Dissertation

Women and Wool Working in the Roman Empire

Dr. Morgan A Lemmer Webber, University of Wisconsin Madison, Spring 2021

Abstract

This dissertation looks at women’s roles in textile production in the Roman Empire, from the first through third centuries C.E., utilizing archaeological, epigraphic, literary, administrative, and visual evidence. The sites of Karanis, Trier, and Ephesus are used as case studies to focus analysis alongside domestic, commercial, and performative lines. Scholars have often viewed the domestic and commercial divide in textile production along gendered lines, associating domestic production with women in the context of the ideal of feminine virtue and commercial production with men working in centralized production centers. This study uses the cottage industry model to explore the role of women’s labor in the Roman textile industry, exploring the links between domestic production and commercial distribution.

License

Dissertation documents and text are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license by Morgan Lemmer-Webber 2021.

Links to Full Text

Source

My dissertation is done in Scribble, which is a combination programming and markdup language built on top of Racket. The non-scribble Racket files are released under Apache v2.

You can browse the source files or even check out and compile the dissertation yourself by checking it out via git and git-annex:

$ git clone https://mlemmer.org/git/dissertation/.git/
$ cd dissertation
$ git-annex init
$ git-annex sync

From there you can pull down binary files, eg:

$ git-annex get WeavingTutorial.odt

Note a few things:

The repository is kind of a mess. I hope to clean it up eventually.
Christine did a lot of the work on the technical tooling including the ODT exporter, but the text is all me. However there are some commits where Christine committed on my behalf because I had a migraine and she was typing as I dictated. Just be aware of that (and thanks Christine)!
Note that I was fairly new to both git and git-annex when we started this. Because of that, I mostly was letting git-annex assistant commit files on my behalf. Therefore, many of the commit messages from me are automated and aren't that helpful. These days I use Emacs and Magit to manage git repositories (I didn't know Emacs at the time, so I was using DrRacket, which is a good place to start but a bit more limited). If I were to do it over I'd probably start there first.
I still need to copy up a bunch of the images and some of the other binary files to the publicly hosted git-annex repo. It's a bit complicated because I dumped a bunch of stuff in here, and not all of it are files I'm legally allowed to publish. I have to sort that out... hopefully soon.