Download PDF | The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium By Mati Meyer Charis Messis, Routledge 2024.
550 Pages
This Handbook is the first to consider the interrelated subjects of gender and sexuality in the Eastern Roman Empire from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on both modern theories and Byzantine perceptions, and considering multiple periods and religions (Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish), it provides evidentiary textual and visual material support for an analysis of the two linked themes. Broadly, the essays demonstrate that gender and sexual constructs in Byzantium were porous. As a result, they expand our knowledge of not only how sex and gender were conceived and performed but also how ideas and practices shaped Byzantine life. The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium will be an indispensable guide for students and scholars of late antique and Byzantine religion, history, culture, and art, who will find it a useful critical survey of current scholarship and one that shines new light in their areas of research. The focus on issues of gender and sexuality may also be of interest to individuals concerned with Eastern Mediterranean culture, as well as to the broader public.
Mati Meyer received her PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a faculty member at the Open University of Israel. She has published extensively in articles and a monograph and co‑edited books on women, realia, emotions, corporeality, gender and sexuality, and biblical reception in Byzantine art, including Emotions and Gender in Byzan‑ tine Culture, edited by Mati Meyer and Stavroula Constantinou (2018) and Between Juda‑ ism and Christianity: Art‑Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel Neher, edited by Katrin Kogman‑Appel and Mati Meyer (2009).
Charis Messis holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies from Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a habilitation from the Sorbonne University. He is now teaching Byzan‑ tine Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. 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, including Storytelling in Byzantium: Narratological Approaches to Byzantine Texts and Images, edited by C. Messis, M. Mullett, and I. Nilsson (2018).
CONTRIBUTORS
Eirini Afentoulidou is a Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research/Department of Byzantine Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (or, Institut für Byzantinis‑ tik and Neogräzistik–Universität Wien). Her research interests include textual criticism, language analysis, manuscript studies, Byzantine theological literature, and gender studies. She currently works on childbirth‑related prayers in Byzantine prayerbooks (Euchologia).
Ilias Anagnostakis (PhD History, University of Paris‑I Panthéon‑Sorbonne) is a Research Director Emeritus at the Institute of Historical Research (Programme of Everyday and Social Life) of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens (NHRF), Greece. His research interests and many publications (books and articles) focus on everyday and so‑ cial life in Byzantium, popular poetry, perceptions and attitudes, Byzantine Peloponnese and Byzantine gastronomy and wine, olive oil, honey, and dairy production. Currently, he works on ‘Chrysothemis’, a database (NHRF) of food preparation methods in Byzantium.
Diliana Angelova teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, US, and studies Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantine art and visual cultures. Her scholarship seeks to advance three basic goals: to illuminate the cultural and artistic continuities between the polythe‑ istic/pagan and the Christian eras in the Ancient Mediterranean; to apply gender analyses to large historical questions; and to mobilise visual and material remains in order to chal‑ lenge the entrenched literary‑ and male‑centred reconstructions of historical events and processes. Her first book, Sacred Founders: Women, Men, and Gods in the Discourse of Imperial Founding, Rome through Early Byzantium (UC Press, 2015), offered a gendered and longue durée analysis of the conceptualisation of Roman imperial power. She is cur‑ rently at work on a monograph on the continuity of Greco‑Roman art.
Roland Betancourt is a Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, US. His research focuses on the Byzantine Empire, including its art, liturgy, and theology, with an interest in issues of sexuality, gender identity, and race. Betancourt is the author of three monographs, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as several edited volumes. His work also looks at the uses of the medieval past in the modern world, from its abuses by the far right to its representations in art and popular culture.
Leslie Brubaker (Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies/University of Birmingham/emerita) has published widely on Byzantine gender and culture. Her most re‑ cent book is the edited volume Global Byzantium (2022), and she is currently working on processions, the material culture of poverty, and the Life of St Mary of Egypt.
Damien Casey is a Lecturer in Theology at the Australian Catholic University, in the Fac‑ ulty of Theology and Philosophy. He holds a PhD on philosophies of difference in the work of Luce Irigaray from the University of Sydney, published as Flesh Made Word: Theology after Irigaray (2010). His other publications reflect his interest in the intersection between theology and philosophy, from the early Christian centuries to the postmodern age.
