July - 2026

Ciudadanas (Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2024, 48 pages, €15.50), by Enrique García Riaza, draws on literary, epigraphic, and numismatic sources, as well as archaeological remains, particularly from domestic spaces, to examine the status and political agency of women within provincial and allied communities during the Roman expansion across the western Mediterranean. The author analyzes dynamics of integration and strategies of female representation to argue that women did not merely inhabit the domestic sphere but acted as active agents in diplomacy, political mediation, and the consolidation of civic alliances. By engaging with the legal system, patronage networks, and public cults, these women played a pivotal role in redefining local identities, maintaining social cohesion in the face of Roman power, and building the interpersonal networks that shaped institutional relations during the Republican period and the Early Empire. 

In Living at the Margins: African Peasants in an Age of Extremes, 300–900 CE (2025, Anton Hiersemann Verlag, 361 pages, €164), Paolo Tedesco examines the organization and exploitation of African peasant labor during the Late Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine periods. Tedesco focuses primarily on epigraphic data and literary sources, contextualizing the relationships between peasants and landowners through a case study of the fundus Tuletianus, a large agricultural estate in Numidia that left behind significant epigraphic documentation (the Albertini Tablets). The author demonstrates the transformations in these relationships as well as the continuity of rural production and trade between Africa and the Mediterranean from the 4th to the 8th century CE. His approach seeks to shed light on the diverse actors involved in rural production, distinct groups of peasants, tenant farmers, and free and enslaved laborers, and their interactions with wealthy landowners.