The material culture of women in Pompeii and the Bay of Naples have received some much-needed attention in recent years.[1] This book adds to a growing field—including the author’s own publications on similar topics—by exploring portable material culture linked to care of the body as a way to find women who are not widely represented or embodied in the aspects of the archaeological record which frequently receive more attention from scholars (e.g. architectural and decorative evidence). As the Introduction (Chapter 1) sets out, central to this endeavour is a desire to identify ‘feminine objects’ (‘oggetti feminiili’). Mirrors frequently appear in textual sources as objects used in the female toilet, and this is in turn used as evidence that surviving mirrors in the archaeological record represent ‘oggetti feminili’. The author holds (p. 4) that this approach dispels any concern about objects being ‘feminine’ because it is based on ancient evidence. There is perhaps a reasonable position to take, though the usual caveats about the unreliability of an incomplete textual record almost exclusively authored by elite men certainly apply. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, concerns around feminization of men using ‘feminine’ objects were abundant in Roman literature, and while this may reflect the prejudices and concerns of an elite class, it could also indicate that some men did use them. The Introduction also provides an overview of past work on the mundus muliebris (largely taken here to mean toilet sets). This is followed by a concise review of contextual finds analysis at Pompeii and its problems, including issues around how ‘representative’ the distribution of objects is of their use. Importantly, this chapter contains the book’s main theoretical discussion of the challenges of gendering objects. Key here is Berg’s acknowledgement that objects are not gendered but can gain gendered connotations in social context.
The next chapter (‘I contesti letterari del mundus muliebris’) reviews the textual evidence for the mundus muliebris, its composition, and social connotations. The methodology adopted in this chapter, importantly, is one which employs all the available textual evidence spanning the late Republic until at least the middle Empire—this is an understandable approach, since we must work with what we have, but one repercussion is that no coherent or consistent definition of the contents of a toilet set can be established. This observation notwithstanding, the picture that emerges is that in certain times and places, women’s toilet sets were conceived of including a wide and varied range of objects, and central to these are mirrors, as well as unguentaria and other vessels, implements for care of the skin (cura cutis), and of the hair (cura capelli), as well as bathing accoutrements (instrumentum balneare). We also learn in this chapter that the social value of care for the body was a contested concept—a ‘good’ woman should maintain herself, but in the early imperial period too much washing has connotations of sexual licentiousness or even sex work. This chapter closes with an acknowledgement that men could use toilet sets, too, and indeed that this is attested in various ancient sources. The implications of this acknowledgement, however, are not explored further.
Chapter 3 (‘Iconografia del mundus muliebris’) deals with the iconographic evidence for women’s care of the body. Toilet instruments appearing on tombstones and mirrors, with their symbolic connections to Venus, are by far the most prominent among these. These motifs are most easily read as status indicators, and/or as alluding to heirlooms that could be passed down from generation to generation. Importantly, the tombstones bearing these symbols are often freedwomen or in one case an enslaved woman, perhaps an ornatrix; high status Roman women and/or their survivors apparently did not choose to associate them(selves) with this kind of imagery in death. Art from Pompeii and elsewhere gives us a sense of the ways in which objects were used—even if we need to account for the symbolic nature of some depictions—and particularly the role of vessels like basins and jugs/ewers in washing.
Chapter 4 (‘I componenti materiali del mundus muliebris’) grinds through items which are either part of the mundus muliebris or which might be associated with it. Much of the analysis in this chapter is a competent summary of finds from Pompeii considered within the framework of existing typologies. First and foremost here are the more than 100 mirrors which have been found in the town, which the author uses as a diagnostic tool to isolate and identify associated finds which could be examples of women’s toilet sets. A similar approach has recently been applied to gaming material from Pompeii with success, by using dice—the most reliable indicators of gaming—to tie otherwise ambiguous objects to ludic activities.[2] It remains to be seen whether a similar approach can be applied to the identification of gendered material. To illustrate potential hurdles, let us return to the mirrors. Most of the mirrors from Pompeii are simple and bear limited decoration, but among the more ornate specimens, one standout example has a handle in the shape of Hercules’ lionskin and club. Since mirrors are often explicitly connected with women in Latin literature, the author suggests this could be viewed as a reference to Omphale’s emasculating appropriation of Hercules’ attributes. However, there is also a tangible concern in our textual sources linking use of mirrors by men with fear of ‘feminization’ (as in, for example Seneca, Brev., 12.3), which, to her credit, Berg does acknowledge but does not examine in detail. This trope is difficult to interpret—does it simply reflect an unjustified moral panic among elite Roman men? Or are we dealing with disapproval of a very real and common practice? Returning to the mirror with herculean handle, could this also have been an expression of masculinity, albeit by a man who did not adhere to a form masculinity of which Seneca would have approved? Perhaps we will never know, but it is worth noting that the use of mirrors to identify “women’s” assemblages is not without its problems in all cases.
