Trade and Taboo investigates the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. It tracks the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity by following groups of professionals--funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers--and asking how they coped with stigmatization. The goal of this book is to reveal the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, the volume shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets. Sarah E. Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. Her volume expands on anthropological theories of pollution by exploring individuals who regularly came into contact with corpses and other polluting materials, then considers communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers called praecones . Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners, while the book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman empire.

Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about the economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45 BCE and 565 CE. Trade and Taboo will interest all those studying Roman society, issues of historiographical method, and the topic of taboo in preindustrial cultures.