In my previous post on beguines I touched on their involvement in the medical field.  After textile work, these may have been the second most common jobs for beguines to have held.  Some of this likely had to do with the association of femininity with nursing.  This, however, was not all.  Such work also held strong religious significance for women who had dedicated their lives to service.

Perhaps the reason for this was the emphasis on caring for the sick and the poor that dominated the new religious movements of the 12th and 13th centuries. By serving the sick, the poor, and the outcast, the beguines fulfilled their religious duty in addition to supporting themselves.  Several beguinages were founded specifically as hospitals and shelters for the poor* or evolved out of such institutions as women attached themselves permanently to them.  Others served as leper houses, caring for those perpetual outcasts of society.  Many of them took St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a widow known for her care of the sick and lepers, as their patron.

It is probable that some beguines at least had medical training, especially but not only among those who worked with lepers, though little to no information survives on what learning they might have had.  The repetition in some beguinages of rules stating that their members were forbidden from working as midwives makes it likely that some were trained to do just that.

This emphasis on care for the sick led to beguines also becoming associated with death and dying as well.  They nursed the sick and the elderly and as a result confronted death regularly.  As a result, their prayers were considered especially effective in helping the both the sick and the souls of the dead.  A common custom in the Low Countries at this time was to leave money in one’s will for a certain number of beguines to sing prayers and psalms over one’s dead body in the hope that it would help one’s soul on the way to heaven.  In their work and in their religious duties, beguines often found themselves at the boundaries between life and death, heaven and humanity.


*The two being somewhat the same thing at this time.

Sources/Further Reading:
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Jewell, Helen M. Women in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe 1200-1550. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Flemish Beguinages - UNESCO
Beguines and Beghards - Wikipedia
_

Hestia, goddess of the hearth, was simultaneously one of the most ubiquitously worshiped gods and one of the least spoken about.  She was both the eldest and the youngest of the Olympians, having been both first born and first swallowed by Chronos, making her the last to be regurgitated.  One of the three major virginal goddesses, she is the only one who probably didn’t evolve from a mother goddess and thus the only one who has always been interpreted as never having taken a lover.*  Both Apollo and Poseidon asked for her hand and were both refused as Hestia swore to remain a maiden forever.  There was some confusion for a time over whether she or Dionysos was the twelfth Olympian.

The worship of Hestia was less flashy than that of the other major gods.  She had few temples dedicated specifically to her.  Pausanias tells us of two: one at Hermione and a sanctuary dedicated to her at Sparta.  She seems to have had no major festival*** and was more often depicted as a flame or a hearth fire than in human form.

Hestia and Demeter on a vase.  Hestia is veiled.
[Detail of Hestia & Demeter on a kylix vase, 5th century BCE, Antikenmuseum, Berlin]
[Source: Theoi.com]

None of this means she was unimportant or received few sacrifices.  Prometheus may have given humans fire, but Hestia was its preserver, its tamer.  Without her there could be no feasts, no food, no government.  Her major temples were the hearth fires of each city’s major civic building.***  Allowing one of these fires to go out was a major failure of one’s duty to the community.  Her minor temples were the hearth fires of every household.  As a result, she also governed architecture.  She received the first (often slightly cheaper) portion of any sacrifice made to any god and the first and last libation at any banquet.

Little is known about Hestia’s priesthood.  The only major example we have is an inscription in praise of the goddess by a priestess of Hera who spent some time as chief priestess of Hestia at Ephesus.  She praises Hestia as the preserver of fire without whom the gods neither eat nor drink.  There is some reference to the “Hestia of the City” of Sparta, whether that was a ceremonial position or an actual priesthood remains in doubt.  In Roman times she may have been a member of the city assembly.

Hestia may have been one of the quieter goddesses in myth, but she was also the most widely worshiped, for none could do without her.


*The other two, Artemis and Athena, probably did and in their early incarnations were likely interpreted as virgins not because they never took lovers, but because they never submitted to monogamous marriage.  This, however, was soon erased and they were worshiped as virgin goddesses in the current sense of the word.
**Unlike her Roman counterpart Vesta.
***The Acropolis at Athens, for example was dedicated to Zeus as chief of the gods, Athena as protector of the city, and Hestia.

