Download PDF | (Publications of the Centre for Hellenic Studies 8) Lynda Garland (editor) - Byzantine Women_ Varieties of Experience 800-1200-Routledge (2006).
248 Pages
Contributors
A chequered career as a re-enactor, professional history educator and entertainer, and historical craftsman has given TIMOTHY DAWSON an intensely practical approach to the subjects he tackles, which provides a valuable complement to conventional academic methods. He is responsible for www.levantia.com.au, a site devoted to the medieval history of the Levant.
LYNDA GARLAND is an Associate Professor in the School of Classics, History and Religion at the University of New England, New South Wales, and author of Byzantine Empresses. Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 5271204 (1999) and with M. Dillon. Ancient Rome: from the Early Republic to the Assassination of Julius Gaesar (2005). Her current project is a monograph on Byzantine Humour and its Social Context, AD 527-1453.
JUDITH HERRIMN is Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London. From 1995-2002 she was Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, KCL, and prepared two volumes for publication in this series: Alexandria, Real and Imagined (2004), Personification in the Greek World (2005). Her most recent book is Women in Purple. Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (2001) and she is just finishing an introductory study, a ‘Byzantium for Beginners’.
CORINNE JOUANNO is professor of ancient Greek literature at the University of Caen (France). Her main field of research is Byzantine novel. She has published a translation of Digenis Akritas (1998), an essay about the Alexander Romance (2002), and is presently completing a translation of the Life of Aesop.
LEONORA NEVILLE is associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at The Catholic University of America. Her first book, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950-1100, was published in 2004. She is currently studying the political theory expressed in the history of Nikephoros Bryennios.
STEPHEN H. RAPP, JR. is Associate Professor of medieval Eurasian and Byzantine history and the Director of the Program in World History and Cultures at Georgia State University (USA). He is the author of Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts.
DION C. SMYTHE studied at St Andrews with Paul Magdalino and in Vienna. He is Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. He works on Byzantine outsiders and labelling theory, and the role of computers in teaching and research.
ANNA SILVAS has made successful forays not only into Byzantine history but also Western medieval studies, resulting in Jutta and Hildegard: the biographical sources (Yurnhout: Brepols, 1998). She has spent some years on the Cappadocian Fathers, resulting in The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford: OUP, 2005), and is currently finishing books on the letters of St Gregory of Nyssa and on St Macrina.
Editor’s Introduction
Byzantine society was unquestionably patriarchal. Nevertheless, as in all medieval cultures attitudes towards women were ambivalent. It can be argued that women were a marginalized group, in theory an inferior sex, and conventionally were supposed to be seldom seen and never heard in public. ‘They were debarred from all priestly functions and denied the power of giving instruction in church. Nevertheless the church acknowledged that women were spiritually equal to men and there were many well-known early Christian female martyrs. Women founded monasteries, their relics might perform miraculous cures and some achieved sainthood. The Theotokos (the ‘Mother of God’) was always a central figure in the devotion of both men and women and was seen as the mediator between mankind and Christ.
‘Though separation of the genders was ideologically considered a norm, it is increasingly clear that women were not ‘secluded’ in the Byzantine world. The gynaikonitis (women’s quarters) which was a feature of the palace and noble homes was not an area to which women were restricted, but one where the women of the family could enjoy some privacy and pursue their traditional occupations such as spinning and weaving. ‘Respectable’ women from the higher socio-economic class were clearly privileged enough to be able to stay at home and delegate activities outside the household to servants and retainers. The majority of the female population, however, which could include anything from housewives and small-scale retailers to prostitutes, maintained a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Byzantine cities as part of their daily routine. Some women had to work outside the house as a matter of course, and housewives would go shopping, attend church services, visit the baths or relatives, and participate in festivals and saints’ days. In Constantinople we even hear of girls and upper-class women (“women who had never before left the gyvakonitis”) taking part in a spontaneous street riot, when the Empress Zoe was threatened with tonsure and exile by her adopted nephew Michael V in April 1042.
