Download PDF | Anne McClanan (auth.) - Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses_ Image and Empire-Palgrave Macmillan US (2002).
295 Pages
SERTES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
The New Middle Ages contributes to lively transdisciplinary conversa-tions in medieval cultural studies through its scholarly monographs and essay collections. This series provides focused research in a contemporary idiom about specific but diverse practices, expressions, and ideologies in the Middle Ages; it aims especially to recuperate the histories of medieval women. In her monograph Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire, Anne McClanan considers the production and consumption of images of imperial women in the sixth century from Adriane through Sophia. McClanan analyzes an impressive array of artifacts and materials—from the ordinary to the opulent—to demonstrate how Byzantine culture deployed a specific visual language that crossed the barriers of form to create a discernable typology of “empress.” This typology emblazoned “empress” as a public, political identity with whom one could affiliate in distinct ways.
One of the most intriguing elements of this study is McClanan’s absorbing presentation of the empress Theodora. Using the tools of contemporary gender analysis, she dismantles the “political pornography” of Procopios’s Anekdota, which overburdens the imperial image with gross corporeality in an anxiety-driven attempt to void the empress’s “claim to an imperial essence” and thus to divest Theodora of typological status. In this book we see empress both as subject and object who occupies a cultural space distinct from that of emperor. McClanan’s study is rooted in a forceful understanding of the registers of Byzantine culture, and her study gives us fresh vantage points from which we can approach the mosaic of imperial life and discourse.
Bonnie Wheeler Southern Methodist University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank now the people who have been so generous in Is my work on this project. While working on my doctoral dissertation on the topic, the members of my committee, Ioli Kalavrezou, Sarolta Takács, and Norman Bryson, helped shape its initial incarnation with patience and intelligence. Katy Park, Bettina Bergmann, Michael McCormick, and David Mitten also gave prescient advice on portions of the thesis.
Subsequent revision has gone through many phases. I owe thanks to Glenn Peers and Kriszta Kotsis as well as anonymous press readers for invaluable correctives, although the remaining flaws remain my responsibility, of course. Elizabeth Mae Marlowe, student assistant Jamie Joanou, and my colleagues in the Portland Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Society assiduously commented on portions of the manuscript. Many other scholars have contributed to the project, especially the editor of the New Middle Ages series, Bonnie Wheeler, whose ongoing encouragement and support made this book possible. Amanda Johnson and Meg Weaver at Palgrave likewise marshaled the manuscript through editing and production with dispatch. A crucial subvention from Portland State University’s Office of Graduate and Research Studies funded many of the illustrations.
My family and friends have sustained me with their belief both in me and my work.This book is dedicated with gratitude and joy to Ben Hadad.
INTRODUCTION
One day a Byzantine emperor decided to test the security of his palace. Dressed in rags, he slipped out under cover of darkness onto the streets of medieval Constantinople. When the emperor returned to the Great Palace, he was stopped at the first two guard posts. He handily bribed the guards and moved on. At the third post, however, with his bribe refused, the disguised ruler was dispatched to jail. And the story continues, “when the soldiers had gone away the Emperor called to the jailer and said, ‘My friend—do you know the Emperor Leo?’” “How could I know him?” replied the man, “when I do not remember ever having seen him properly? Certainly I gazed at a distance once or twice, when he appeared in public, but I could not get close, and it seemed to me then that I was looking at a wonder of nature rather than at a human being. It would be more to the purpose for you to be thinking how to get out of here with a whole skin rather than to ask such questions as that . . . You lie in prison, he sits upon his golden throne.
Emperor Leo’s mischief related in this tenth-century traveler’s account then ends happily, for the emperor convinced his recalcitrant jailer to go with him into the palace the next day where his vigilance was rewarded. Liutprand of Cremona, Antapodosis, 11.'
The emperor and empress stood at the apex of the Byzantine state. Even when their very persons were unrecognizable to the functionaries who circled the periphery of the court, the imperial image was replicated endlessly throughout the Empire in their stead. Although Liutprand’s anecdote concerns an emperor, we will see that the same conundrums apply to empresses when we look earlier in Byzantine history at the imperial women of the late fifth and sixth centuries. At once accessible and remote, their representations circulated everywhere at the same time that the individuals receded into the infinity of the concept of divine rule. To their medieval audience, the multiple meanings of imperial images rested on a foundation of visual, political, and cultural traditions that buttressed the institutions of authority. The early Byzantine period presents the chance to study the nascent form of these practices as we see the transition from Roman imperial norms to new paradigms. The role and representation of imperial women demonstrates how those traditions diverged and coincided on the basis of gender.