Béatrice Caseau Chevalier is Full Professor in Byzantine History, in the medieval section of the History Department at Sorbonne University, Paris, France. She was the director of a re‑ search cluster on Religions and Society in the Mediterranean (Labex RESMED 2015–2021). She is now a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on religious and social history. She has published 10 articles on childhood and also books on food culture, religious rituals and the senses. Her most recent publications on childhood are: ‘The Child in Late Antique Religion and Ritual’, in Children in Antiquity: Perspec‑ tives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. L. Beaumont, M.P.J. Dillon, and N. Harrington (London: Routledge, 2020), 397–412; ‘Sainteté et enfance (An‑ tiquité tardive et monde byzantin)’, in L’infanzia nel alto medioevo (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2021), 737–762; ‘Too Young to be Account‑ able: Is 15 Years Old a Threshold in Byzantium?’, in Coming of Age in Byzantium: Adoles‑ cence and Society, ed. D. Ariantzi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), 19–28. With Charis Messis, she published ‘Το παιχνίδι στο Βυζάντιο: εξερευνώντας τα άτακτα προεφηβικά παιχνίδια (Le jeu à Byzance: exploration des jeux désordonnés de la preadolescence)’, Αρχαιολογία 133 (2020): 34–41.
Stavroula Constantinou is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Medieval Arts and Rituals of the University of Cyprus. She has established a diamond open access and peer‑reviewed international journal (Eventum: A Journal of Medieval Arts and Rituals; first issue in 2023). Constantinou is also a member of the European Cultural Parliament and Cor‑ responding Member of the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Bamberg. She is the coordinator of the H2020‑twinning project ‘Network for Medieval Arts & Rituals’ and the principal investigator of 2 projects (‘Lactating Breasts: Motherhood & Breastfeeding in Antiquity & Byzantium’ and ‘Storyworlds in Collections: Toward a Theory of the Ancient & Early Byzantine Tale’) which have been funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Foundation of Research & Innovation. She has published extensively on Byzantine hagiography, gender, emotions, and ritual. Some of her most recent publications include Metaphrasis: A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products (Brill, 2021), co‑edited with Christian Høgel, and Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), co‑edited with Mati Meyer.
Lynda Garland was a Professor of Ancient and Medieval History at the University of New England, NSW, Australia. She is now an Honorary Research Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. Her main research interests are in the areas of Byzantine Studies and the Crusades. With Matthew Dillon she is also the author of sourcebooks and textbooks on Ancient Greece and Republican Rome used in tertiary institutions worldwide.
Maria Gerolymatou (PhD History, University of Paris‑I Panthéon‑Sorbonne) is a Research Director at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Founda‑ tion Athens (NHRF), Greece. She is interested in the economy of the middle and late Byz‑ antine period and has published several articles on this subject and a monograph entitled Markets, Merchants and Trade in Byzantium from the 9th to the 12th century (2008). She is currently working on the Byzantine Archive of the Monastery of Saint John the Theo‑ logian on Patmos. She had edited the Patriarchal Documents of the Archive (2016) and is preparing the edition of the last volume of the series which will comprise the Private Documents.
Judith Herrin was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham and received additional training in Paris, Munich, and Athens. She was awarded several fellowships and visiting appointments before 1991 when she took up the Stanley J. Seeger Profes‑ sorship in Byzantine History at Princeton University. From there she moved to King’s College London where she remains Professor Emerita and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow attached to the Classics Department. Her major books include The For‑ mation of Christendom (Princeton University Press, 1987), now reprinted as a Princeton Classic (2021); Women in Purple. Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (2001) Byzantium. The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Penguin Books, 2007), available in 12 languages, and Ravenna. Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Penguin Books, 2020), which was awarded the Duff Cooper/Pol Roger Prize for History 2020 and is being translated into 10 languages. In 2002, she was awarded the Gold Cross of Honour by the Hellenic Repub‑ lic; in 2011 she was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Centre for Byzantine Research at the Aristotle University of Thessalonike; in 2012 –13, she was elected President of the International Association of Byzantine Studies, and in 2016, she won the Heineken Prize for History.
Joshua David Holo is the Dean of the Jack H. Skirball Campus of the Hebrew Union College‑Jewish Institute of Religion and an Associate Professor of Jewish History, Los An‑ geles, US. A 2004 recipient of the Koret Foundation Jewish Studies Publication Program subsidy for Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy (Oxford University Press, 2009), he has authored numerous scholarly articles on medieval Jewish history and contrib‑ uted to specialised volumes, most recently ‘Synagogues under Medieval Islam’, in Jewish Religious Architecture, edited by Steven Fine (Brill, 2020). He serves as the editor for the Brill Series on Jewish Studies.
Liz James is a Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. She has been researching and discussing Byzantine gender since the 1990s and has published various articles dealing specifically with women in Byzantium.