Sources/Further Reading:
Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite - Perseus
Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia - Perseus
Homeric Hymn 29 to Hestia and Hermes - Perseus
Inscr. Ephesus 1062 G, found in Lefkowitz & Fant no. 24 (Inscription by priestess of Hestia, not available online)
Pomeroy, Sarah B.  Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995._
Hestia - Theoi.com
Hestia - Wikipedia

Marguerite la Porete (d. 1310) was a beguine, mystic, and author whose views on the union of the soul with God got her accused of heresy, condemned, and burned at the stake. Her execution was the first institutional action taken against the beguine movement.

The only real sources we have on Marguerite’s life and thoughts are her trial records and her book.  Like Hadewijch, she may have been from a middle-class or wealthier family, though considering literacy rates among urban beguines, the evidence for this is less strong.  It is likely that she lived in or near Cambrai, perhaps in the court beguinage there, perhaps on her own.  It is also possible that she took up the wandering life for a time, an unusual but not unheard of choice for a beguine.

Sometime between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book The Mirror of the Simple Souls as heretical and ordered it burned.*  Marguerite, however, refused to be cowed.  Her book was hugely popular and rather than recant, she continued to publically promote her work.  She also submitted it to churchmen and scholars John of Quaregnon, Franco of Villers, and Godfrey of Fontaines,** all of whom approved it.  She may also have collected a small community of supporters around her

This, however, did not prevent her arrest in 1308.  She and a male follower, the beghard Guiard of Cressonessart were put on trial for heresy in Paris.  Guiard eventually recanted.  Marguerite did not.  A group of 21 theologians found her book definitively heretical, largely on the basis of its assertion that a soul could become one with God (the word she uses is “annihilated”), at which point it could not sin and cared neither for virtues nor the gifts of God.  It didn’t help that she had written it in Old French, not Latin, running counter to standard practice of the time.

In 1310, another commission of lawyers found that she should be judged as a relapsed heretic, not a first-time offender.  She was burned at the stake that same year.  Her book, popular even after its condemnation, remained so after her death.  It has since been accepted as canonical and Marguerite herself is numbered among the great beguine mystics.


*The Mirror of the Simple Souls is sometimes held to be a primary source on the Heresy of the Free Spirit, though whether she herself would have made that connection is unknown.
**A Franciscan, a Cistercian, and a highly respected Master of Theology at the University of Paris.

Sources/Further Reading:
The Trial of Marguerite Porete - University of North Carolina Greensboro
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast, Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Marguerite Porete - Wikipedia

In 216 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal dealt the Romans a crushing defeat at the Battle of Cannae.  The Romans were scrambling for resources, especially food, troops, and the money to pay for both.  The next year, at the urging of Tribune Gaius Oppius, they instituted a law limiting the amount of gold women could own (half an ounce) and forbidding them from wearing purple clothing or riding in carriages within a mile of Rome or in any town except for religious purposes.  The state took the gold women were denied and used it to pay for what it needed.

When the war ended, the State paid back the money it owed and men began to display their wealth once more.  The Oppian Law, however, remained in effect, restricting women’s wealth and their display of it.  In 195 BCE, twenty years after the law had originally been passed, the wealthier women of Rome had finally had enough.  They flooded into the streets to protest, supported by tribunes of the plebs Marcus Fundanius and Lucius Valerius who introduced a motion to repeal the law.

Still a cranky-looking old man.
[Bust assumed to be Cato the Elder, 2nd century BCE, source: Wikimedia Commons]

They faced heavy opposition, especially from tribunes Marcus and Publius Junius Brutus and consul Cato the Elder.  Livy tells us* of the argument’s made.  Cato claimed that repeal would lead to women spending far too extravagantly in an attempt to rival each other, running roughshod over their husbands and crippling Roman society.  He used as part of his evidence the fact that women were protesting this law publically, something unheard of, according to him.  His fellow consul, Lucius Valerius Flaccus responded that the Oppian Law did nothing to inhibit rivalry between women and questioned why only women should be denied the fruits of peace, when they were already denied magistracies, priesthoods, or other offices and had only elegance and finery to take pride in.**  Neither side won out, and it was only when the women besieged the doors of the Brutuses that the Lex Oppia was finally repealed.

