Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily

Name: Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily
Price: 64.95 AUD
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ISBN: 9781009691611

Sofia Bianchi Mancini (Universität Erfurt, Germany)

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English

Cambridge University Press
31 August 2026

History; Ancient history: to c 500 CE; Politics & government; Legal history

Sicilian curse practices have often been misread through Athenocentric paradigms. This book repositions Sicily at the centre of inquiry, offering the first holistic analysis of legal curse tablets (defixiones iudiciariae) from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with particular focus on Selinous, Akragas and Kamarina. Moving beyond isolated textual readings, it situates these inscriptions within the legal, social and political environments that shaped their production. The study provides new editions and drawings of key tablets – revisited after decades of neglect – while addressing palaeographic, chronological and editorial issues. For the first time, it also assembles a complete set of images of all major examples, making them fully accessible. By embedding curses within civic life and predominantly elite rivalries, it reveals them as 'paralegal' instruments in the renegotiation of status, authority and power. Sicilian legal curses thus emerge as independent from, rather than appendices to, their better-known Attic and Athenian counterparts.

By: Sofia Bianchi Mancini (Universität Erfurt Germany)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781009691611
ISBN 10: 1009691619
Pages: 440
Publication Date: 31 August 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Sofia Bianchi Mancini is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies and co-PI of the SFB TRR 294 sub-project A01, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She is also the editor of One Cult, Multiple Cultures (with L. Pérez Yarza, and J. Herrera Rando, 2025) and of Reaching the Superhuman (with C. Di Serio and S. Fogliazza, 2025), and author of Epica antica (with J. Rüpke, 2025).