Author: Marguerite Johnson, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland - Academia.edu

Abstract: »A theme that has been recurring in the book to date, most recently in Pierce’s chapter, is how far cultural change since the 1990s has impacted on the scholarly landscape. This issue is especially explored in the next study, Marguerite Johnson’s ‘Warfare, violence, rape, revenge: Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co.’. Johnson examines how far reception studies has changed since 1997 and also how diff erently classical studies has come to be conceptualized since then. She also shows how far one of the gaps in the 1997 collection might now be filled: wartime rape. As Johnson notes, one of the reviewers, James Davidson (2000 , see also above), asked why there was so little discussion of warfare and rape when, he assumed, rape would have been key to the experience of warfare in cultures where warfare was rife. As Johnson sets out, the first book downplays Ovid and was set, still, in a second-wave feminist world view. But what if, she asks, the lens shifts to Ovid, but to an Ovid whose horrific evidence is envisaged as female-authored. The resulting discussion takes further the thread that has run through several chapters to date of what it means to venture into a dialogue between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Such a dialogue can be identified in the 1997 book, but without the self-awareness that several decades of classical reception studies, postcolonial studies and third-wave feminist studies have opened up. The Ovid-as-woman presented by Johnson is Jane Holland whose cycle of poems on Boudicca offers engagements with antiquity, with women’s role in modern genocidal violence, and with the role of Classics in underwriting the elitism that enabled British imperialism. What comes though is, Johnson concludes, ‘Blood and all’ (p. 260).« (Source: Deacy, Susan. »Introduction: 'Twenty Years Ago': Revisiting Rape in Antiquity.« Revisiting Rape in Antiquity: Sexualised Violence in Greek and Roman Worlds. Edited by Susan Deacy et al. London 2023: p. 12)

Contents:

	Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co (p. 248)
	The Boudicca series (p. 248)
	Holland, Tacitus and Cassius Dio (p. 250)
	Holland and Ovid (p. 251)
	Classical reception, violence and rape (p. 258)
	Notes (p. 260)
	Bibliography (p. 262)

Wikipedia: Ancient history: Ancient Rome / History of the Roman Empire, Roman Britian | Literature: English literature / Jane Holland | Literature: Poems about rape | Sex and the law: Rape / History of rape