Anthony Kaldellis (PhD History 2001, University of Michigan) is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has published many books and articles on topics of Byzantine history, literature, and culture, focusing on the reception of the ancient Greek classics and the survival of Roman identities and political orders. He has also translated many Byzan‑ tine texts into English, especially historians, and is currently writing a new history of the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantine to Mehmet. He is also the host of the academic podcast Byzantium & Friends.
Bente Kiilerich is a Professor of Art History at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She studied classical archaeol‑ ogy and art history at Copenhagen University, where she completed her magister artium and doctoral degrees. A former president of the Norwegian Committee for Byzantine Stud‑ ies, she has published widely on Byzantine, late antique and early Christian art, Greek and Roman art and archaeology, as well as on contemporary classicism. Her research interests include material aesthetics, spolia, Byzantine mosaics, portraiture, polychromy, and fash‑ ion. She is currently the editor‑in‑chief of CLARA – classical art and archaeology. Among her books are Late Fourth Century Classicism in the Plastic Arts: Studies in the so‑called Theodosian Renaissance (1993); The Obelisk Base in Constantinople: Court Art and Im‑ perial Ideology (1998); with Hjalmar Torp, Bilder og billedbruk i Bysants (1998) and The Rotunda in Thessaloniki and Its Mosaics (2016). For articles, book chapters, and other publications, see https://uib.academia.edu/BenteKiilerich.
Maria Leontsini is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Historical Research‑Section of Byzantine Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. She has published on the reign of Constantine IV, as the last emperor of the Early Byzantine period (2006). She has participated as external collaborator in academic programs of historical geog‑ raphy (Seasides of Byzantium. Harbours and anchorages of a Mediterranean Empire, Römisch‑Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz, 2015–2016) and international projects digitising Byzantine cultural heritage objects (Byzart‑Byzantine Art and Archaeology. The‑ matic Channel on Europeana 2017–2019). She has designed and implemented open access digital databases indexing environmental data from Byzantine sources (Domestic and wild fauna in the Greek territory 8th–15th century, Project Anavathmis) and literary evidence on Byzantine relations with the Muslim World. Her articles, reviews, and chapters follow her wide interests across collective and individual behaviours in public and private life, or‑ ganisation of urban and rural space, and natural environment, as also interaction, exchange and cross‑cultural communication in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Henry Maguire is an Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins Uni‑ versity, Baltimore, US. He has also taught at Harvard and at the University of Illinois, Urbana‑Champaign. From 1991 to 1996, he served as the Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. He has authored six books on Byzantine art and co‑authored three more with his wife, Eunice Dauterman Maguire. Together with Ann Terry, he carried out a survey and publication of the wall mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč, which was published in 2007. Throughout his career, he has been interested in the relationships between art and literature in Byzantium, although he has also written on other topics, including ivories, Byzantine secular art, and attitudes toward nature in Byzantium.
Przemysław Marciniak is a Research Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Silesia in Katowice and MZAW‑Gastprofessor für Kulturgeschichte des Altertums at the Ludwig‑Maximilians University Munich (2022–2023). His research focuses on perfor‑ mance, satire, the reception of Byzantium, and animal studies.
Charis Messis holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies from Écoles des Hautes Études en Sci‑ ences Sociales in Paris and a habilitation from the Sorbonne University. He is now teaching Byzantine Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. 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 such topics.
Mati Meyer is an Associate Professor at the Open University of Israel (Department of Liter‑ ature, Language and Arts). She has been publishing on Byzantine women and gender since the early 2000s. She has authored a book, An Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art (London: Pindar Press, 2009), and co‑edited with Katrin Kogman‑Appel, Between Judaism and Christianity. Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel‑Neher (Leiden: Brill, 2009) and Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture with Stavroula Constantinou (New York: Palgrave‑Macmillan, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph dealing with representations of the gendered female body in Byzantine illuminated books.
Bronwen Neil is a Professor of Ancient History in the Department of History and Archaeol‑ ogy at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research focuses on Roman cultural history from the fourth to tenth centuries, with an emphasis on east‑west church relations, letters, gen‑ der, and hagiography. She is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. In 2020, she published two books on epistolography, co‑authored with Pauline Allen: Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form (Cambridge, 2020) and Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church (Washington DC, 2020). Her most recent book is Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad (400‑1000 CE) (Oxford, 2021).
