Building women's social capital in late antique Egypt : business owners and civic administrators

Abstract

Women as a social category have been the subject of numerous recent studies considering their lived experience in the Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean. However, their representation in the narrative sources continues to shape modern reconstructions of women’s agency within their social and economic contexts, often with unsatisfactory results. Building off the twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s model of social capital, this article will use the documentary papyri from Egypt to suggest a model in which the agency of individual women can be viewed and incorporated into micro-historical narratives of Late Antique women’s lived experience.