Magie Lecture: Entrepreneuring Women: The spaces of textile manufacture in classical Greek cities

Textile production was a vital part of classical Greek economies, predominantly managed and carried out by women. Recent scholarship, shaped by New Institutional Economics, suggests a division of labor where men wove luxury textiles in workshops for the market, while women created basic textiles at home for domestic use. However, this view, based largely on literary sources, marginalizes women’s contributions and overlooks substantial archaeological evidence. The material record shows that most textiles, including high-quality items, were produced by women in household settings, as indicated by the widespread presence of textile tools in residential spaces and the absence of specialized workshops.

About the Speaker:

Lin Foxhall is Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Liverpool and. She also serves as Editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (Cambridge University Press). Previously she was Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at Liverpool and led the University-wide Heritage Research Theme, Professor of Greek Archaeology and History at the University of Leicester, and Head of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, where she played a major part in leading the team that discovered the body of King Richard III. She has held posts at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and University College London, and Visiting Professorships in Germany, Denmark and the USA. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Liverpool.

An active field archaeologist, she has led and participated in collaborative research projects in Greece and Southern Italy, and has written extensively on agriculture, rural economies, landscapes, land use, material culture and gender in the ancient Mediterranean, and especially the Greek world, mostly between the Bronze Age and Classical periods.

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