Fascination with ancient Egypt is a recurring theme in Western culture, and here Brian Curran uncovers its deep roots in the Italian Renaissance, which embraced not only classical art and literature but also a variety of other cultures that modern readers don’t tend to associate with early modern Italy. Patrons, artists, and spectators of the period were particularly drawn, Curran shows, to Egyptian antiquity and its artifacts, many of which found their way to Italy in Roman times and exerted an influence every bit as powerful as that of their more familiar Greek and Roman counterparts.

Curran vividly recreates this first wave of European Egyptomania with insightful interpretations of the period’s artistic and literary works. In doing so, he paints a colorful picture of a time in which early moderns made the first efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, and popes and princes erected pyramids and other Egyptianate marvels to commemorate their own authority. Demonstrating that the emergence of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of historical knowledge was one of Renaissance humanism’s great accomplishments, Curran’s peerless study will be required reading for Renaissance scholars and anyone interested in the treasures and legacy of ancient Egypt.

When historians study the women of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquity, they are generally dependent on ancient literature written by men. But women themselves did write and dictate. And only in their own private letters can we discover unmediated expression of their authentic experiences.

More than three hundred letters written in Greek and Egyptian by women in Egypt in the millennium from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest survive on papyrus and pottery. These letters were written by women from various walks of life and shed light on critical social aspects of life in Egypt after the pharaohs. Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore collect the best preserved of these letters in translation and set them in their paleographic, linguistic, social, and economic contexts. As a result, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800, provides a sense that these women's habits, interests, and means of expression were a product more of their social and economic standing than of specifically gender-related concerns or behavior.

Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800, takes the reader through theoretical discussions about the handwriting and language of the letters, the education and culture of the writers, and the writers' everyday concerns and occupations, as well as comparing these letters to similar letters from later historical periods. For each letter, discussion focuses on handwriting, language, and content; in addition, numerous illustrations help the reader to see the variety of handwritings. Most of this material has never been available in English translation before, and the letters have never previously been considered as a single body of material.