Leonora Neville is the John and Jeanne Rowe Professor of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She is par‑ ticularly interested in religion, gender, and the importance of the classical past for medieval Roman culture. She reconsidered the strength of the famed Byzantine bureaucracy and presented a new understanding provincial government in Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950‑1100 (Cambridge 2004). The study of cultural memories of classical Roman masculinity led her to write Heroes and Romans in Twelfth‑Century Byzantium (Cam‑ bridge 2012). She offered a new interpretation of how the rhetoric of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad worked to portray Anna as a good historian, even though she was a woman, and a good woman, even though she wrote history, and how the modern misinterpretation of those strategies has led to Anna’s reputation as a power‑hungry schemer in Anna Kom‑ nene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford 2016). To help open her field to broader study, she wrote a Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge 2018). Her interpretation of Byzantine Gender was published by Arc Humanities Press in 2019.
Eleftheria Papagianni (Dr. Iuris in 1986) is a Professor of History of Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Law School, where she teaches History of Law and Byzantine Law. Since 1981 she has been participating in the international Research Pro‑ gram for the republishing of Byzantine legal sources at the Frankfurt a.M.‑based Göttingen Academy of Sciences (Max‑Planck‑Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte). She served as the Director of the Program (2008 to 2011) and since then, till the end of the Program (31/12/2020), as member of its Steering committee. She is a member of many Greek and International scientific associations. She has also taught in Seminars in foreign Institutes and Universities (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Centre Pierre Belon, Paris; Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Belgrade) and participated in numerous national and international Congresses and Conferences, in many meetings of which she has chaired. She has written a big number of articles, books, contributions in collective volumes, transla‑ tions, and reviews, in Greek, French, German, and English.
Stratis Papaioannou (National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens) works on Byzan‑ tine literature. He has recently published The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature (2021), Μιχαήλ Ψελλός: Η ρητορική και ο λογοτέχνης στο Βυζάντιο (2021), and Saints at the Limits: Seven Byzantine Popular Legends (2023). Currently, he is completing work on the Life of Theodore of Edessa within the framework of the project Retracing Connections (Uppsala, Odense, Athens).
Maria Parani is an Associate Professor in Byzantine and Post Byzantine Art and Archaeol‑ ogy at the University of Cyprus, where she has been teaching since 2005. Her training as a field archaeologist and as an art‑historian shaped her approach to the study of medieval Byzantium and her interest in the ways meaning was conveyed in art or by secular and re‑ ligious ceremonial through material things, whether actual or depicted. Given the commu‑ nicative power of dress, especially, as a means of constructing and communicating identity, Byzantine attire has been a central focus of her research. This preoccupation with dress, which is hardly ever attested archaeologically, has led her to develop the second main re‑ search axis that defines her scholarly profile, namely the exploration of alternative sources for the study of Byzantine material culture, both written and visual. In addition to this, a significant part of her research in recent years has concentrated on the art and archaeology of Byzantine and Early Medieval Cyprus, from the fourth down to the fourteenth century.
Brigitte Pitarakis holds a doctorate in Byzantine art and archaeology from Paris 1 Sorbonne University (1997), where she also taught for five years (1992–1997). She later earned an Habilitation à diriger des recherches from École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (2020). She is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, since 2002, and specialises in Byzantine metalwork and the Byzantines’s use of objects in daily life, setting them within their artistic, economic, historical, political, religious, and social contexts. She has also published on the occupations, preoccupations, and beliefs of the Byzantines. Her current book project explores Byzantine culture through metalwork. Among Pitarakis’s international collaborations are Artefacts and Raw Materials in Byz‑ antine Archival Documents, an online database for the study of material culture (http:// typika.cfeb.org/index), and Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955, with Olivier Delouis (Istanbul Research Institute, 2022). As scientific advisor to the Istanbul Research Institute of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Pitarakis has curated several popular exhibitions on Byzantine Constantinople for the Pera Museum. She currently serves on the editorial board of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies and, until recently, sat on the board of Revue des études byzantines (2016–2021).
The Reverend Dr. Patrick Viscuso is a Professor of Canon Law at the Antiochian House of Studies and the Pastoral School of the Diocese of Chicago and Mid‑America, an Orthodox canonist, and a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. His doctorate in his‑ torical theology from The Catholic University of America concentrated on Byzantine and Oriental canon law, patristic studies, and church history. He also holds a Master of Divinity from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and five books: A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church (2006), Orthodox Canon Law: a Casebook for Study (2007, 2011 2nd edition), Sexuality, Marriage, and Celibacy in Byzantine Law: the Alphabetical Collection of Matthew Blastares (2008), Guide for a Church under Islam, The Sixty‑Six Canonical Questions Attributed to Theodoros Balsamon (2014), and The True Significance of Sacred Tradition and Its Great Worth by St. Raphael Hawaweeny, A Nineteenth‑Century Ortho‑ dox Response to Roman Catholic and Protestant Missionaries in the East (2017). He has been president of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America.
