Embedded/Glossed Readings: Women who Wrote in Ancient Greek

One of the projects I’m committing to this summer is creating some resources for those who would like to read and/or introduce to students Ancient Greek written by women. In general, resources that make authentic Greek texts accessible are few and far between, even fewer when it comes to texts written by women.

So, every week until the end of August, I plan to post a short embedded reading with Oerberg-style glosses introducing a poem, letter, or section of a longer work written in Greek by a woman. Many of these works will be from the Renaissance/Early Modern period (as this is the period my research focuses on), but some will be from Medieval/Classical writers. Each time I post a reading, I’ll make a blog post here and post the resource on my Embedded Readings page. If I end up continuing past August, I may charge a bit for additional resources/packets of what I’ve created, but for now, they are free.

For this first week, I’ve chosen a poem by Olympia Fulvia Morata, a 16th century Italian scholar and writer of Latin and Ancient Greek. The poem centers themes about the expectations of womanhood and diverging from those expectations. I’d like to thank Andrew Morehouse for giving me some guidance on how to create an embedded reading, and AnnMarie Patterson for editing.

I have created two versions, one with Ancient Greek glosses only, and one that combines Latin and Ancient Greek glosses. There are brief instructions on how to use the resource at the bottom of each document.

You can download the Greek one here, and the Latin/Greek one here.