It is important to remember that this law exclusively affected relatively wealthy women.  Most Roman women probably didn’t care.  I would also like to highlight something Livy notes only in passing: the men’s speeches in the senate changed nothing.  It was the women’s actions, outside the proper ways of doing things perhaps, that brought about the repeal.

*It must be remembered that everything Livy wrote had a political purpose.  The exact contents of the speeches he records must be taken with a grain (or possibly a whole handful) of salt due not only to his own agenda, but also to the fact that he was writing a century after any of this happened.

**Go read the speeches themselves.  They’re worth it.  And they’re short.

Sources/Further Reading:
Livy, History of Rome 34.1 - Diotima
Livy, History of Rome 24.18, 34.1-8 - Titus Livius: History of Rome
Pomeroy, Sarah B.  Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995.
Lex Oppia - Wikipedia

One of the defining characteristics of the medieval beguine movement was that its members worked for a living, unlike any other group of religious women at the time.*  I have talked a little bit about women’s work in the cities of northwestern Europe, but the work beguines did and the way they thought about it deserves special consideration.

While beguines could be found doing nearly any kind of job open to women, there was a strong pull towards work they could do as a community.  Most beguines living in court beguinages, and many living in convents as well, found employment in the textile industry.  They carded, cut, and spun wool and flax, and washed, dyed, and napped finished cloth, all of which allowed them to congregate in the courtyards of their beguinage and work in community with each other.

Many beguines worked in hospitals run either by the city they lived in or by their beguinage, caring for the sick and the poor.  Many, though not all of these hospitals were at least partially charitable institutions, allowing beguines to not only support themselves, but also to put into practice spiritual ideals that were spreading rapidly through Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries.**  Teaching was considered another way of taking those spiritual ideals into one’s own hands and putting them into practice, and as such was also a common occupation.

These may have been the most popular jobs among beguines, but they were nowhere near the only ones.  Some of them were craftswomen or sold work produced by other members of their community.  Others rented out their property and lived off the income.  They tended, however, to cluster in occupations at the lower end of the economic scale, usually not having access to training or resources for anything else.  Many found employment in domestic service, others sold their labor by the day to various craftsmen, herded animals, or ran small farms.

Work was, for beguines, a spiritual ideal in and of itself.  The story of Mary and Martha from Luke 10:38-42 was often referenced in relation to the beguines.  They strove to reach and balance the ideals represented by both women, the contemplative (Mary) and the active (Martha), where previous thought had emphasized mostly the former.


*Religious not in the sense of having a religion but rather in the sense of living according to under a Rule approved by religious rules and formally promising oneself to poverty, chastity, and obedience to one’s superiors within the Church.  The majority of religious women at this time (i.e. nuns and recluses) lived mostly on the income from lands donated to their communities or on donations from pious laypeople.
**Indeed, the very formation of the beguine movement was tied to this increased interest in individual access to religion and in carrying out the spiritual ideals of humility and charity, which some argued were not being followed by the greater monasteries and the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy.

Sources/Further Reading:
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Jewell, Helen M. Women in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe 1200-1550. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Beguines and Beghards - Wikipedia

My ancestors and brothers were kings of Sparta
I, Cynisca, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses
erected this statue.  I declare that I am the only woman
in all of Greece to have won this crown.

-Inscription* found at the base of the statue of Cynisca in Olympia

Cynisca (born c. 440 BCE) was the first woman to win at the ancient Olympic games.  Her four-horse chariot team won twice, first in 396 and then again four years later in 392. It is unlikely, however, that she even saw her victories happen as women were barred from even entering the stadium.