This book examines the visual representation of early Byzantine empresses. These depictions appeared across multiple registers of consumption, and the interpretations of these differing modes inform one another. One of the main goals of this book is to assess the full range of images, in order to balance our sense of female imperial representation. Too often, imperial art has been elided into a study of work befitting an imperial milieu. The glittering spectacle of works such as Ravenna’s mosaics present only a tiny portion of what people then actually saw; historians and art historians have based their conclusions largely on luxury goods.
The full spectrum of extant female imperial representations includes modest coins and commercial weights, as well as sumptuous mosaics and architecture. The omniform evidence has been neglected, and each kind of material calls for different strategies of interpretation. Although relevant case studies of specific images and historical problems exist for the women considered here, no attempt to understand the images’ roles within a broader cultural context has been undertaken until recently. Because of the fractured view of the place and image of these women, the strongly typological nature of the literary and visual representations of the empress has been neglected in favor of an illusory sense of one or two colorful individuals.” The term “typological” is used in this book more generally, as it denotes forms strongly based on a normative type, as opposed to its theological meaning of interpreting the Hebrew Bible as a prefiguration of the New Testament. Here we will investigate how typological forms are strongly shaped by preexisting dictates and structures in the visual rendering of early Byzantine empresses. The implications of this way of thinking are often hard to reconcile with modern ideas of individuality and even of celebrity. Markers such as insignia constituted an empress’ identity in a way that grates against sensibilities shaped by a more disposable consumer culture. Clothing, of course, used to carry a far higher relative value than it does today. A general feature of medieval society was the basis of a public persona in items of clothing; even in early modern Europe, "Wanted" circulars would often list clothing rather than facial features.°
The rarefied existence of empresses does not particularly illuminate the lives of women in society in general; this study instead explores an important subset of Byzantine imperial art.* The intersection of class and gender in the representations of these institutions remains pertinent, for in many ways the experience of these individuals as members of the imperial house shaped their lives more than the social practices for being a woman in the fifth through seventh centuries.” Empresses’ most distinctive attribute in the public eye was the fact of their imperial, not their feminine, identity. If anything, the prominence of women underscores aristocratic or imperial power as against the power of the people in the ancient Greek tradition. The portrayal of empresses, however, diverged in significant ways from that of emperors, as we will see by chapter two when we consider commercial weights.
The term "portrait" must be used here advisedly, for the images at the heart of the discussion are not attempts at mimetic representations but renderings of idealized types. The early importance of numismatics for establishing our ideas of ancient portraiture carry over to how we view the early
6 Because our medieval
Byzantine material under consideration here. sources are voluble, they beguile us into a false sense of familiarity. The upcoming chapters will show that what we might consider “empress-looking”’ today cannot be taken for granted as we grapple with Byzantine sources.
The elision between the imperial image and personal identity is crucial for understanding the manner in which early Byzantine imperial representations functioned. Modern notions of portraiture based on likeness are irrelevant here, for they do not accommodate the public role these images had. Empresses’ public identities were constituted not only from being part of the imperial house, and thus the embodiment of state authority, but also from being women. Thus even the appearance of a woman possessing independent power, such as Cleopatra, assimilated with that of her husband on their numismatic depictions.’ In Roman society women were viewed not so much as individuals but as part of a biological class, as seen in women’s omission from the explorations of personal character in ancient physiognomic manuals.? This sense is perpetuated to some degree in the early Byzantine period. Just as most of the textual sources that we have from the period were written and transmitted by men, the visual record that survives seems a largely masculine realm of production.
The "normalized" status of imperial women’s representations depends on this notion. The anecdote from Liutprand of Cremona that begins this introduction renders a world in which the appearance of the imperial person is unknown, and indeed irrelevant, even to palace staff. Discussed later in more detail, the motif of bride shows is another way that the typological force of empresses' images can be shown.? In accounts such as the Vita of Saint Philaretos’ bride show, potential candidates for marriage to the heir apparent were gathered in Constantinople on the basis of how closely they approximated a set of measures and a picture (lauraton) of the ideal future empress.
