Byzantine Gender 9781641890175

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PAST IMPERFECT Past Imperfect presents concise critical overviews of the latest research by the world’s leading scholars. Subjects cross the full range of fields in the period ca. 400—1500 CE which, in a European context, is known as the Middle Ages. Anyone interested in this period will be enthralled and enlightened by these overviews, written in provocative but accessible language. These affordable paperbacks prove that the era still retains a powerful resonance and impact throughout the world today.

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Byzantine Gender Leonora Neville

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© 2019, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds The author asserts their moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copy­right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN (print): 9781641890168 e-ISBN (PDF): 9781641890175 e-ISBN (EPUB): 9781641890182 www.arc-humanities.org Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1. “Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Chapter 2. Medieval Roman Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Chapter 3. Gender and Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Chapter 4. How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Chapter 5. Masculinity and Military Strength . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 6. Change Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

List of Illustrations Figure 1. Thomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence, 1847. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Figure 2. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, Le Sac de Rome en 410 par les Barbares, 1890. . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Figure 3. J. W. Waterhouse, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, ca. 1883. . . . . . . . . . . 10 Figure 4. Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in the play by Sardou. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Introduction

We are about to have lunch. You have to bring your food and beverage of choice because we are not actually in the same place. But the book you are about to read is modelled on those long, wonderful lunches when you can get a friend who is deep in the study of something to open up and tell you what is most important to know about her field. This is my favourite way to approach a new subject. I have no trouble tracking down the big definitive handbooks in the library, but often those books are just more collections of small specific studies that do not really tell you what the animating questions and keys to understanding are. When you can get a friend to stop worrying that the footnote, caveat, and nuance police are going to pop up from behind the salad bar and just tell you what he thinks, you can get a personal take on the entire field that gives you a frame of reference for approaching the articles and books that experts love producing. This book is my lunchtime explanation of what I think would be most helpful for you to know about Byzantine gender so that you can study it further, compare it to your own field, add it to your lectures, or just enjoy a deeper understanding of the world. It deals with Byzantine performance of gender roles, ideas about what was normal for men and women, and how those ideas and performances affected the ways Byzantine people thought they ought to behave and interact with each other. It is based on several decades of studying Byzantine gender both from the perspective of a

2  Introduction social historian, trying to figure out how the dead humans actually got along with one another, and from that of a cultural historian looking at elite texts with tools developed by scholars of literature. I’m telling you what I think, not what I suppose a consensus opinion among scholars would be. Not enough people study Byzantine gender for there to be much consensus. At the same time, I do not expect anything I say here to be particularly controversial. I have focused on the topics where I have something useful to say, but occasionally you will find me offering a question without an answer. I have opted for clarity and forceful expression over hedging and qualifying because you certainly realize that any statement made about the gender ideals of a civilization that lasted for a thousand years is a generalization that has numerous exceptions. I hope to leave you with a clear idea to wrestle with.

Who Are We Talking About? The state we call the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages. The citizens of this empire never doubted that they were Romans who lived in the Roman Empire. By the time the Roman Empire in Italy, North Africa, Spain, and Western Europe disintegrated in the late fifth century, the Eastern Mediterranean had been part of the Roman Empire, administered in the Greek language, for roughly six hundred years and they had all been citizens of the empire for around two hundred and fifty years. Some citizens of the Medieval Roman Empire knew that the first language of the Roman Empire had been Latin, and its first religion had been traditional polytheism, but since the Roman Empire was a political structure, rather than a language or religion, the use of Greek and acceptance of Christianity did not affect their status as the Roman Empire. Since 212, when universal citizenship was granted, being a Roman did not have anything to do with living in Italy or speaking Latin. The Roman identity of the Greek speaking population in the Eastern Mediterranean was not a construct of elite imagination. The use of the term “Romans”