She was the daughter of Archidamus II, king of Sparta, and his wife Eupolia and the sister of King Agesilaus II.  Her mother’s name, Eupolia, means “well-horsed,” perhaps showing where she got her interest in horses from.  Her own name, Cynisca, means “female hound.”

We know nothing of her life until her victory.  She was not able to participate in the Games for much of her life as the Elians had barred the Spartans from Olympia in 420.  It was only after the Peloponnesian war when Sparta attacked Elis and gained access to the city once more.  Cynisca entered her horses into the games at the first possible opportunity in 396, at which point she would have been in her fifties.

Like other Olympic victors in chariot racing, Cynisca did not drive her team herself, but employed a jockey.  Unlike many other victors, she probably did not even see her own victory.  She did, however, train her horses herself and was encouraged to enter the Games by her brother, though what his motives were remains in doubt.  Plutarch and Xenophon both claim it was in an attempt to discredit the sport.  Modern scholars find this explanation dubious.

In honor of her victory, the sculptor Apelles created a sculpture of Cynisca for the sanctuary at Olympia, probably commissioned by the horsewoman herself.  The inscription at its base (see above) is thought to have been written by the woman herself.  She was also commemorated with a hero shrine in Sparta.

Though she was the first, she would not be the only woman to win the Olympic crown.  Female victors were not common, but a few women did follow in Cyisca’s hooftracks.

*The text in Greek can be found here.

Sources/Further Reading:
Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.8.1-3, 3.15, 6.1.6 - Perseus
Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus 20.1 - Perseus
Xenophon, Agesilaus 9 - Perseus
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Spartan Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Cynisca - Women Make History
Cynisca - Wikipedia

The issue of consanguinity or incest is one that concerned medieval legalists greatly, garnering at least as much attention as the issues of consent and clandestine unions.  What I speak of here is not actually incest by modern definitions, as it mostly concerns no relationships closer than third-cousins.  There is also a difference between consanguinity, having to do specifically with a blood relationship, and incest, having to do with relationships by blood, marriage, adoption, or the baptismal font.

Roman law prohibited marriages between close kin, whether by blood and by marriage, which the Christian emperors of the 4th and 5th centuries expanded upon.  None of these laws, however, went as far as legalists in later centuries would.  The Responsa Gregorii, attributed to Pope Gregory I, prohibited marriage to anyone within seven degrees of kinship.  In other words, one couldn’t marry anyone closer than one’s seventh cousin.*  It also forbade intercourse (or marriage) with the blood kin of one’s (former) spouse.  Merovingian law shared these prohibitions, but took things a step farther, banning marriage between godparents and any member of their godchild’s family as well. 

By the 11th and 12th centuries, powerful nobles were using these restrictions as an excuse to dissolve marriages that they wanted out of for other reasons.  Possibly the best-known example of this is the divorce of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France upon the “discovery” that they were cousins.**  By this point many Church officials were arguing against the dissolution of such marriages, but the camp that said incest was a valid reason to divorce remained strong.  In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council put an end to this by reducing the forbidden degree of kinship from seven to four.

Many members of the lower classes, meanwhile, paid as much attention to these laws and opinions as they did the ones regarding clandestine marriage that is, not much.  There are legal cases that show they were aware of the laws, but in many places they seem only to have paid attention when it suited them.  For all that the Church tried to impose some control over people of all classes of society through marriage law, members of the laity continued to use the law to their own benefit.


*To give some idea of what this means, if everyone had precisely two offspring, a person would have 64 sixth cousins, 32 fifth cousins, 16 fourth cousins, 8 third cousins, 4 second cousins, and 2 first cousins, or 126 cousins within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity.  And this isn't even including one’s cousins at one or two degrees of removal (e.g. the child of one’s third cousin is one’s third cousin once removed), which I am not taking the time to count at the moment.
**Third cousins once removed, to be specific.  They had actually known for several years by this point and it seems that Eleanor had wanted out of the marriage for about as long.  Louis finally gave in because Eleanor had failed to produce a son.  The pair of them promptly remarried with people even more closely related to them.

