About Domina Tempora

By Marianne Fisher

 

I’m Marianne Fisher, a historian and writer fascinated with women who didn’t do what they were supposed to.

 

I hold a BA and an MA in Ancient History, and I’ve spent years exploring the lives of women who defied expectations, wielded power, challenged convention or simply refused to fit the stories history preferred to tell about them.

 

Domina Tempora is where I follow that fascination across cultures and centuries.

 

I write about queens and rebels, priestesses and poets, schemers and visionaries — and the worlds they inhabited. The politics, religions, myths and customs that shaped their lives; the ambitions they pursued, the rules they broke, and the contradictions that made them human.

 

I’m as interested in the societies surrounding these women as I am in the women themselves. What could a woman own, desire, believe or become in her time? What happened when she wanted something the world had decided she shouldn’t have? And how much of the story survives when the people recording history have their own reasons for telling it a certain way?

 

These are the questions that draw me back to the past.

 

My writing is slow, literary and deliberately subversive. Unapologetically feminine, attentive to detail, and alive to the ironies of human nature. I have little interest in turning complicated lives into simple moral lessons. I’d rather linger in the contradictions, explore the unfamiliar, and let the past be as strange, beautiful and unsettling as it really was.

 

What You’ll Find Here

 

Public Writings

Free essays exploring historical women, forgotten stories and the worlds in which they lived.

 

The Private Collection

Longer, more intimate essays published exclusively for subscribers, offering a deeper exploration of the women, ideas and histories that capture my imagination.

 

Your subscription supports my work and gives you access to the Private Collection and all future essays.

 

If you love women’s history, complicated characters and beautifully told stories about the past, I hope you’ll feel at home here.

 

Welcome to Domina Tempora. I’m so glad you’re here.