There's an interesting sociology in trying to figure out how a specific set of paper topics get collected together into a publication. Appended onto this collection of studies relating to singles in the ancient world, we get two papers with "comparative material" that I find hard to integrate into an overall purpose. While this paper on singlewomen in late medieval Antwerp and Bruges touches on some parallels with, for example, the position of women in Roman and Coptic Egypt, it feels like the reader is left to draw her own conclusions about how the topics speak to each other. It almost feels like there was a conversation along the lines of, "I'm putting together a volume of papers on singlewomen in the classical world and I'd really like to have a paper from you." "Um...can't manage that, but how about the Low Countries a millennium later?" Goodness knows, I've be present for similar conversations.
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