12-06-2012, 05:05 PM
Quote:An awful lot of writing on Roman wives cites the same half dozen inscriptions about women weaving. The trouble is that such inscriptions are very rare before 300 CE, and the literary evidence is not so good. My reading in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum did not turn up a lot of parallels ...Alexandra Croom discusses women and woolworking to some degree, citing pictorial evidence on tombstones (rather than in the epitaph) and grave goods across earlier periods. In terms of literary evidence, there's Columella's description of the farmwife's duties, which include making cloth on rainy days (On Farming, 12.3.6) and a reference by Pliny to women cursing harvests by walking along roads and spinning at the same time (NH 28.5.28 - hope that reference is right). Croom does present these as evidence for spinning rather than weaving however, and argues herself that it was only the former that was restricted to women. (I'm unaware of any reference, visual or textual, to men spinning in the Roman world.)
