Download PDF | Stavroula Constantinou (editor), Mati Meyer (editor) - Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture-Palgrave Macmillan (2018).
339 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the ffteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience.
The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confnes of Byzantine studies. The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies.
The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other felds, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
Foreword
Human beings have a large repertoire of emotions. Charles Darwin, in his seminal study, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, discussed suffering and weeping, low spirits, anxiety, grief, dejection, and despair, joy, high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion, refection, meditation, ill-temper, sulkiness, and determination, hatred and anger, disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, helplessness, patience, and affrmation and negation, surprise, astonishment, fear and horror, and, fnally, self-attention, shame, shyness and modesty.
The tendency of some modern (and earlier) investigators to reduce this variety to a few basic emotions—sometimes as few as fve—has come at the expense of nuance. The object of this latter approach has been to identify emotions that are invariant across different cultures; the subtle distinctions drawn by Darwin in positing so wide a range of sentiments are open to the objection that not all societies carve up the emotional domain in exactly this way, and so his system lies open to the charge that it treats the categories familiar in the English language as transhistorical. But even the so-called basic or elementary emotions turn out to be differently constituted from one society to another.
There is always a cultural factor in the constitution of the emotions, even if, at some level, one wishes to affrm that the emotions are not simply and wholly socially constructed and that at some level, they refect universally shared capacities among human beings—and perhaps even certain animals. Take anger, one of the emotions that is regularly included among the most basic. When Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, affrms that ‘it is impossible to be afraid of and angry with someone at the same time’ (2.3, 1380a33), it is easy to see that his conception of anger and very possibly also of fear must be at least to some extent at odds with modern intuitions, at least in the English-speaking world, where it would seem that we might very well feel anger precisely at someone who induced fear in us.
And in fact, Aristotle’s conception of anger is different from modern defnitions; for him, anger is a desire to avenge insults or slights, and so is closely bound up with matters of status and honor. We naturally hesitate to seek revenge against those we fear, and so in practice, we are not angry but more likely to tolerate the offense against our honor as coming from a superior and hence, in some sense, ftting. Not only are individual emotions variously infected, but the inventory of the emotions itself is unstable across cultures.
Pity, for example, would surely be included among the fundamental emotions in classical Greece and Rome, to judge by its primary place in ancient lists and discussions of the passions, and yet not only is it never acknowledged as basic by modern investigators, it is often excluded entirely even from more extensive catalogues, such as Darwin’s own (it is mentioned incidentally only three times in the entire work).
That human values differ from one society to another is no surprise. The emotions, however, have long been considered to be instinctive and hence invariant across cultures. It is only recently that the history of emotions has emerged as an active feld of study. Thanks in part to the extraordinary analysis of the pathê in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, students of classical Greece have by now developed sophisticated analyses of the emotions he and others described and illustrated in action. More recently still, scholars of the Byzantine world have made substantial contributions of their own.
For despite great areas of continuity between classical Greece and Byzantium, there were important changes, not least the pervasive role of Christianity in Byzantine society, which brought with it new conceptions of the emotions as well. We may see this, for example, in the understanding of pity. Aristotle had defned pity as ‘a kind of pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm to a person who does not deserve to encounter it, which one might expect oneself, or one of one’s own, to suffer, and this when it seems near’ (Rhetoric 2.8.2).
On this conception, pity involves a moral judgment as to whether another’s suffering is merited; it is not simply an instinctive empathy with anyone who is in trouble. Lactantius, in his Institutiones Divinae, composed in the frst decade of the 4th century, argued rather that God endowed human beings with pity in order that they might protect each other, even, he adds, when it is possible to evade the law. So conceived, Lactantius avers, pity is a virtue.
Gregory of Nyssa, in turn, also regarded pity as essential to human society. In his sermon on the ffth beatitude, he cites the famous verse of the Gospel of Matthew, ‘blessed are those who pity, for they shall be pitied’ (5:7), and comments: ‘the obvious meaning of the text summons human beings to be loving and sympathetic to each other because of the unfairness and inequality of human affairs.’
Gregory then offers his own defnition of pity as ‘a voluntary [hekousios] pain that arises at the misfortunes of others’ (On the Beatitudes, PG 44.1252.28-30), and he goes on to explain: ‘pity is a loving shared disposition (‘ਕγαπητικ συνδιȐθεσις’) with those who are suffering under painful circumstances.’ Note that Gregory does not consider whether the misfortunes that elicit pity are deserved or not; in the spirit of the Gospels, Gregory offers a formula for a kind of universal sympathy for our fellow beings.