Alicia Walker (PhD Harvard University 2004) is a Professor of Medieval Art and Archi‑ tecture at Bryn Mawr College. Her primary fields of research include intercultural artistic connections across medieval Afro‑Eurasia (especially between Byzantium and the Islamic world) and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium. Her first mono‑ graph, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Byzantine Impe‑ rial Power, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She is also co‑editor of the essay collection Negotiating the Secular in Medieval Art. Christian, Islamic, Bud‑ dhist (Ashgate, 2009), and the special issue of the journal Medieval Encounters, Mecha‑ nisms of Exchange: Transmission, Scale, and Interaction in the Arts and Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean (Brill, 2012). She has published widely on topics relating to the art of the Byzantine court as well as the role of material culture in the constitution of gendered identities. Her recent publications have appeared in Studies in Iconography and The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture. She is currently at work on her second monograph, provisionally titled The Erotic Eye in Byzantium: Objects, Images, and Sexual Allure in the Eastern Christian World.
Andrew Walker White currently serves in a joint appointment for both the History and Art History, and Religious Studies departments at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. As a Byzantinist with a background in the performing arts, he has spearheaded translations and performances of both Ancient and Medieval Greek poetic texts – most recently, parallel translations of Euripides and the Byzantine‑era Christos Paschon. His first monograph, Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press), addresses the spatial, musical, and anti‑theatrical performance practices associated with the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. In addition to a substantial portfolio as a performing arts critic, he has published numerous articles on performance‑related topics. His research interests include the culture of oral transmission in Ancient Greek Pedagogy, including the dramatic scholia; the post‑Classical Greek performing arts, and he is currently developing a English translation (and contextual analysis) of Choricius of Gaza’s Apologia Mimorum.
Lora Webb received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fel‑ low at ANAMED, Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. Addition‑ ally, she has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and the Stanford Humanities Center. Her research focuses on the intersec‑ tion of visual and ritual culture in the Constantinopolitan court, in particular the role of eunuch courtiers in imperial display.
FOREWORD
Judith Herrin
An Octogenarian Welcome The current debate about presentism in historical research has opened many challenging issues, including the central idea of comparing ancient and medieval historical problems with their apparently modern equivalents. Gender and sexuality feature prominently in such debates because gender is obviously both contemporary and entirely identifiable in medieval written sources, and sexuality is always with us. So in 2024 this volume is totally apposite and most welcome. Its contributors provide a wide range of approaches to prob‑ lems of the Byzantine epoch that continue to resonate today: are angels gendered figures? Do eunuchs have a specific sexuality? Are early Christian women who disguised their female identity in order to pass as male examples of trans people? These are long‑standing prob‑ lems reformulated in the twenty‑first century language that demand re‑examination – an enormously exciting prospect. To encourage this novel exploration, I would like to empha‑ sise the relatively recent changes in attitude and shifts in historical engagement that have led to the current prominence of issues of gender and sexuality – with an inevitably personal account. In the mid‑twentieth century, the field of Byzantine Studies was directed by men, who set chauvinistic and often thoroughly misogynistic agendas for research. They simply did not register the other half of humanity. The basic textbook by George Ostrogorsky had little time for women,1 whereas authors who did mention them followed the model set by Charles Diehl in his frequently reprinted study Figures byzantines. 2 However, even the latter confined themselves to significant elite examples, such as Anna Komnene, a historian in her own right, shoe‑horned into a resentful little girl, while others were treated as princesses in a fairy‑tale fashion. Steven Runciman grasped the significant role women could play with a slightly less dismissive attitude, but Donald Nicol continued the tradition, culminating in The Byzantine Lady. 3 Women who chose to specialise in the field of Byzantine Studies usually opted to deepen the traditional study of institutions, administrative records, and imperial history. They gen‑ erally ignored issues of sexuality in favour of research into archival material, for instance, Germaine Rouillard worked on Athos manuscripts, perforce without seeing the originals.