A cliché such as the feminine beauty of empresses offers an obvious example of the way stock formulae have beguiled some scholars such as Garland, who makes the mysterious assertion that one sixth-century empress “was worth looking at.’!” While I too think these empresses are worth looking at, it is more for what they can tell us about how early Byzantine public identity was created through images and words. Convention dictated that imperial women must be represented both in texts and visual depictions as beautiful by medieval standards. It is simply nonsensical to determine their “real” appearance based on the highly filtered images that survive. The original audience would hardly have expected a faithful replication of every blemish. This convention already had a venerable heritage by the early Byzantine period, for throughout antiquity the notion of physical beauty and moral perfection were interlinked so that outer appearance reflected virtue or its absence (an idea known in its early Greek form as KOAOKaya06c). Just as modern notions of beauty often relate to symmetry, so too does the regularizing force of public representation put these women into a predictable mold of acceptable contours.!! Rigorously grounded in the methodology of ancient art history, museum curators have dutifully sought out identifications with individual historical figures for those objects in their care, but this approach is strained past its limitations by some of the works we will consider.
The current work follows a loosely continuous art historical narrative in an attempt to correct some of these imbalances.The three empresses discussed in the main chapters—Ariadne, Theodora, and Sophia—reigned in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Their predecessors, women of the Houses of Constantine and Theodosios, offer important antecedents in the transformation of Roman institutions, and their immediate successors following the Empress Sophia often have only oblique mentions in that period’s scarce sources. Focusing tightly on this period allows enough depth of analysis to look at the complex layering of visual culture. Both the continuities and innovations in the role and image of imperial women during this period require understanding the milieu in which they operated. For example, the Empress Theodora’s place within this sequence establishes the very conventional nature of both the positive and negative rhetoric that represented her. Understanding the representation and role of these women removes them from isolation, for imperial women need to be seen in comparison with emperors.
The first chapter quickly surveys the representation and patronage of late Roman imperial women in order to provide a historical framework for the period addressed in the main chapters of the book. The second chapter establishes the strongly typological nature of the imperial image by looking at a body of material that is largely unfamiliar to many art historians. The empress was the favored form on steelyard weights used in routine commerce in the fifth to seventh centuries. Such unimpressive objects exposed a wide range of citizens of the Byzantine Empire to representa- tions of the empress, yet they have been largely overlooked in discussions of Byzantine imperial art. These weights have been often buried in the research of metrology and archeology. Their dating, place of origin, and varying meanings all require reassessment as part of the broader study of visual culture. Her presence also validated ordinary commercial exchanges at the edge of the Empire, just as the image of the empress prominently marked widely circulated coinage during this period. Throughout this book we will see how important coinage is as a medium for the imperial image.
Even in the realm of mass-produced, utilitarian objects, past scholars have resisted accepting the typological nature of imperial representation. The bronze counterpoises of steelyard scales represent an empress clumsily; differences among this cluster of objects arise from minor irregularities among the multiple workshops that cranked out these guarantors of trade. The trivial fluctuations in form that exist—some have a necklace, some do not—are seized upon as the necessary marks of personal difference to create an identification with a specific empress. When scrutinized as a group, these rather generic emblems of imperial authority cannot be reckoned as portraits in a more modern sense. This tension between typological and individual representations poses specific problems when applied to imperial art. The “empress-ness” or “emperor-ness” of an effigy overrode individual appearance in these official representations; this necessity imbues Byzantine imperial art with a strong typological aspect. The balance between the two elements had shifted even by the early Byzantine period, which comes up against our assumptions formed by the remarkably apposite requirements of Roman imperial art.
The third chapter chronicles the Empress Ariadne (d. 513/15), who reigned in the last decades of the fifth century and first years of the sixth. To an unprecedented extent, Ariadne’s representation was emblazoned throughout the Empire on official diptychs, coinage, and statuary. The way typologies shape images on luxury goods is profoundly different from the way it operates in more mundane spheres such as commercial weights. Ariadne’s power was considerable, and at the death of her first husband she selected the next emperor—the civil servant Anastasios—through her marriage to him. The imperial couple reformed coinage with a new system of denominations and iconographic conventions that survived for centuries, until the Middle Byzantine period. Bronze and gold coinage reinforced at both ends of the spectrum the ubiquity of the imperial presence, for silver is not used much until later in Byzantium.