His idea of a shared disposition, moreover, seems to have something in common with modern notions of sympathy, which appeal to a merging of identities; thus Adam Smith, in his fundamental study of the moral sentiments, states that when we pity another person, ‘by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.’
Finally, Gregory associates pity closely with love or agapê, and describes pity as an ‘intensifcation of a loving disposition (‘ਥπȓτασιν […] τોς ਕγαπητικોς διαθȑσεως’) mixed together with a feeling of distress.’ As Gregory observes, since love is the best thing in life, and pity is a magnifcation of love, then those who experience pity are truly blessed and achieve the height of virtue. It is easy to see how far we have come from Aristotle’s rather more aristocratic conception of pity. If the emotions in any given society are subject to the infuence of its deepest values and institutions, it should come as no surprise that attitudes toward gender too, and no doubt class as well, should play a crucial role in their determination.
And yet, in the history of emotions, this dimension has been largely neglected, and the volume before you is the frst focused attempt to examine the emotions of the Byzantine world from this perspective. Sometimes, in the service of maintaining social hierarchies, an emotion will simply be denied to certain groups. An example is the extreme reticence in classical Latin literature to ascribe the feeling of shame to slaves, as Robert Kaster has demonstrated.1 So too, women may be said to lack courage and the kind of fear that accompanies it; as Mati Meyer writes in this volume, ‘as it was associated with a courageous person, fear was usually male gendered, and was generally mentioned in connection with military acts or devotional practices.’ Passionate love or erôs was another asymmetrical emotion: men were typically regarded as lovers or erastai, that is, the subjects of erotic attraction, whereas women were imagined as the objects of male passion, that is, as erômenai.
Anger too was unevenly distributed between males and females. And yet, just here we see clearly how socially prescribed constraints fail to erase the fact that men and women (of all classes, we may add) equally share the same emotions, despite the efforts of men to repress them in women. The recognition of the parity of emotional competence in women frequently manifests itself as an anxiety, in which women who experience anger or sexual desire to the full degree that men do are caricatured and rendered monstrous, as though they were not genuinely female but some kind of freak or villain.
In Sophocles’ Trachiniai, the heroine Dejanira protests, ‘It is not appropriate (kalon) for a sensible woman to be angry’; it is not a lack of capacity that inhibits her but a sense of protocol. So too, although sex may be dangerous to anyone who falls under its sway, women who are possessed by erotic passion are mocked and disparaged as unnatural; Procopius’ account of the debaucheries of Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, may suffce to illustrate the point.
The gendering of emotion persists to this day, even among feminist thinkers who wish to affrm the value of the gentler sentiments that women, confned to domestic life, are imagined to represent. Carol Gilligan, in her infuential book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, 2 found that women evince a stronger sense of caring for others than men do. That this disparity is due to early socialization is highly plausible, but Gilligan’s position has been the subject of considerable controversy, particularly on the part of those who detected in her argument a genetic basis for the differences.
As the chapters in the present volume make abundantly clear, Byzantine writers emphasized and sustained such a gendered dimorphism in the ascription of emotions. But, as we have noted, such ideologically informed discriminations are inherently unstable, as gendered identities are muddled and inverted (think of the complex role of the eunuch, explored in Shaun Tougher’s chapter in this volume).
In this way, they expose the social pressure that is required to maintain them—the work of defning women precisely as emotional, when emotion is conveniently contrasted with reason and self-control, as opposed to the noble fear and righteous rage that is presumed to characterize real men. But it is time to let the texts, and the scholars who have interpreted them, speak for themselves, as they illustrate in rich abundance the manifold ways of the sexing of emotions in the Byzantine world.
David Konstan New York University , New York, USA.
Preface
The emotionally charged Koimesis of the Virgin adorning the Church of Panagia Phorbiotissa in Cyprus, which appears on the cover of the present book, would have been just as familiar an image for the Byzantine faithful as it is for today’s visitors to the church. To both past and present congregations, it conveys a powerful message of grief and lament over the Virgin’s death, emphasised by a dramatic bodily and gestural visual grammar.
Whether the men and women partaking in the liturgy, or entering the church for any other devotional reason, would have taken or do take the gender aspects refected in the spatial division according to each sex into account is a matter of conjecture. As they are ultimately formed within a given society, emotions can teach us specifcally something about gender aspects in Byzantine society and generally about social normative ethics, values, and ideals.
