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Byzantina Symmeikta, 2022
The Byzantinist community welcomes the present attractive volume that brings together scholars from various fields, including anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, history, and philosophy, and aims to approach the lives of the nonelite women from the late Roman to post Byzantine era through their precious possessions, working routines, and clothing. The study of ordinary women has been gaining ground, especially in the context of gender studies, to which this collective volume is a welcome addition. Its eleven chapters speak to the life and experience of non-elite women with modern academic tools and, as the subtitle makes clear (p. i), it is through material culture that they attempt to piece together the lives of ordinary women, mainly from the Byzantine period. The dedication (p. v) "Giving voice to those who remain unheard" is inventive, imaginative and stimulates the readers' thought. The lists of figures, plans and tables (p. ix) convey the extent of the material which contributes to the visualization and the documentation of the papers. The list of contributors (p. xvi) indicates the scientific field of the respective authors, showing the interdisciplinary character of the present volume. There are four sections, covering the daily life, work, female interests and general ethnographic approach: Part 1 ("Modest Vanity, Social Identity", pp. 11-79), where archaeological evidence and material objects of ordinary women relating to their personal care are examined. Part 2 ("Working girls", pp. 81-148), focuses on female daily labour routine, through art representations, historical sources and bioarcheology. Part 3 ("Earthly delights, holy concerns, pp. 151-183), worldly female interests, such as dance, meet with the theological perceptions about lay women. Part 4 ("An ethnographic glimpse", pp. 185-213), studies ordinary women
Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Palaeolithic to the Byzantines, 2023
In this book, Guy D. Middleton explores the fascinating lives of thirty real women of the ancient Mediterranean from the Palaeolithic to the Byzantine era. They include queens and aristocrats, such as the Pharoah Hatshepsut and the Etruscan noblewoman Seianti; Eritha and Karpathia, Bronze Age priestesses from the Aegean; a Pompeiian prostitute called Eutychis; the pagan philosopher Hypatia and the Christian saint Perpetua, from North Africa, as well as women from smaller communities. Middleton uses a wide range of archaeological and historical evidence, including burials and funerary practices, graffiti, inscriptions and painted pottery, handprints, human remains and a variety of historical texts, as well as the latest modern research. His volume weaves together the stories of real women, placing them firmly in the spotlight of history. Engagingly written and up-to-date in its scholarship, Middleton's book offers new insights for students and researchers in Ancient History, Archaeology and Mediterranean Studies, as well as in Women's History.
Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies, 2024
In premodern societies, such as Byzantium where the dominant ideology was male-centered, there was much discussion in various texts—moralist, legal, philosophical, religious, medical, and literary—about women’s weakness and inferiority, their “right” social and cultural place, and their responsibilities and rights. At the same time, epigraphic evidence and non-textual sources have much to say about actual women’s daily lives and worlds. However, systematic research on premodern women—in this case Byzantine women—did not start earlier than the 1970s, that is, the time when women’s studies emerged as an independent field. Earlier, Byzantinists (mostly male) did not consider women’s social and cultural roles as historically important. Now women’s studies have been largely replaced by gender studies, yet we are far from achieving a good understanding of Byzantine women’s roles, activities, behavior, treatment, and ideologies as determined by their origin, class, financial status, profession, and familial and health situation within a large period lasting more than a millennium and a huge territory that was changing through time. Most studies on Byzantine women concern urban and particularly Constantinopolitan wealthy women. These are chiefly individual elite women (empresses and women of the aristocracy) and nuns (mostly associated with the upper classes of Byzantine society) of the middle Byzantine period. What unifies all non-slaveByzantine women irrespective of origin and status was their responsibility to become wives, mothers, and caregivers of their children—either on their own or with the help of nurses and servants. All women were also responsible for the household and its invalid or sick members. However, Byzantine women’s familial lives have not yet received systematic scholarly attention. Even though there are many research gaps in the study of Byzantine women, existing scholarship has provided important information about their many achievements: they acted as rulers of the empire; they sustained the economy of a highly military society by running factories, mills, rural estates, and commercial enterprises; they founded monasteries and churches; they built hospitals and orphanages; they commissioned the creation of important monuments, artworks, and manuscripts; they organized literary circles; and they composed texts and music. Although they were acting in an androcentric society, Byzantine women often achieved much more than their male counterparts, a reality that renders their work even more noteworthy. The bibliography provided here constitutes an overview of studies, mostly in English, focusing on various aspects of the lives, representations, and ideologies of Byzantine women.
CIDONCHA-REDONDO, F., "The Role of Women in Shaping the Funerary Landscape of Ostia and Portus"
E. Mataix Ferrándiz, A. López García, A. Álvarez Melero y D. Romero Vera (Eds.), Law and Power: Agents of Social and Spatial Transformation in the Roman West, Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2024, pp. 113-132 , 2024
Depictions of Women in the Works of Early Byzantine Historians and Chroniclers
Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 2017
The aim of this article is to highlight the ways in which women were represented in Byzantine historical works from the sixth to the ninth centuries. These are probably the best sources for a comprehensive understanding of Byzantine society, since they are more vivid, more related to literature than the law codes or archival documents, and less biased than the clergy's writings. Like "Barbarians, " women were thought to be inferior, irrational, highly emotional, and unable to control their impulses. Byzantine women did not seem to have an identity of their own; they were always thought to be a refl ection of a male. Byzantine authors believed that the normal behavior for women was to remain secluded in their houses, but when they actually presented individual women, these were almost always those who did not confi ne themselves to women's quarters. A woman's main avenue of entering written history was to behave like a man, renouncing her gender and acting in an independent manner.
The greater visibility of imperial women in the sources of the 11th and 12th centuries has been largely interpreted as a consequence of the "aristocratisation" of imperial power in the komnenian era 1. While it is undoubtedly true that the kinship structure of komnenian power lent imperial women a prominent role in the transmission, legitimisation and enhancement of the dynasty, one also has to acknowledge that the image and role of imperial women throughout the history of Byzantium has been primarily filtered through the male gaze of Byzantine writers and has depended very much on the genre and quality of their writing. This is equally true of Theodora, wife of Justinian I (527-548), eirene (797-802), Theodora, wife of Theophilos (regent, 842-856) and the empresses of the 11th and 12th centuries. To take just one example, our image of the purple-born Zoe (1028-1050) rests mainly on the unflattering but entertaining portrait of an inept and profligate receptacle for the throne drawn by the talented michael psellos 2. likewise, our perceptions of the beautiful, but ill-fated maria of Antioch, widow of manuel I komnenos (1143-1180) or the unscrupulous but compelling euphrosyne kamatere, wife of Alexios III 1. A. p. kazhdan-A. Wharton epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and twelfth Centuries [The Transformation of the Classical heritage 7], Berkleley-los Angeles-london 1985, 99-102. Cf. also A. laiou, The role of Women in Byzantine Society, JÖB 31/1 (1981) 233-260 [= eadem, Gender, society and Economic Life, hampshire 1992, XI], who identified the 11th century as the period in which elite women began to take on a more visible role. See also l.