Abstract

This paper seeks to unveil the agency of widows in late antiquity beyond prevailing limits of asceticism and euergetism. Based on a Bourdieu’ian field-analysis this approach seeks to illustrate that some widows used their recently achieved liberty not for withdrawing from society, i.e. living an ascetic life among their peers, praying all night and day. They used their liberty to actively engage within this society, within the elite in particular, instead. In so doing, these (wealthy) widows constructed, contested, and negotiated power relations by appropriating and nuancing communication strategies of allegedly male domains of practice, i. e. the daily business of the household. These widows, strictly speaking, set up new power relations with which they started negotiating and maintaining, indeed creating new field positions, through which new interactions occurred that rendered her agency. An exemplary context in this respect is that of inheritance hunting in the widows’ households.