Much of the rest of this chapter runs through the sorts of things we might expect a priori to find in a toilet set. These include vessels for cosmetic and other powders and liquids (made of glass, alabaster, or copper alloy), though these might equally have been used by men, too, especially in an athletic setting, and the small cylindrical boxes commonly referred to as pyxides (but they can also be termed cistae or cistelae), which could be used for holding cosmetics, whether powdered or semi liquids, as well as smaller containers and jewels. Other items relate to care of the skin and hair—bowls for washing; tweezers for depilation; pumice stones and their holders for exfoliation; sponges (though these seldom survive); mixing palettes (coticulae) and trays; spoons, probes, spatulas, and rods (which, however, may also be also linked to medical practice); pins; combs, and so on and so forth. Also considered are several object classes—like razors or calamistra (hair curling implements)—which the author does not associate with women (razors) or which are not attested at Pompeii (calamistra). This discussion is well executed and valuable, for both generalists and specialists, though it is worth noting that it is here that the book’s origin as Berg’s 2010 doctoral thesis reveals itself the most—subsequent bibliography has been added, but not systematically.[3]
Chapter 5 (‘Mundus muliebris e lo spazio femminile’) explores female space in the ancient world in general and in Pompeii in particular. After reviewing texts which refer to the spaces used by Roman women in the home—which are decidedly less confined than in the Greek world—Berg critically evaluates the largely problematic earlier attempts to identify gendered domestic spaces at Pompeii (and elsewhere) on the basis of the architectural and literary record. Finding few spaces which can be convincingly identified as ‘feminine’, she suggests that this may be because the whole of domestic space was in some ways female-dominated. Her subsequent analysis of the findspots of mirrors and associated assemblages rightly concludes that these findspots reveal the places where they were stored rather than where they were used. Funerary contexts from elsewhere sometimes serve to reiterate a link between mirrors and the feminine, but the evidence for identifying the identifying graves as ‘female’ is not made explicit—this is particularly problematic when discussing the burial of a ‘bambina’ from Bonn (p. 202). How do we know the occupant of this tomb was a girl, given the difficulties of assigning sex to children? Additionally, while it is acknowledged that mirrors have been found in male graves, the implications of this are not fully explored. Here, we must ask—what do mirrors in male graves mean for us using mirrors as diagnostic tools to identify female assemblages?
Chapter 6 (‘Contesti pompeiani con mundus muliebris’) offers a reflexive view of the site formation processes and definitions used in the book, and which inform the material discussed in Chapter 4, so it might have been useful for this chapter to come a little earlier in the volume. We learn that the published assemblages were selected based on presence of mirrors and then categorised according to other finds present as “toilet,” “ablution,” or “ornament” sets; Berg also employs two categories of ambiguous objects or ones that cannot be identified with the mundus muliebris. All or most assemblages with mirrors contained other unrelated objects, which underlines that there is no ideal mundus. The most common finds associated with mirrors were unguentaria, then with skincare implements and then implements for getting things out of unguentaria; hair care accoutrements were more rarely found with mirrors. Most assemblages are small (under 10 items) and were often found in poorer houses. Other, larger sets were not, however, necessarily found within the largest domestic properties, and Berg suggests this may reflect the possibility that—just as with tombstones—the flashiest toilet sets were not owned and used by elite women. Assemblages containing mirrors were found in mixture of private and public rooms within houses, but as we saw earlier, this is probably more to do with storage spaces than where they were used.
The backbone of the book is the impressive catalogue (running to more than 200 pages), which sets out the mirrors of Pompeii and their associated assemblages in which the mirrors were found. This is a massive contribution to the corpus of published assemblages and is lavishly illustrated throughout. These data, many of which not otherwise published and are drawn directly from the giornali di scavo and/or the author’s work in the depots, will certainly be of great use to future scholars. This is followed by a brief concluding chapter, which restates the argument arrived in the previous chapters. The rest of the book comprises a separate catalogue of mirrors preserved in the archaeological depots of the Parco Archeologico di Pompei and a full bibliography.
As with many of the books produced by L’Erma di Bretschneider, this book is not cheap— the physical copy costs €305 for individuals and a hefty €510 for institutions. This price may deter some, though I would emphasise that this price is partly justified by the abundant colour illustrations. Overall, despite qualms around gendered objects which I have raised above—can we be sure that mirrors really are feminine objects?—this book is a useful contribution to our understanding of the material culture of Pompeii. It presents a huge quantity of data together in one place and draws in an admirable amount of comparanda. I am glad to have it on my bookshelf and I am sure I will make great use of it in future, as will many others.
Notes
[1] E.g. Swetnam-Burland, M., and B. Longfellow, eds. 2021. Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
[2] Pace, A. 2023. Ludite Pompeiani: Indagini sulla cultura materiale ludica della città antica. Sesto Fiorentino: All’Insegna del Giglio.
[3] For example, the discussion of spoons might have fruitfully incorporated Swift, E. 2014. “Design, Function and Use-Wear in Spoons: Reconstructing Everyday Roman Social Practice.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27, 203–237. doi:10.1017/S1047759414001214.