Sappho Bowman, L. (2004). The "Women's Tradition" Annotated Bibliography

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Sappho

Bowman, L. (2004). The "women's tradition" in Greek poetry. Phoenix 58 (1), 1-27.

Bowman -- a Greek scholar at the University of Victoria in Canada, who has published on issues of women in antiquity -- addresses the question of Sappho as a specifically female poet, and how gender affects her place in the "tradition" of Greek poetry. Bowman approaches the issue from two angles. She asks first whether there was a specific female oral tradition of Greek poetry (in terms of songs sung by women and transmitted from generation to generation), and secondly in terms of a written literary tradition (including not just Sappho but those other female poets whose work survives from ancient Greece in fragmentary form, such as Corinna, Praxilla, and Nossis). Bowman notes that a female oral tradition is historically likely, based on comparable societies, but that no actual evidence exists to attest to it. As for a female literary tradition, some evidence -- such as the epitaph of the Greek woman poet Nossis, which mentions Sappho as an illustrious precursor -- suggests that there is some evidence to consider this. It is clear that Sappho and other female poets were literate and were widely read in the work of their poetic precursors (male or female). An Alexandrian Greek epigram lists nine women poets who were thought to be the equal of Homer, comparing them to the nine Muses: Sappho's name is prominent in it.

Although Bowman's argument is informed by modern feminism, she has good reason for considering these questions in light of the almost total gender segregation which existed in Ancient Greek society -- there were only three ways in which it was socially acceptable for a woman to perform poetry in public (as part of a choir of virgins for a public festival; or as a married woman either singing a song of lament for the dead, or composing a short poem as a dedication or funerary inscription).

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Therefore the question seems open of whether Sappho's work was written for an exclusively female audience when originally performed or sung (as opposed to the more gender-neutral question of what sort of audience it might have as written literature). Bowman notes that Sappho's poems frequently use the feminine form of address, which is grammatically specific for a female audience, and finds it suggestive that the majority of extant work by Sappho and the other Ancient Greek woman poets could fit into the three categories in which female poetic recitation was socially acceptable -- suggesting that the majority of Sappho's work may have been written for public performance by an all-female chorus. Bowman's article is useful for the wealth of historic detail regarding Sappho's work, and the work of other female poets in Ancient Greece. Her conclusions are tentative, but she offers….....

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