers to such questions as how and why women are portrayed in the ways that they are.

The first biography of one of the most fascinating yet long-neglected rulers of the ancient world: Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. Years ago, archaeologists excavating near Pompeii unearthed a hoard of Roman treasures, among them a bowl depicting a woman with thick, curly hair and sporting an elephant-scalp headdress. For decades, theories circulated about her identity—until, at last, she was ascertained to be Cleopatra Selene, the only surviving daughter of Roman Triumvir Marc Antony and Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII. Using this discovery as her starting point and creating a narrative from mere fragments in the archaeological record, historian Jane Draycott reconstructs the exceptional life of this woman who, although born into royalty and raised in her mother’s court, was held captive by Augustus Caesar and his sister, Octavia, after her parents’ demise. Yet as Draycott shows, Cleopatra Selene was destined to emerge as an influential ruler in her own right, as queen, alongside King Juba II, of Mauretania, an ancient African kingdom. A long-overdue historical corrective, Cleopatra’s Daughter reclaims a mighty regent—and her infamous family—for posterity.

Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to Egyptian Queen

Dedicating objects to the divine was a central component of both Greek and Roman religion. Some of the most conspicuous offerings were shaped like parts of the internal or external human body: so-called ?anatomical votives?. These archaeological artefacts capture the modern imagination, recalling vividly the physical and fragile bodies of the past whilst posing interpretative challenges in the present. This volume scrutinises this distinctive dedicatory phenomenon, bringing together for the first time a range of methodologically diverse approaches which challenge traditional assumptions and simple categorisations. The chapters presented here ask new questions about what constitutes an anatomical votive, how they were used and manipulated in cultural, cultic and curative contexts and the complex role of anatomical votives in negotiations between humans and gods, the body and its disparate parts, divine and medical healing, ancient assemblages and modern collections and collectors. In seeking to re-contextualise and re-conceptualise anatomical votives this volume uniquely juxtaposes the medical with the religious, the social with the conceptual, the idea of the body in fragments with the body whole and the museum with the sanctuary, crossing the boundaries between studies of ancient religion, medicine, the body and the reception of antiquity.

Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future

Bodies of Evidence

This is collection from poet Jane Draycott travels many paths and by-ways, beside some of which lie burning cars, or a young man speechless on a forest floor, or girls lost far from home.

The Night Tree

This volume focuses on the depiction of women in video games set in historical periods or archaeological contexts, explores the tension between historical and archaeological accuracy and authenticity, examines portrayals of women in historical periods or archaeological contexts, portrayals of female historians and archaeologists, and portrayals of women in fantastical historical and archaeological contexts. It includes both triple A and independent video games, incorporating genres such as turn-based strategy, action-adventure, survival horror, and a variety of different types of role-playing games. Its chronological and geographical scope ranges from late third century BCE China, to mid first century BCE Egypt, to Pictish and Viking Europe, to Medieval Germany, to twentieth century Taiwan, and into the contemporary world, but it also ventures beyond our universe and into the fantasy realm of Hyrule and the science fiction solar system of the Nebula.

Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games

It refines the study of healing within Roman provincial culture, identifies diagnostic features of healing in material culture and offers a more contextualised reading of ancient medical literary and documentary papyri and archaeological evidence. This study differs from previous attempts to examine healing in Roman Egypt in that it tries, as far as possible, to encompass the full spectrum of healing strategies available to the inhabitants of the province. The first part of this study comprises two chapters and focuses on the practitioners of healing strategies, both 'professional' and 'amateur'. Chapter 2 examines those areas of ancient medicine that have traditionally been neglected or summarily dismissed by scholars: 'domestic' and 'folk' medicine with particular emphasis on the extent to which the specific natural environment of any given location affects healing strategies.

Approaches to Healing in Roman Egypt

Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium a grand piano dreams of the voices and music of days past, ‘rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking’. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, ‘The Occupant’, draws on scenes proposed but left unwritten in Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott’s occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city whose ‘dead lanes keep their silence’, where ‘the frail expire and pale dogs whimper’, as its police post notices: ‘Missing: Have you seen this wind?’

The Occupant

Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: ‘my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, ‘an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.

Jane Draycott

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