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<em>The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the places where they worked in the city, and their everyday lives on the shop floor and beyond.
Through focusing on the lower segments of society, Flohr uses everyday work as the major organizing principle of the narrative: the volume discusses the decisions taken by those responsible for the organization of work, and how these decisions subsequently had an impact on the social lives of people carrying out the work. It emphasizes how socio-economic differences between cities resulted in fundamentally different working lives for many of their people, and that not only were economic activities shaped by Roman society, they in turn played a key role in shaping it.
Using an in-depth and qualitative analysis of material remains related to economic activities, with a combined study of epigraphic and literary records, this volume portrays an insightful view of the socio-economic history of urban communities in the Roman world.
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O X F O R D S T U D I E S O N TH E RO M A N E C O N O M Y General Editors ALAN BOWMAN
ANDREW WILSON
OXFORD STU DIES ON THE ROMAN ECONOMY This innovative monograph series reflects a vigorous revival of interest in the ancient economy, focusing on the Mediterranean world under Roman rule (c.100 bc to ad 350). Carefully quantified archaeological and documentary data will be integrated to help ancient historians, economic historians, and archaeologists think about economic behaviour collectively rather than from separate perspectives. The volumes will include a substantial comparative element and thus be of interest to historians of other periods and places.
The World of the Fullo Work, Economy, and Society in Roman Italy
MIKO FLOHR
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Miko Flohr 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–965935–7 Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Preface This monograph is not an attempt to write a definitive history of fulling in Roman Italy, nor does it aim to provide a complete and detailed overview of all the evidence available. Rather, the idea behind this book was to give the textual and material evidence for fulling from Roman Italy a clear place in the scholarly debate about the socioeconomic history of urban societies in the Roman world and to use it to add some new perspectives to the history of the Italian peninsula in the first centuries of our era, and to add to our insigh