Women also played an important economic role in Byzantium. Aristocratic women could be shop-owners or supervise a workshop in the basement of their house, and women were deeply involved in retail trade as bakers, cooks or innkeepers. ‘They acted as bath keepers, washerwomen, and midwives, maintained a public profile as prostitutes and entertainers, and engaged in specialist trades as weavers and_ silk-workers. Women could also be extremely wealthy in their own right. Imperial and aristocratic women possessed huge estates and property within Constantinople while Danielis, a widow from Patras, in the ninth century, controlled “not a small part of the Peloponnese”, and reportedly owned innumerable slaves. She freed three thousand of them and settled them in southern Italy. Such women were expected to take an active role in the maintenance of their household and supervision of family, servants and property. Women could play an important role as abbesses and nuns, and noble ladies founded monasteries and acted as patrons of literature. Female literacy was primarily confined to a reading knowledge of the bible and certain saints’ lives, but Byzantium did produce some exceptional female writers.
Since with a few valuable exceptions what we know about women is derived primarily through the viewpoint of male authors, who wrote about and for other men, understanding Byzantine women is to some extent inseparable from understanding Byzantine society as a whole. This volume focuses on how the male authors of the discourse of the dominant ideology viewed, understood and presented the public actions of imperial and nonimperial women in the period. The unique role of women was to bear children to ensure the continuation of the family. They were excluded from the public fields of politics, war and church that rewarded and engaged men. Women from non-élite backgrounds enter the historical record only when they are prominent at court or acquire wealth and influence. Male authors praise women for the traditional qualities of patience, silence, beauty, modesty and fertility. Yet women shared the same perceptions of and engagement with their society and social institutions as men. They engaged in imperial intrigue and family networking, inherited and managed wealth, founded monasteries, traded in the marketplace, bought and sold land and paid taxes.
We are fortunate to have from this period the works of a female poet and hymnographer and a historian. In the ninth century Kassia speaks from the perspective of a woman among women, and about women’s attitudes towards a range of issues and priorities. She provides a suggestive counterpoint to other narratives and a perspective largely absent from the historical literature. Her non-liturgical poems give unvarnished observations on friendship, beauty, women, good and bad fortune, wealth and poverty, and vices such as envy and stupidity. The historian Anna Komnene, eldest daughter of Alexios I Komnenos, enjoyed an exceptional education and wrote a biography of her father, the A/exiad, in the first half of the twelfth century. Her work gives rise to invaluable evidence regarding women’s perceptions of the family and for family values generally in the Middle Byzantine period.
The distinguished international authors of this collection discuss central issues including the following: In what ways did the functions of monasteries change for women during the period of Byzantine iconoclasm? (Herrin) Empresses and other imperial women often founded monasteries to which they retired when replaced by a new generation of rulers, or were removed from their quarters in the Great Palace by political change. There is a common pattern of such activity going back to Late Antiquity, but it becomes more pronounced in the late eighth and early ninth century, a period associated with two highly divisive issues: the divorce of Constantine VI and the resumption of iconoclasm by Leo V. This paper explores the question whether such foundations were the result of male pressure on imperial women, who were thus forced to retire from the world of courtly politics to monastic retreats, or whether certain women took the initiative to ensure their own independent and comfortable retirement, as a_ political insurance against the violent and unsettling times in which they lived. They ensured not only their survival but also prepared a retirement home in which they might enjoy a more peaceful old age in circumstances of their own choosing and ensure the commemoration of their death. Of course, this was not always successful, but there are sufficient clues to indicate a good deal of feminine planning behind the establishment of certain imperial monastic foundations of this period.
What did the abbess Kassia contribute to liturgical and secular poetry in this period? (Silvas). A number of women successfully competed with men in the area of hymnography, foremost amongst them Kassia, for, of the women hymnographers known, only Kassia’s works are included in the ecclesiastical books. It is significant that women felt themselves able to write hymns, and even more significant that some of these hymns came to be included in the liturgy, even though some of them are attributed to male authors. Twenty-three of the forty-nine hymns ascribed to Kassia in the manuscripts are considered genuine, and she is well-known for her troparion ‘On Mary Magdalene’, which is included in the Triodion, as well as for her gnomic poetry. This includes forthright epigrams, beginning ‘I hate...’, which reflect her disdain for people who behave inappropriately, speak deceptively or do things for selfish reasons. Clearly, in the ninth century, certain women had the inclination to compose both sacred and secular poetry and sufficient education to do so successfully. This paper analyses Kassia’s originality of thought and perception of the world, as evidenced in her hymns and epigrams, and discusses what can be learnt from her work about the ways in which educated women viewed society and social norms of the ninth century.
