February - 2026

In Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024, 410p., $130.55), Renske Janssen offers a comparative analysis of the legal treatment of marginalized religious cults and practices by the Roman Empire, placing private divinatory practices, Judaism, and Christianity in perspective. The author understands laws as a means of interpreting the motivations of the individuals who establish them, as well as the broader perceptions of the societies they regulate, highlighting how marginalized religions challenge the limits of what is politically and socially acceptable. The selection of the practices and cults compared is justified by the abundance of legal records about them that we have access to, allowing the identification, beyond their differences, of patterns in their interactions with the political-religious authorities in the first centuries of the Roman Empire.

Age, Gender and Status in Macedonian Society, 550-300 BCE, Intersectional Approaches to Mortuary Archaeology (Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 328p., R$182.34) is a study by Elina Salminem on the burials of children, women, and men in Macedonia from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. Applying an intersectional approach to the material evidence, the author seeks to understand aspects of the lives of the people whose remains are documented, their mortuary practices and references to an afterlife, as well as the hierarchical and status differences between ordinary people and elites that these practices express. The author thus sheds light on the lower strata of Macedonian society, traditionally obscured by the emphasis placed by scholars on its elites, highlighting the benefits of an intersectional approach for this purpose.