The church and institutions attracted Alice Gardner, who wrote a serious study of Theo‑ dore, abbot of the Stoudios monastery, and a pioneering book on the Lascarid dynasty of Nicaea; Joan Hussey, who studied the Orthodox Church and prepared the Cambridge Medieval History volume on Byzantium for the 1966 International Conference held in Oxford, and Hélène Ahrweiler – the Lembiotissa monastic archive and the navy. Evelyne Patlagean, the first to tackle poverty and to identify women among the lower classes, was marginalised and then felt banished from the very strong group of Byzantinists in Paris led by Paul Lemerle. Women were more prominent in the field of art history: Alicia Bank, the terrifying di‑ rector of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, had a powerful influence in training many Russian Byzantinists; Erica Follieri, an important philologist, pursued research on manu‑ scripts in the Vatican library with exemplary professionalism; and archaeologists had their role models in women such as Jane Harrison and Kathleen Kenyon. Female scholars of the western Middle Ages fared better with Eileen Power investigating medieval women across class boundaries, though there was a familiar concentration on queens and Jeanne d’Arc. Prejudices against women studying Byzantium persisted. The assumption that girls could not master the necessary skills, not only the Greek language but also numismatics, epigra‑ phy, and palaeography, was widespread. (As an undergraduate I was told that I couldn’t investigate Byzantine social and economic history because I couldn’t read medieval Greek, which is why I went to Birmingham to study the language). In this respect, Greek women had a real advantage and undertook some of the most serious research, for example, Eleni Glykatzi (later Ahrweiler), Angeliki Laiou, and Julian Chrysostomides. They made their careers in Paris, Harvard, and London, respectively, where they provided inspiring training. A shift was underway. In Paris and Munich, women such as Cécile Morrisson and Vera von Falkenhausen were being encouraged and promoted. The student rebellions of 1968– 1969 saw the rise of feminism, partly in response to the misogyny of many revolutionaries, and generated new Marxist theories of class and historical development.4 Further, the seri‑ ous study of women in past eras started to register their long‑term influence – Byzantium began to catch up with such ancient historians as Sarah Pomeroy and Averil Cameron, who had identified writings by and about women. I, too, was involved in the revolt against the very traditional methods of teaching as well as the prevailing assumption that women in Byzantium were not a fit topic for historical research. Although I chose to work on the letters of Michael Choniates for my thesis, which allowed very little space for discussion of women, the rise of feminism and the questioning of male authority inspired my initial work in the field. I was also very fortunate in having encouraging supervisors in the young, energetic, and very supportive Anthony Bryer and, when he went on sabbatical, in the Marxist classical scholar Robert Browning. A feminist invitation from Holland took me to Groningen in 1977 and another to Edinburgh in 1978, where I gave papers on women and the Church.5 This initial effort was dedicated to the identification of women in the Byzantine world who achieved some presence in the surviving sources, despite overriding male authorship. It was a necessary preliminary to a fuller and more balanced interpretation of a long period of historical patriarchy. But the attempt to expand beyond empresses, abbesses, and aris‑ tocratic princesses proved difficult, as was revealed in the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, which covered the last two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In a series of fascicules published between 1976 and 1995, it collected references to named women. But it did not record all those of lower status who were frequently mentioned simply as widows, wives, and mothers of men. The ‘kleine Leute’ were only included in an addendum. A deter‑ mination to include all women, even the anonymae, informed later collections.6 When male historians such as Eric Hobsbawm dismissed the significant impact of femi‑ nism and the study of women, I was provoked to contribute an ambitious piece to a fest‑ schrift for him, ‘Women and the Faith in Icons in Early Christianity’.7 It was criticised (e.g., by Robin Cormack) but appears to have stood the test of time. The oral transmission of skills between generations, so obviously key to traditions of childbirth, breast‑feeding, and educating children, also included ways of expressing devotion in churches, in front of images, and at liturgical performances (especially funeral rites that involve expressive mourning). Moreover, thanks to Averil Cameron, I was encouraged to present an analytical article to the book that resulted from a seminar she ran with Amélie Kuhrt at the University of London.8 ‘In Search of Byzantine Women: Three Avenues of Approach’ signalled the di‑ chotomy between Eve, the first sinner, and Maria, the Theotokos, who gave birth to God in the incarnation of Christ. It also looked at court records that document the activity of women speaking out for their legal rights: the control of their dowries, the marriage gifts they made to their husbands while they lived, which then reverted to the women; control of their inheritances in property and movables, and control and care of their children. In this invigorating period, Marina Warner most fruitfully explored the impossibly con‑ tradictory model of the Virgin Mary for women in a brilliant semi‑autobiographical ac‑ count, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, followed by Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, two books that encouraged new avenues for the study of women from non‑Byzantine