What should we deduce from the prominence of women in Byzantine fiscal records? (Neville). Understanding any aspect of the lives of Byzantine women is complex because Byzantine women can only be seen through their representations in the surviving literature, law and art. Often these are not women and men, but characters created by authors and artists. Since the writers of tax registers are among the most artless of all conceivable writers, their testimony is important, however terse. The officials who compiled tax registers focused on the task of recording who owed what tax on which piece of land. They used any means necessary to define a given individual precisely: surnames, place names, nicknames and relationships to other individuals. At times the author of the Cadaster of Thebes used a woman’s prominence and name recognition as a means of identifying men who were less easily known in their own right. Widows are frequently listed as taxpayers. Some women owned many small plots of land. Some owned watermills.
Some owned land they inherited from their husbands. Here we see that one of the positions open to women was that of property owner. This information has the advantage of stemming from a source for which we know the audience and purpose of the writing. The tax assessors wrote registers for tax collectors so that they would know how much each person owed. The author of the register needed to depict the reality of provincial landholding as accurately as possible. Ideas about what roles women should play either in society or in approved literature were not allowed to interfere with the matter at hand. The information provided by the tax register that landowners were frequently women and that this position brought some women public prominence is useful when historians turn to assessing statements about the prominence of women. This paper surveys the evidence provided by fiscal records about the status of women in provincial society and shows how this information may effect our reading of other contemporary sources.
‘To what extent was a foreign-born empress, without a family network in Byzantium, able to become a player in Byzantine politics and society? (Rapp and Garland). Mary of ‘Alania’, daughter of Bagrat IV of Georgia, was only the second foreigner to reach the Byzantine throne since Irene, the first wife of Constantine V. Despite her foreign origins, she was to become a significant factor in Byzantine politics and society in the late eleventh century as the wife of Michael VII Doukas. She became empress for the second time by marrying Nikephoros III Botaneiates after his coup d’état during her first husband’s lifetime, and was a prime mover in the successful coup of Alexios Komnenos against Nikephoros. She appears to have retained great influence over Alexios following his accession to the throne, and was later suspected of conspiracy against him. She was also one of the first Byzantine imperial women to act as a patron of art and literature. Although Mary appears to have spent some time in her youth at the Byzantine court, she still has to be considered an outsider forced to act on her own with little or no family support group.
Nevertheless, it could be argued that Mary played an important part in setting the scene for the prominent role of imperial women in the twelfth century. Despite her isolation and foreign background, or perhaps because of this, Maria had no compunction in interfering in Byzantine politics. Georgian sources, such as the Vita of Giorgi Mtacmideli, are here used to elucidate the details of Mary’s background and career as empress of Byzantium and the ways in which she drew on Georgian traditions to contribute to the novel political and economic influence wielded by later Komnenian women.
What can we learn from the A/exiad of Anna Komnene about family values in the Middle Byzantine period? (Smythe). This paper sets out lines of investigation and outlines what may be considered to be ‘traditional Middle Byzantine family values’. The Adxzad of Anna Komnene gives a vivid account of the society of Byzantium and its relations with the West at the time of the first and second crusades. As one of the most exceptional historians of Byzantium, her account is vital to our understanding of the period.
However she belonged to the generation that was writing not during the reign of her father, Alexios I Komnenos, but during that of her nephew Manuel I Komnenos, and from the time of her father’s death she lived in political eclipse in the monastery of Kecharitoumene in Constantinople. The eldest born of the Komnenoi-Doukai porphyrogennetoi her goal in life had been to ascend the imperial throne as empress-regnant. The particular focus of Anna’s life-experience in this paper is how she related to her father and her family, an important element in the narrative. From the very opening of the work, we are made aware of Anna’s relationship with her father and important trends of Middle Byzantine family life are present in The Alexiad: the extended family, the network of alliances and family connections, the raising of children by prospective mothers-in-law and the widespread ‘adoption’ of adults to create a quasi-familial bond.
