Showing results by author "Sarah Ruden" in All Categories

The dangerous belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to "traditional" values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West. How did such damaging ideas arise? In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold.

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct the life of Rome’s greatest poet.

On March 7, 203, in the amphitheater at Carthage, Vibia Perpetua was one of five Christians who met their deaths after refusing to venerate Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his son. Perpetua stood out from the others, and in fact from all the other martyrs of her era and before: she was an aristocratic married woman with an infant son, and she is the first female prose author whose work survives. Offering a new translation of Perpetua's prison diary and situating the life behind it within the late Roman Empire, Sarah Ruden tells the story of Perpetua's feat of self‑invention as a martyr.