Gender and the end of empire

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] The problem of the “Fall of the Roman Empire” continues to excite debate among historians and archaeologists, fifteen centuries after Odoacer deposed the usurper Romulus in 476. Similarly, there is an ever-growing corpus of work on women’s history and, to some extent more recently, gender in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The challenge of bringing these two burgeoning areas of research together has, however, on the whole been avoided.