This fine collection of twelve studies, which originated in the 2008 Feminism and Classics Conference at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, joins a spate of recent work seeking to build on the advances made since the mid-1970s in our understanding of sex and gender in the ancient world. A cohesive ensemble it was not intended to be: the editors’ use of plural “obscenities,” accepting that currently “consensus about what constitutes obscenity is hardly possible” (1), aims rather to “understand and theorize the more abstract concept ‘obscenity’ through various of its individual manifestations” (2). The collection is accordingly more of a sampler, a broad and disparate range of material (language, texts, art, and material culture) in which the contributors articulate their own definitions and employ critical methods drawn not only from philology and literary criticism but also anthropology (especially Douglas), ethnography of speaking, linguistics, narratology (especially Bakhtin), psychoanalysis, sociology, and queer, speech act, and social performance theories: Part 1 (chapters 2–6) focuses on Greece (129 pp.), Part 2 (chapters 7–11) on Rome (127 pp.), and Part 3 (chapters 12–13) on Ancient Obscenities and Modern Perceptions (63 pp.). Although the contributors are aware of one another and some studies can be read together (e.g. those on Greek ritual and cults), for the most part they go their own ways: each chapter has its own endnotes and bibliography, the editors’ Introduction (Ch. 1) describes but does not synthesize the contributions, and a skimpy index gives little idea of the volume’s wealth of topics and interesting detail.