Introduction  3

for Greek speakers became frequent first in the provinces and among less educated authors and only caught on in elite literature centuries later.1 The term “Byzantine Empire” was first used by scholars in the sixteenth century and became common in the nineteenth. In the eyes of those scholars, the real Roman Empire was classical, pagan, Western, and Latin-speaking, and so the medieval, Christian, Eastern, Greek-speaking people who thought they were Romans were simply mistaken. The citizens of the Medieval Roman Empire have been seen by scholars as either Greeks who thought they were Romans, or Byzantines who thought they were Romans. Now that scholars commonly think of communities as constituted by their members’ self-conception, it makes less sense to impute a false consciousness to the subject of our study. Both ancient Greek rhetorical writing and Christian moral teaching had profound influence on Medieval Roman culture. Elite education consisted largely in learning how to write and speak Attic Greek and employ the precepts of classical rhetoric. Medieval Roman culture was profoundly traditional in that models of behaviour taken from ancient Greek, Roman, or Biblical history influenced the way people tried to live their lives. While modern people may assume that pagan Roman morality was radically different from Christian morality, the people of the Eastern Empire developed a fairly seamless appreciation of how their own morality drew on their Greek, Roman, and Christian heritage. These ancient antecedents had strong influence on medieval conceptions of proper gender performance. Ancient and biblical characters provided models for behaviour for medieval people, who saw proper conduct as reenacting the behaviour of positive ancient figures. Understanding the self-conception of these Medieval Romans helps us appreciate the profound continuities between ancient and Medieval Roman culture. If you know a lot about gender in the classical Roman Empire, you already know a great deal about gender in the Byzantine Empire. The differences are largely due to the Christianization of ancient Roman culture. Much of what follows will also seem familiar

4  Introduction to students of early Christianity. Chronologically, this book focuses on the period after Late Antiquity (roughly the third to seventh centuries), with most examples coming from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, when I have greater expertise. I use “Byzantine” when discussing scholarship that has the “Byzantines” as its subject, “Medieval Romans” for the people that I study, and either Medieval Roman Empire or Romanía (their term) for the polity in which they lived. We begin with a look into how traditional interpretations of the Byzantine Empire hinge on negative assessments of Byzantine gender. The second chapter tries to establish the basic parameters of Medieval Roman conceptions of the physical characteristics and moral tendencies of men, women, and eunuchs. The third chapter sketches a few of the main virtues that were incumbent on men and women because of their gender. After this discussion of social ideals, chapter four attempts the far more dicey task of thinking through how real women may have interacted with these norms and found ways to construct positions of authority and autonomy for themselves that simultaneously upheld their culture’s gender paradigms. Chapter five asks how significant martial prowess was in Medieval Roman conceptions and expressions of ideal masculinity. The final chapter addresses the issue of change in gender ideals over time.

Notes 1 Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

Chapter 1

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men

Gender in the Medieval Roman Empire has been rarely examined as such, which is odd given the prominent role played by ideas of gender in creating common images of “Byzantine” society. Since the early ninth century, when Pope Leo and Charlemagne deemed the office of Roman Emperor to be vacant because the Eastern Emperor was a woman, Byzantium has been a foil for Western European cultural self-understanding, and distinctions between east and west were often drawn in terms of gender. Eastern Romans have been seen as less masculine than the Franks and their successors. Western Europeans have perceived Byzantium in various and changing ways, yet two themes are dominant and consistent: the Byzantine Empire was filled with effeminate men and powerful women. Odd gender, by western European standards, lies at the heart of what makes the Eastern Empire seem queer. Eighteenth through early twentieth-century western Euro­­ pean scholars routinely denigrated Byzantine culture as Orien­­ tal, despotic, superstitious, decadent, and culturally stagnant. While these criticisms are well known, we have not appreciated how they all contributed to an implicit gendered critique of Byzantine men as insufficiently masculine. Superstition and extreme religiosity were considered female traits, and so the overly pious Byzantine men were womanish. Faith in crazy miracle stories, magical rituals, or demons marked the believer as devoid of rationality, which was characteristic of men. Byzantines who believed this stuff must have been

