September - 2026

In O crime do adultério e a violência contra as mulheres na Roma antiga e no Brasil atual (Editora 7Letras and FAPERJ, 2025, 200 pages, R$79), Sarah Fernandes Lino de Azevedo constructs a critical analysis regarding the control of the body, female sexuality, and gender-based violence. Proceeding from the premise that the criminalization of adultery was never merely a moral or legal issue, but rather served as a mechanism for dominating the female body, the work explores the origins of this asymmetry in the early days of Roman law. By analyzing the role of the Roman patriarch in antiquity, the author demonstrates how the punitive severity directed at women, contrasted with the permissiveness regarding male infidelity, established principles that still resonate within Brazilian criminal law and culture. By linking the Roman past to the alarming rates of femicide and so-called "crimes of passion" in Brazil, the book warns that this legacy continues to have brutal consequences. 

In Living Precariously in the Roman World: A Social Archaeology of Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2026, 272 pages, $45), Astrid Van Oyen proposes a social archaeology of inequality in the Roman Empire, shifting the focus away from broad macroeconomic models and abstract categories to examine the lived experiences and survival tactics of vulnerable populations. Drawing on the concept of "precarity," the author utilizes archaeological data to analyze the lives of subaltern groups and those on the margins of the elite: potters attempting to innovate without sufficient capital, blacksmiths exposed to constant fire hazards, migrant mine workers, and enslaved women negotiating affection and memory through modest funerary monuments. By integrating approaches from the Material Turn, feminist studies, and development economics, the work breaks down the divide between the social and the economic, demonstrating how material culture and objects actively shape identities, temporal strategies, senses of place, and community bonds.