Sources/Further Reading:
Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Brundage, James A. "The Canon Law of Divorce in the Mid-Twelfth Century: Lousi VII C. Eleanor of Aquitaine." In Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, 213-221. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Marriage and Divorce - Consistory Database
Marriage Canons in The Decretum of Gratian - Catholic University of America

Maps.  Maps are cool.
[Map locating Chalkidiki in Greece, source: Wikimedia Commons]
[Map of Ancient Chalkidiki, 1923, source: Wikimedia Commons]

One of the major archaeological sources in the study of Ancient Greek domestic architecture (houses, in other words) is the ruins of Olynthos, a city of Chalkidiki in northeastern Greece.  It seems an odd place to have such prominence, being so far from any of the major cities, but its history gives it numerous advantages as a source.

Unfortunately, this map doesn't show the street plan of the South Hill.
[Map of Olynthos in Nevett, Lisa C. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.]

The southwestern part of Olynthos grew organically; its haphazard street plan shows its origins.  The rest of the city, however, shows far more planning and far more regularity.  In 432 BCE the inhabitants of several towns in the region banded together and moved to Olynthos for protection a few years before the Peloponnesian War.  Houses had to be built quickly in order to shelter the city’s new inhabitants.  Just under a century later, Phillip II of Macedon conquered the city, razed it to the ground, and sold those inhabitants he caught into slavery.  Small portions of the city were briefly resettled, but the rest was totally abandoned.

As a result of the city’s rapid expansion, all of the houses in the newer part of the city seem to have been based on the same basic plan, giving us some idea of what was commonly accepted as typical layout of a Greek house, though many people took the opportunity to alter their houses to suit their own purposes.  The city’s rapid fall and abandonment meant that though the walls do not survive, their foundations do, giving us the layout of at least the ground floor.*  It also meant that many personal and practical items were left near where people used or stored them, giving us some idea of what people actually did in various parts of the house.

There are, however, several problems with Olynthos as a source.  Its rapid fall also means that many people would have tried to hide valuable or extremely personal items while others simply ran off with them.  Additionally, the city is in the northeast, far from other important cities in Greece, and the very small number of ancient houses uncovered elsewhere makes it hard to know what regional differences there might have been.


*While we cannot know what any upper floors would have looked like, stair bases can tell us which houses had another floor and where the stairs leading up to it would have been.

Sources/Further Reading:
Nevett, Lisa C. “Gender Relations in the Classical Greek Household: The Archaeological Evidence.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 90 (1995): 363-381.
Nevett, Lisa C. House and Society in the Ancient Greek World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Olynthos - Wikipedia
_

Note: To avoid confusion, I will be referring here to Empress Matilda simply as “Matilda” or “the Empress.”  Matilda of Boulogne will be known as “Matilda of Boulogne” or “the Queen.”

There are few good contemporary images of her, so have one from a few centuries later.
[Empress Matilda, from "History of England" by the monks of St. Albans, 15th century]
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Empress Matilda (1102-1167), was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror and chosen successor to his son, Henry I.  She was betrothed to the future Holy Roman Emperor Henry V and crowned Queen of the Romans at age 8.  The couple married four years later.

Matilda spent the next 11 years learning statecraft and assisting her husband.  She acted as his regent in Italy for several years and probably participated in the Council of Worms in 1122.**  She was crowned Holy Roman Empress in 1117 by Maurice Bourdin.***  The couple had no children and when the Emperor died in 1125, the Empress returned to her father.

Five years earlier, her only legitimate brother William had died, leaving Henry I without a male heir.  In 1127 Matilda’s father persuaded her to marry Geoffrey of Anjou, both in the hopes that the union would give him an heir and in order to secure the border between Normandy and Anjou.  Unfortunately, Matilda and Geoffrey got on badly.  Even so, their first son was born in 1133.

Henry required his nobles to swear loyalty to Matilda as his heir.  The nobles themselves were displeased with the idea, relations with Anjou having been antagonistic to say the least.  When Henry died in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the throne.  In 1139 Matilda invaded England, leaving Geoffrey behind in Anjou.