Of course, any work on emotions and gender can inform both textual and artistic research and interdisciplinary inquiry. It is thus the goal of the present volume to mine the gender dimensions of emotions and the emotional aspects of gender within Byzantine culture and to suggest possible readings of such instances. Most of the chapters collected in the present volume were developed from papers delivered during two panels convened by the editors at the 2015 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK, entitled “Emotions in Byzantine Culture,” the editors’ research that centres on emotive and gender issues in Byzantine literature and art, and the work of some established scholars in the volume’s felds who kindly agreed to provid their own contributions.
This collection celebrates the current breadth of Byzantine gender studies while at the same time contributing to the emerging feld of Byzantine emotion studies. Furthermore, the editors rejoice in the collaborative nature of both disciplines and the range of interests of the various scholars, with contributions from the felds of political and cultural history, philology, literary studies, material culture, and art history.
The volume offers the reader an array of perspectives encompassing various sources and media, including historiography, hagiography, theological writings, epistolography, novels, manuscripts, art objects, and illuminated manuscripts. The chapters cover a time span ranging from the early to the late Byzantine historical periods. The volume’s diversity is secured by an expanded and enriched exploration of its unifying theme of gendered emotions.
The breadth and scope of the collected articles also refect the ways in which Byzantine gender and emotion have been studied thus far, while at the same time offering novel approaches that challenge established opinions in Byzantine studies. The editors wish to thank the organisers of the International Medieval Congress at Leeds. We would also like to thank all of the contributors to the volume along with their sponsoring organisations. Concerning the contributors in particular, we are grateful to them for both their insightful and creative essays and their keen response to and support of this project. We would also like to warmly thank Evelyn Grossberg for her admirable editorial work.
Our thanks go also to our institutions— the University of Cyprus and the Open University of Israel—which have supported us fnancially both for travel to the IMC conference and by covering the volume’s editorial costs. Last but not least, the editors wish to thank Oliver Dyer for his guidance and help, as well as the volume’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. Nicosia, Cyprus Ra’anana, Israel April 2018 Stavroula Constantinou Mati Meyer
Notes on Contributors
Andria Andreou is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cyprus, Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, specialising in Byzantine Greek narrative literature. Her Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘The Holy Double: Identity, Desire, and Holiness in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Couples’ (defended in 2017) looked at how a hagiographic text’s two protagonists interacted with each other and how their relationship was staged by using Lacanian psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender and kinship identities. Diliana Angelova is an Associate Professor in the Departments of the History of Art and History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is primarily interested in the history of ideas and the role of women in ancient societies. By taking gender and material culture seriously, she seeks to reframe the traditional male- and literary-centred way in which such fundamental subjects as Roman imperial power, early Christian art, and romantic love have been defned in scholarship. She is the author of Sacred Founders: Women, Men, and Gods in the Discourse of Imperial Founding: Rome Through Early Byzantium (University of California Press, 2015).
Valentina Cantone is an Associate Professor of the History of Medieval Art at the University of Padua, Department of Cultural Heritage. She teaches Art History and the History of Byzantine and Western Medieval Art. Her research interests focus on Byzantine art, especially Christian iconography, Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, art historiography, and multidisciplinary approaches in mosaic studies.
Stavroula Constantinou is an Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Cyprus, Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Her research focuses on Byzantine Greek narratives, particularly hagiography, gender, ritual, and performance, and she has published many studies on these subjects. She is currently working on a monograph on miracle story collections.
Andriani Georgiou received a Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies from the University of Birmingham. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Open University of Cyprus, where she teaches modules on Byzantine History and Byzantine Art.
Charis Messis holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies from Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and teaches at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests concern Byzantine history and literature, especially the history of gender, along with other social and anthropological aspects of the Byzantine world. He is author and co-editor of several books and articles on related topics.
Mati Meyer is an Associate Professor at the Open University of Israel. She has published many articles on Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, as well as a book, entitled An Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art (London: Pindar Press, 2009). With Katrin KogmanAppel, she edited the volume Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Among her current projects is a monograph on gendered representations of the female body and its reception in the Middle Byzantine illuminated book. Leonora Neville is the J. and J. Rowe Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies the intersections of gender, authority, and classicism in Byzantium.
Ingela Nilsson is a Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. She has worked extensively on Byzantine literature, especially of the twelfth century, with a particular focus on erotic discourse in a narratological and diachronical perspective. Among her publications are Plotting with Eros: Essays on the Poetics of Love and the Erotics of Reading (ed. 2009).
Shaun Tougher is a Reader in Ancient History at Cardiff University. He has published extensively on Julian the Apostate, the Macedonian dynasty, and eunuchs. He is also interested in the reception of these subjects.
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