perspectives.9 Caroline Walker By‑ num’s Jesus as Mother, published against the recommendation of an established professor of theology, showed how basic assumptions about the male leadership of the early Church were incorrect.10 Not only was Mary an embodiment of womanly power, but St Paul had emphasised the inclusion of all in the Christian community, regardless of status and gender. These widespread concerns generated new research projects. In Sweden, Kari Børresen organised what proved to be a long‑running ERC workshop drawing on pan‑European concerns that explored women’s contributions to Christian life, voiced by female scholars, who brought their own approaches and bibliographies to ex‑ amine the role of the Church in limiting or promoting women’s initiatives. The workshop meetings that took place in a variety of different venues, often in nunneries where accom‑ modation was inexpensive, produced very stimulating discussions, and undoubtedly con‑ tributed to the growth of innovative studies. Like the ERC Transformation of the Roman world seminar, this investigation was singularly important in advancing understanding of the half of humanity so poorly represented in the sources. Kari was also deeply committed to the issue of female ordination, so we often discussed how women could advance to lead‑ ership roles as bishops in the Church of England but not elsewhere (Catholic and Orthodox united in their understanding that the priest who officiates in the service of the Eucharist represents Christ at the Last Supper – so must be male). One result of the seminar was the volume devoted to the Early Middle Ages in the series, The Bible and Women. Franca Ela Consolino and I edited the original publication in Ital‑ ian, now available in English and German, which includes an elegant analysis of ‘kyriarchy’ by Stavroula Constantinou;11 Old Testament models of powerful women in early medieval poetry; female use of the Bible in letter collections; and in the writings of Dhuoda and Hrostvit, which demonstrate a constant engagement by medieval women with the text of the Bible.12 This common practice underlies a more gendered approach to medieval culture east and west, also confirmed in chapters on Jewish and Muslim references to Christian Holy Scripture. In 1980, John Boswell published a fundamental challenge to the study of gender and sexuality.13 Today his claims may have been overtaken by closer analyses, but in 1980 they put the issues of love between men at the centre of the study of sexuality. They reflected the author’s personal commitment in a way that paralleled the feminist identity with the undocumented women of these medieval centuries and was none the less powerful for that. At the time, the term ‘gay’ was criticised – amazing to recall – and some historians refused to countenance the evidence of homosexuality in familiar monastic texts. But this book led to the most positive expansion of the study of sexuality in general, including love between women. Meanwhile, the Byzantine court records were also being exploited by historians who realised the attention given to women by imperial laws – many inherited from the Ro‑ man period and often adapted by later Byzantine legal experts. Joëlle Beaucamp studied these rulings as evidence of patriarchal authority designating specific areas of female domi‑ nance.14 Angeliki Laiou’s studies Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire, Mariage, amour et parenté, and Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage extended and enriched these legal parameters through her commitment to follow how the law was interpreted and imposed.15 Although this research now looks rather restricted to the identification of parameters enclosing female experience, it was an essential step towards the broader and more de‑ manding issue of gender. Again, it is easy to forget that the Oxford Dictionary of Byzan‑ tium published in 1991 had no entry for Gender. Alexander Kazhdan, the originator of this invaluable scholarly aid, also had rather limited interest in sexuality (see, e.g., the entry on Women, although he had written an article on Byzantine hagiography and sex).16 He agreed to include entries on Homosexuality, Eunuchs, and Bestiality, but under the heading Witch, he redirected the reader to Engastrimalos, a male sorcerer. A pioneering article by Catia Galatariotou on women and witches remained an isolated instance and gender as an issue did not feature in the Dictionary. 17 But it was a topic of wider interest to historians of the modern and western medieval world, who led the way in its development. Joan Wallach Scott’s article, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, was the trailblazer that challenged historians, especially those of a Marxist persuasion, who cham‑ pioned class as the most important category, to examine masculinity and femininity more closely.18 Nearly 40 years after its publication in 1986, it is difficult to recall what a major breakthrough this was. It extended the study of men and women, biologically and socially defined, to improved levels of understanding – which were initially brought together in a London seminar, organised by Liz James and Charles Barber, and later published in an important book.19 Averil Cameron’s article, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’, asked the key ques‑ tion: Byzantine gender: still an issue? And answered, most definitely. Her own analysis of how the concept of virginity was used as a metaphor and love was transferred from the secular world to the spiritual realm of love of God showed how important the serious study of gender could be. By 2004, Julia Smith could claim ‘the ubiquity of gender in the ordering of social existence throughout this period’.20 Gender issues were also of great interest to those who studied the Byzantine imperial court, where the eunuch corps wielded considerable power as experts on