The seal of Empress Matilda, possibly made in the early years of the war.
[Seal of Empress Matilda, before 1167, source: Wikimedia Commons]

In 1141 her forces captured Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln.  She took the city of London later that year and was declared “Lady of the English.”  Just before she was to be crowned, however, the city rose against her with the support of Matilda of Boulogne and drove her out.  Shortly thereafter, the Queen’s forces captured Matilda’s half-brother and commander of her armies Robert of Gloucester.  The two women negotiated an exchange of prisoners, Stephen for Robert.

After this, affairs degenerated into a stalemate as neither side managed to gain an advantage.  Matilda began spending more of her energies on her Norman possessions as her son Henry grew old enough to lead.***  In 1153 a truce was brokered and Stephen recognized Henry as his heir.

Matilda spent the rest of her life involving herself in Norman affairs and advising her son on policy.  She died in 1167 and was buried at Bec Abbey.


*The future Henry II.
**This was the end of the Investiture Controversy, when Henry V gave up his right to invest bishops.
***Then only a papal envoy, he would later become Antipope Gregory VIII.

Sources/Further Reading:

Bradbury, Jim. Stephen and Matilda: the Civil War of 1139-1153. Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2009.

Chibnall, Marjorie. "The Empress Matilda and her Sons." In Medieval Mothering, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, 179-294. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Matilda, Empress, Queen of the Romans - Epistolae
Empress Matilda - Wikipedia

Note: Marjorie Chibnall's book The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English is also a good source.  I was, however, unable to get access to a copy.

When it comes to women’s work, it’s important to make a distinction between women born into slavery and those enslaved later in life.  It might be more profitable to a slave owner to train a young slave (who would be their property for many years to come) in some skilled task than to do the same with an older one.  As a result, some slave and freedwomen were far more educated than poor freeborn women.  It is probably that those who had this good fortune were also more likely to be freed or to manage to buy their own freedom.

In addition to working at tasks we now consider stereotypically unskilled female work (cooking, cleaning, basic textile work, child care, etc.), as the majority of slave and freedwomen did, and at less stereotypically female jobs (porter, pedagogue), some slave women were trained in more skilled tasks.  Funerary inscriptions tell us of specific occupations.  They worked as hairdressers, dressmakers, ladies’ maids, and attendants on upper class women.  Upon their manumission, some freedwomen became involved in the small-scale textile industry or sold things at the market for a living.  Others were trained as midwives, clerks, secretaries, or readers.  Caenis, for example, was Antonia Minor’s secretary before she was freed.

Many slave and freedwomen worked in more public jobs.  They were actresses, flute-players, dancers, barmaids.  We even have some (scanty) evidence of enslaved female gladiators.  Many were forced into prostitution.*  The infamia of having been a prostitute carried over if a woman was freed. 

Upon manumission, a slave became client to her former owner, now her patron.  In addition to the usual reciprocal relationship between patron and client, a freedwoman still owed her patron service (unless she had been a prostitute), so long as she still had enough time to make her own living.

Slave and freedwomen were everywhere in Ancient Rome.  It was a society built on the exploitation of slaves and could not exist without it.  Unsurprisingly, however, they remain one of the least talked about groups of people in Roman society.**



*It was possible for a slave owner to prevent the female slave he was selling from being prostituted.  The ne serva was a clause included in the contract that not only prohibited her new owner from doing so, but required them to include the same clause if they sold her. In earlier centuries, if any subsequent owner violated that clause, she reverted back to her first owner.  During the later Roman Empire, by which point it had the force of law, violation of the ne serva freed her.
**With the possible exception of prostitutes.  You know, because of the long tradition of older, privileged men writing about them.

Sources/Further Reading:
"Occupations of slaves and freedwomen in Italy" (no. 335) in Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Maureen B. Fant, trans. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: a Source Book in Translation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Pomeroy, Sarah B.  Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995.
McGinn, Thomas A.J. Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.