How did women’s clothes in the Middle Byzantine period reflect their occupations and lifestyle? (Dawson). Empresses and ladies of the Byzantine court are regularly shown in their finery in metropolitan pictorial arts and their garments are occasionally mentioned in textual sources, such as books of dream interpretation. In contrast, recovering an impression of the dress of common women is very much more difficult. Where they are depicted in metropolitan art it is normally in the guise of antiquated conventional modesty. More representative hints can be gleaned from the margins of the empire, especially from the invaluable genre of donor portraits. “These indicate that the dress of ordinary women of the Byzantine Empire had much in common with their eastern neighbours. Central to this style was the three-fold tension between the ruling social ideals of modesty, practicality for the various forms of domestic and public labour poorer women were compelled to engage in, and the natural desire for some adornment. This paper demonstrates that the wardrobe available to the women of Byzantium had a generous range of garments and styles, and was well able to address the demands of practicality, the pursuit of pleasure and the limited requirements of propriety.
What part is played by women in the Byzantine novels of the twelfth century? (Jouanno). This study surveys the role of women in the Greek novel, and the ways in which the Byzantine novelists, whose texts reuse ancient models, adapted the ‘woman theme’ to their medieval readership. In the Byzantine works we no longer find those energetic female characters so noteworthy in the Greek novel (even if Makrembolites’ Hysmine may falsely seem to be such at the beginning of the work). And even the sexual symmetry which has been seen as a characteristic feature of the genre in antiquity is much lessened in Byzantium, where heroines are rather submissive and play a less important role than the male protagonists.
This is shown by the examination of narrative space — and particularly speeches — ascribed to both sexes. Byzantine heroines are mostly praised for their discretion, embodying the new ideal of a society which was far less permissive towards women than late antiquity had been. But beside this Christian image of feminine modesty, we also find in Byzantine novels passages where extraordinary boldness is ascribed to female characters, generally in fantasy settings or dreams. This striking contrast between two opposing figures of femininity may reflect a tension between the moral standard of the time and the desire of transgression — reality and imagination. In this case, the Byzantine novel is to be read as a play with the norm, literary and ethical.
What part did women play in the street-life and carnival in Constantinople? (Garland). Humour and joking deserve a place among the objects of the new socio-cultural approach to history, following the prominence of gender as a social category worthy of study. The two are united here through an analysis of the ways in which Middle Byzantine texts portray women in the context of humorous and abusive discourse. Byzantium was a society in which crude humour and the joke per se were viewed with enthusiasm in most social settings, and women were to some degree not only participants in such humour, but — as might be expected — the objects of it.
The misogynistic approach to humour typical of a society which depended so much upon traditions of classical literature, was compounded by the public prominence of specific women and _ the ubiquitous appearance of women on the streets. Women are also shown indulging in jokes or abusive language, and appreciating the buffoonery, insults, and personal humiliation which was so much a feature of Byzantine humour. This paper explores the types of humour in which women participated as audience, instigators, or objects-of-attacks in the carnivalesque milieu of eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium.
What engagement did imperial women have with entertainment at the Byzantine court? (Garland). The fact that genders at court were usually segregated, especially before the Komnenian period, with men and women being separated for official receptions and banquets, has received widespread acceptance. But clearly, under the Komnenoi, males and females at court shared the same space for at least some of the time and also participated in the orchestrated humour enjoyed at court. If any women in Byzantium had the freedom to select their own forms of entertainment and amusement, clearly it would have been women of the imperial family. Empresses are shown as prepared not only to tolerate, but actually to commission and reward performances of slapstick and buffoonery in their private apartments. Other misogynistic humour, for instance in the Ptochoprodromic poems which were arguably intended for a court audience, targets women and their activities, particularly in the domestic context and features sexual innuendo and homosexual allusions. The evidence clearly suggests that this sort of humour was appreciated by one and all.
I am grateful to the authors of the articles for joining me in this exciting project. I also want to thank a number of other people who have contributed in different ways to this project: Wendy Pank for her editorial collaboration and her ability to solve computer problems and software incompatibilities; Judith Herrin for her supervision of the volume and insightful suggestions at all levels; Paul Lancaster for his editorial advice; Matina McGrath for her initial involvement in the project; and Alice-Mary Talbot as Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, where this volume was first conceived.
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