ceremonial tra‑ ditions, protectors of the women of the imperial family, and educators of the imperial children. Eunuchs also became guardians of the holy places of Islam and the harems of Muslim rulers. The evidence that poor families in the Byzantine Empire considered castrat‑ ing a son at a young age so that he could pursue a career as a eunuch, which was paralleled in China, clearly created a distinct gendered category common to many societies. Other eunuchs were drawn from the ranks of prisoners of war who were castrated as adults (and many presumably did not survive the operation). In addition, individuals who experienced the failure of testicles to develop in adolescence or whose testicles were ‘miraculously’ re‑ moved (such as the ninth‑century patriarch, Methodios) appeared as anomalous men. The concern with gender has been striking. It immediately prompted much closer analy‑ ses of concepts of masculinity, as well as the in‑between status of castrated men, the manly women, so clearly identified in Byzantine sources as another deviant from the norm of ex‑ pected femininity, and manly eunuchs. Kathryn Ringrose’s ‘Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium’ stimulated a much greater attention which continues to initiate investigations into the many aspects of the category of eunuch within medieval societies.21 In Byzantium, the hegemonic masculinity of the ruling class was constantly reaffirmed by reference to the ‘other’ – feminine, slave, barbarian, eunuch, and priest – where perceived ethnic differences and identity politics all created additional reasons for keeping women from attaining or using power. This obliged me to examine those individuals who had wielded authority in Byzantium, not merely as wives of emperors but as shaping agents, in ‘The Imperial Feminine’ and Women in Purple. 22 Much of this research was carried out at Princeton University, where Lawrence Stone had determined to diversify the History Department from its thoroughly white male profile and through his leadership of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center encour‑ aged the novel interests of a younger generation. Working in that exciting environment, I identified three women who played major roles in eighth‑ and ninth‑century Byzantium, combining their supreme power and imperial authority with a feminist grasp of women’s capacity. In turn, Irene, Euphrosyne, and Theodora resolved a deep crisis over Christian representations across a century and negotiated the abandonment of Iconoclasm. This mili‑ tary reform, provoked by Islamic fealty to Mosaic orthodoxy, may have saved the empire from external defeat, but it was unable to sustain the banning of icons against the coordi‑ nated resistance of women and iconophile monks. Despite the paucity of evidence provided by male‑authored texts of the sixth to ninth centuries, it was clear that women who married into the ruling dynasty in Constantinople also took care to preserve their natal family’s origins in shared burial shrines, often monas‑ tic, while insisting on their own commemoration among imperial tombs in the mausoleum attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles. In their assumption of the power of regent for their underage sons, they sustained the dynasty and at the same time asserted their authority to rule. Although the medieval west witnessed similar opportunities for women, in Byzantium the feminine capture of full imperial authority elevated empresses to an un‑ paralleled height. Janina Ramirez makes a neat comparison in the display of women on coins – Empress Irene and the Anglo‑Saxon Queen Cynethryth.23 Women, Men and Eunuchs also contained major articles by Leslie Brubaker on ‘matron‑ age’ (a splendid neologism), on imperial womanhood (Barbara Hill), Salome’s sisters and dance (Ruth Webb), women as outsiders, with special attention to Anna Komnene (Dion Smythe), and masculine identity in Byzantium (Charles Barber). It marked an advance that remains useful nearly 30 years later and deeply influenced my collected essays, Unri‑ valled Influence. In particular, it helped to generate a deeper analysis of masculinity and the multiple identities hidden within the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Under the impact of contemporary Queer Theory, these have exploded into an increasing awareness of is‑ sues related to race and identity, marginality, and same‑gender relations, richly explored in Roland Betancourt’s Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Mid‑ dle Ages.24 Although many historians criticise several aspects, such as his ‘slut‑shaming’ of Empress Theodora, his study of the Ethiopian eunuch captures the intersectionality of race, skin colour, and gender most effectively. Looking back over these six decades, it is clear that gender offers a more complex way of analysing relationships, experiences, and identities, and that contemporary gen‑ der problems fruitfully inspire explorations of similar issues in the past. I am convinced, however, that the historical realities of distant periods demand a respectful appreciation of specific conditions and developments. This is also the case for more recent efforts to study Emotions and Gender in Byzantium and Spacialities of Byzantine Culture, which have greatly expanded the range of gendered research topics.25 The outpouring of new interpretations and methodologies in the study of gender and sexuality is well represented in this volume, full of promise for future research, new discoveries, and previously unad‑ dressed areas of gendered sexuality. Let us hope that the impressive speed of advance in this field indicates that it has become a fixture in medieval studies because there is so much more to be done. My very warm welcome to this collection and thanks to the editors for making it happen! Judith Herrin Oxford, September 2023
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