6  Chapter 1 more like children and women than men. Oriental despotism was denigrated for instilling slavish behaviour in the servile Byzantines. Again, this is partially a complaint about gender since the problem with servile men is that they take the submissive and docile role that is appropriate to women rather than standing up for themselves like real men. The construction of Byzantium as an Oriental state activated ancient associations of the east with excessive luxury, sexual indulgence, and softness. Going east could cause even a great Roman like Mark Antony to lose his virile strength amidst the temptations of the flesh. Byzantine men were soft simply because they were Oriental. The attack on the supposedly imitative and derivative Byzantine art and culture—the complaint that they mindlessly repeated fossilized forms of ancient culture— rests on an implicit valorization of innovation as real creativity. Whether from painters or poets, originality and invention marked proper masculine creativity, while the aesthetic and decorative crafts of women employed skill but not generative Art. The supposedly mindless Byzantine repetition of the ancient forms shares the denigration of craft work as something lacking in creativity. Another failure of Byzantine masculinity. All of these criticisms have a common grounding in conceiving of ideal masculinity as rational, dominant, creative, and western. The underlying problem Euro­­peans projected onto the “Byzantines” was that they were not proper men. Images of excessively virile women are also prominent in conceptions of Byzantium. Start listing famous Byzantines, and Empress Theodora will be among the top five. She is famous as the woman who had the balls to tell Justinian to fight rather than flee before protesters. This is a story of gender inversion that makes Theodora come across as a heroic, or at least compelling, character to modern audiences. Other less famous Byzantine empresses also “wielded power,” backing up Theodora in the role of Powerful Byzantine Woman. The strong women work with the effeminate men to make Byzantium a negative foil for a properly functioning society. Part of what makes Byzantine society “Byzantine”—that is, devious, convoluted, twisted—is that it is contrived, unnatural, not

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   7

straight. At the root of Byzantium’s not-straight status, is that gender is inverted: men are weak and women strong. Most working Byzantinists think the old derogatory images of Byzantium have long been recognized as wrong and are no longer relevant. Few of them think that their research has much of anything to do with gender, which is still occasionally confused with the history of women. Assumptions and prejudices of which we are unconscious are the ones most likely to deceive us. Given that most Byzantinists think gender has no bearing on their work, they are likely to be oblivious to the ways assumptions about Byzantine gender play out in their research. We have not begun to confront the reality that the Western denigration of Byzantium is a discourse about gender. There are a number of reasons why Medieval Roman people developed their reputation for gender inversion. In part it comes from negative evaluations of contemporaneous Western observers and antagonists. In particular, Western participants of the Crusades cultivated images of the Eastern Roman men as devious, cowardly, and hence unmanly. In some cases, ancient Roman prejudices against wily Greeks were revived. For others, the perception that Emperor Alexios I had not fully supported the First Crusade became a justification for proclaiming the Greeks could not be trusted. Images of Byzantine emperors in crusade historiography depict them as devious, treacherous, not upstanding, not straightforward. Bravery and masculinity are so tightly tied, that I think this is a gendered image. You cannot be both craven and a real man. The medieval Empire also maintained a secular, civilian elite that was unheard of in Western Europe. The extremely militarized medieval western European aristocracy looked at the civilian aristocrats of the Eastern Empire and saw fops who did not conform to their ideals of proper masculinity. In addition to the weight of these medieval witnesses, influential paradigms of history developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also constructed the decline of the classical Roman Empire as, in part, a failure of Roman masculinity.

8  Chapter 1

Figure 1. Thomas Couture (France, 1815–1879); Romans during the Decadence, 1847; oil on canvas, 466 × 773 cm; inv. 3451; with permission of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Excessive luxury had made the Roman go soft, allowing for the conquest of the Empire by the more buff Germanic tribes. This obviously left the Medieval Romans continuing on in a state of non-virility. The effeminacy of Byzantine men was a consequence of their decline from Roman virility and a symptom of Byzantine decadence. Consider the 1883 painting by John William Waterhouse of Honorios and his chickens. The fay, slight, distracted Emperor is surrounded by wornout finery. He concentrates on feeding his chickens rather than on fighting the enemies of the empire. It is a portrait of weakness, deriving from a sixth-century history, but I think it is also a gendered portrait of an effeminate man. The painting is a remarkably accurate reflection of how later Roman emperors were imagined by nineteenth-century Euro­­ peans. Part of what makes a Byzantine not Roman is his lack of masculinity. The gender aspects of the “no longer really Roman” story were compounded by the critique discussed above of Byzantine culture as decadent, Oriental, superstitious, stale, and