The next three chapters reassess the visual and textual representations of the Empress Theodora (ca. 497—548). Because Theodora has so often been discussed in the scandalous terms of Prokopios' Anekdota, a work popularly called the Secret History, her artistic and religious patronage has been neglected. She is, remarkably, the subject of more modern biographies than any other Byzantine figure, but these works, often for a general audience, gullibly cast her as one of history’s great sexual adventurers. This book’s revision shifts the terms of discussion about two of the most wellknown images of Byzantine art, the portraits of Justinian and Theodora in the Church of San Vitale, Ravenna. Although not a sponsor of the building, the Empress’ inclusion in this political message conveys her importance as a beneficent head of state. The topos of empress-as-founder recurs as a defining theme in the construction of female imperial identity. Yet the image of Theodora and her attendants also portrays the sekreton ton gynaikon, the female court surrounding the empress. The empress was clearly defined in these Byzantine sources as the leader of a female court structured by a subtly nuanced hierarchy.
Prokopios’ political pornography in the Anekdota can be understood in terms of late antique rhetoric, but also parallels more recent manifestations of anxiety toward female rulers. Within patriarchal societies, such maneuvers remain ever-popular means of diminishing the male ruler.'* Using methodological strategies that have been applied with success to verbal and visual rhetoric about powerful women as disparate as Marie Antoinette and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, this project explores further problems and paradoxes in Theodora’s depiction. Prokopios’ rhetoric incisively manipulated the terms of regnal identity in such a way that he negates Theodora’s claim to an imperial essence, in the terms of the ruler’s “two bodies” delineated by Ernst Kantorowicz.'? Theodora’s almost palpable corporeality in the Anekdota thus becomes the crux of our understanding of her representation in this source. The fascinating vixen of such works as Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium turns out to be a mirage that melts away under closer examination.
The visual representation of Theodora’s niece, the Empress Sophia, 1s the focus of the final chapter. In the late sixth century, powerful figures such as the Empress Sophia (d. after 600) emerged in the Byzantine political arena. This period begins what is called the “Dark Ages” in Byzantium because of the paucity of contemporary textual sources, but it also produces compelling evidence for the importance of an exceptional empress such as Sophia. When Sophia’s husband, Justin II, succumbed to mental illness, she in effect ruled the Empire, an authority registered in her prominent image on coinage and also naming substantial imperial projects after the empress. The most abundant currency denomination—the bronze follis—proclaimed Sophia’s status by rendering her seated on the throne beside the emperor in a manner previously used only for coemperors.
As Angeliki Laiou has noted in her research on the later Byzantine period, representations of women particularly lean on conventions, making an assessment of specific historical circumstances all the more vexed." Looking at the formative period of Byzantine culture, this book asks how power was represented and implemented by imperial women. Dynamics of continuity and change shape the narrative of imperial representation, and empresses’ roles both as subjects in art and as patrons of art are significant. In the past, Byzantine empresses have been studied in isolated historical investigations, which fragmented our image of their role in the functioning of the Byzantine state. Charles Diehl’s Byzantine Empresses exemplifies this approach; Donald Nicol’s more recent book, The Byzantine Lady: Ten Portraits, continues this trend. Slighting important individuals such as Ariadne, whose “story” does not exude the tantalizing aroma of scandal, this method, structured as a string of vignettes, dwelled on more flamboyant figures.'° The sixth-century Empress Theodora, whose histories best exemplify the distortions of this phenomenon, has had inordinate attention lavished on her of a rather peculiar kind, and these speculations warrant historiographic study in a later chapter. Once returned to the traditions of early Byzantine imperial women, Theodora suddenly seems a far more ordinary empress than before, but the way these norms are applied will prove quite interesting.
The specific qualities of empresses’ representations are lost when empresses are subsumed into a larger study of imperial art, such as the foundational work by André Grabar, L'empereur dans l'art byzantin, or its predecessors such as Lampros’ Aevyoua BuCavtivev Avotokpatópov.!' Grabar’s monograph became the fulcrum for ensuing discussions of imperial art and he characterizes imperial art of the fourth through sixth centuries as a thin veneer of Christian forms imposed onto an underlying stratum of ancient types.'® A little over thirty years ago, a Grabar student, Maria Delivorria, wrote a diachronic study of the visual representation of empresses as her unpublished dissertation.'? Delivorria’s thesis proffers a sometimes very insightful assemblage of the early Byzantine material, but its iconographic methodology and focus on luxury goods now allows further questions to be asked. She enhances the iconographic work of Delbrueck with the study of textual sources such as acclamations.””
The present work, though, 1s only possible because of the careful work of these and other scholars who created a foundation for this work. For example, Lynda Garland produced a more synthetic history of Byzantine Empresses from A.D. 527-1204. Her diachronic study offers a helpful introduction to the topic, but follows the well-baited path laid by previous studies in its ready acceptance of several of the rhetorical tropes found in the medieval sources. She is more successful in the wide array of evidence she has managed to collect from folk songs to church histories. Visual evidence is assiduously interwoven into Garland’s account, and this evidence will be discussed more extensively in the following chapters. Liz James recently analyzed specifically the power of early Byzantine empresses during the period from the Theodosian empresses through Iconoclasm.** Her book uses images to substantiate arguments that are based largely on texts about the institutional role of imperial women. In many ways, its work is complementary to the undertaking here, though I will discuss a few points of disagreement in the following chapters.
The visual representation of Byzantine imperial women appears in other noteworthy recent studies, such as Henry Maguire’s intriguing work that posits a theory of modes in the visual representation of the imperial house.” His theory will be discussed in depth later, for it contributes an important insight to our understanding of this domain of Byzantine visual culture. Leslie Brubaker pursued these notions further, and—looking at Late Byzantine portraiture—broadens this analysis of visual modes to distinguish formal differences between depictions of men and women.?^
Part of exploring the complex meanings of different kinds of imperial imagery entails the study of Byzantine concepts of gender. The particular functions of imperial women 1n early Byzantine visual culture make this book potentially relevant to understanding other means by which gender can be a useful parameter for research. As Susan Bordo noted, there is a "new skepticism about the use of gender as analytical category,” but imperial women’s image is different enough from that of emperors that this sliver of early Byzantine visual culture yields insights into broader questions. Imperial women were sometimes elided from the more recent wave of revisionist scholarship that sought to understand the lives of ordinary people.” A good recent monograph adheres to this mold: Gillian Clark’s Women in Late Antiquity probes the everyday life of women, bringing fascinating detail to matters of dress and medical care, but mentioning imperial women only incidentally.” Likewise Irmgard Hutter’s brief article on the representation of women over a broad spectrum of Byzantine history, “Das Bild der Frau in der byzantinischen Kunst,” tries to analyze visual representation as documentation of social practices. Empresses possessed a distinct role and representation in early medieval art, and by looking at the variations of the imperial image their meaning becomes more clear. New work, including a nicely balanced anthology edited by Liz James, represents a deeper involvement in historicizing the representation of gender.” Judith Herrin and Barbara Hill's recent books on imperial women of the Iconoclast and Komnenian periods respectively also map out important later terrain.”
Barbara Hill, in her monograph, provides an intelligent discussion of how the heritage of feminist scholarship can inform the study of Byzantine women, and her arguments need not be replicated here.?! The ways in which gender shaped the identity of both the male and female members of the Byzantine imperial house are distinct yet inextricably bound. The definition of this project is based on the assumption that the study of one informs the other, just as gender is taken here as “a social category imposed on a sexed body” in a well-known formulation of this distinction central to feminism and gender studies.** As Jill Dubisch noted, “The female anthropologist’s identification with women of other societies, despite differences of culture and power, is often taken for granted (by women as well as men) in a way that a male anthropologist’s identification with men is not? A preponderance of recent work on women in Byzantium has been pursued by female scholars, replicating a pattern well familiar from other fields. The alterity of the medieval world can slip away under the illusion of a unifying sameness of women’s experience, and facile transhistorical comparisons must be used with caution. The creativity of some of these ahistorical juxtapositions can be entertaining, such as Fischer-Papp’s book that delineates the supposedly uncanny parallels between Theodora and Evita Peron, apparently linked across time as sister femme fatales, “Theodora died on June 28, 548. Even the date bears a significant similarity with the date of Evita’s death, July 26, 1952.4 The beloved theme of eternal woman rests on a notion of masculine and feminine gender that is a fixed binary opposition.” Just a reminder of the challenges to this idea posed by Byzantine eunuchs, potentially a third gender, illustrates how problematic that tidy divide is.
These polysemous imperial representations confound the static interpretations given in the past to imperial images on media as diverse as those on commercial weights or gold mosaic. As Gilbert Dagron argued in a discussion of the narthex mosaic of Leo the Wise (emp. 886—912) in the Church of Hagia Sophia, Byzantine art historians have shied away from the potential ambiguities of the objects under inquiry.?? These mosaic figures communicated many meanings to the diverse people who encountered the assembly of imperial effigies populating the urban space. The categories of representations natural to us diverge from medieval perceptions, so we cannot take for granted what “empress-looking” meant to the first audience of the imperial panels in the Church of San Vitale. There remain, too, the questions of what power looks like at a particular time and place. The alterity of medieval visual experience, a very interesting topic in its own right, figures in the reappraisal made here of the imagery of Byzantine steelyard weights.
Ignoring these ambiguities, previous research on these empresses sometimes sought immutable rules by which they functioned within Byzantine society. Maslev exemplifies this phenomenon in his study, “Die staatsrechtliche Stellung der byzantinischen Kaiserinnen,’ which assembles examples that span from the late Roman period through the Komnenian Dynasty." His approach implies that the Byzantine state was operated for a millennium by a secret constitution that scholars can deduce from its plenitude of manifestations. In this vein Maslev’s influential article is riddled with judgments about matters such as whether the sixth-century Empress Theodora can be considered a “co-ruler in a constitutional sense" (“Mitherrscherin im konstitutionellen Sinne").*? Part of the strength of the thousand-year long Byzantine state resided in the flexibility of its institutions, and this monograph will demonstrate the fluidity of the roles played by imperial women within the reigns of Ariadne, Theodora, and Sophia as Augustae. The numismatic record illustrates the strongly typological nature of their depiction, yet reveals the somewhat improvised manner in which practices were reinvented to fit new circumstances. I would argue that the reason scholars such as Garland conclude that the “empress’s constitutional importance was never defined,’ was because there was no Byzantine constitution to define it, and that its specter only misleads us into speculations about timeless institutions that disappear under scrutiny.°”
Likewise the titulature of imperial women changed. Returning to the Roman origins of the institution, Augusta was first used when Augustus willed it to his wife Livia by adopting her into his family.?? The title Augusta was occasionally bestowed by the Augustus during the early Roman Imperial period, and in the period following the reign of Domitian was used more frequently.*! The emperor typically crowned the empress before her marriage ceremony, which suggests a precedence of her new identity as empress over her identity as wife.** In the fifth and sixth centuries conventions in titulature shifted to a readier use of Augusta, and conservative sources such as Prokopios register alarm at innovations in Roman institutional traditions. Only in the late eighth century, as part of the shift to the use of Greek for official documents and titulature, did the Greek title basilissa become standard for the empress when it was taken on by Irene.** The rank of Augusta was normally a singular role held by one woman, and this singularity was often defined by officiating over the many activities at court. In chapter seven, the controversy of the Empress Sophia and her successor to the role of Augusta will demonstrate that the empress’ role of the sekreton ton gynaikon, the imperial court of women, was highly coveted. When the new Caesar wished to make his wife Augusta, the dowager Sophia strenuously opposed this infringement on her prerogatives. By the tenth century, the female court included at least a thousand women in its ranks.^
An examination of the empress’ court shows how palatial institutions could function as ordinary Byzantine domestic structures writ large. As during the Roman Imperial period, a theme of almost down-home good- ness plays out in the public styling of imperial women. An ambivalence about the appropriate role and status of imperial women is evident from the founding of the Empire.^? For example, the Roman biographer Suetonius tells us that Augustus wore clothes woven by the women of the imperial family." Eve D'Ambra explores at some length the motif in both art and literature of the Roman matron assiduously spinning.*® Spinning and weaving persist as the quintessential female activities even through the Middle and Late Byzantine periods.*’ To cite a well-known example, popular legend relates that the Empress Irene supported herself by spinning after her exile to Lesbos.?? In the same vein, late antique imperial women were typically praised for traditional female virtues, now amplified onto the grander scale of state. Specific patronage practices connected to these female stereotypes evolved for imperial women that are distinct from those of the emperor. As we will see, female imperial patronage often gravitated toward charity that specifically benefited women, such as the convents established by the Empress Theodora.
The ways women such as Ariadne, Theodora, and Sophia worked within these frameworks communicate the resilience of the norms and the possibilities contained within them. The next chapter, an overview, sets the historical stage for the book's questions; early Byzantine imperial women’s representations are shaped by a rich context of tradition and conventional expectations.
A note on spelling: I have used the spellings of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium for consistency and cross reference common alternate spellings 1n the index.
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