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   9

Figure 2. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (Béziers, 1847–Paris, 1926); Le Sac de Rome en 410 par les Barbares, 1890; oil on canvas, 197 × 130 cm; signé et daté b.c. : Sylvestre 1890; inv. 891.3.1; with permission of the Musée Paul Valéry, Sète.

10  Chapter 1

Figure 3. J. W. Waterhouse (Britain, 1849–1917); The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius; London, ca. 1883; oil on canvas 119.3 x 205.0 cm; South Australian Government Grant 1883; with permission of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

derivative. While the terminology of gender was foreign to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western historians, it is now easy to see now how their jeremiads against Byzantine culture are full of complaints about inappropriate gender performance. Briefly taking just one example, Lecky’s 1875 History of Morals holds that Byzantine civilization was characterized by cruelty and sensuality. Its people were, “immersed in sensuality and in the most frivolous pleasures” and their history was “a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.”2 The supposed sensuality and hedonism connect Byzantines with stereotypes of overly libidinous women and the actors of its history did not include virile men. Yet Lecky attributes the origins of poor Byzantine character to the excessive influence of religious asceticism. He contrasted the deleterious effects of asceticism on human character with what he thought was a natural degree of “animal nature” in a healthy human disposition: “good humor,

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   11

frankness, generosity, active courage, sanguine energy, buoyancy of temper, are the usual and appropriate accompaniments of a vigorous animal temperament, and they are much more rarely found either in natures that are essentially feeble and effeminate, or in natures that have been artificially emasculated by penances, distorted from their original tendency, and habitually held under severe control.” His point is that people who have been subject to severe Christian discipline become like those with a naturally feeble or effeminate nature. This line of thought connects the excessive religiosity imputed to Byzantine culture directly with effeminacy. This is just one of many possible examples of descriptions of Byzantium that help construct an image of what a proper man should be: rational, free, creative, energetic, and dominant. Byzantium—a state, don’t forget, that exists only in the western European imagination—became a forum for creating and reinforcing the gender ideals of western Europe. There is a third reason for the Medieval Roman Empire’s reputation for dandies and viragos that is worth discussing in greater depth because it bears on the working methods of contemporary historians. The perception of gender inversion also arises from misunderstanding (or ignoring) the use of gender as a means of characterization in Medieval Roman rhetorical texts. This rhetoric was an art of persuasion, in which the author endeavoured to convince an audience to adopt a particular stance toward the subject or have a particular emotional response. Just about every text surviving from the medieval Empire is trying to convince you of something and get you to feel a particular way about someone. One of the chief tools the rhetoricians had was to portray some characters as good and others as bad. In some texts it is easy to see who the good guy is supposed to be, while others can be extraordinarily subtle and open to multiple simultaneous interpretations. The moral status of the characters is often created through presenting them as having good or bad gender performance. Good men were supposed to be masculine, according to Medieval Roman ideals, and good women were supposed to be feminine.

12  Chapter 1 Traditional models of action, derived from ancient and biblical texts, were deployed by writers as ways of associating characters with positive or negative behaviours and to teach the audience how to act. Nearly all forms of written discourse were in a sense hortatory; written to endorse particular cultural values and promote particular behaviours among the audience. These texts held up ancient and biblical exemplars on which people ought to model their behaviour. Selfhood in Romanía was created and expressed by associating oneself with chosen ancient and biblical models: you expressed your individuality, not by saying how you were different, but who you were like. The use of biblical models in religious liturgy and hymnography means that the cultural production of self through imitation of models was not merely a rhetorical game of educated elites, but a pervasive aspect of society. The upshot is that there is usually a lot going on in a text beyond what lies on the surface. It is not only that the Medieval Roman texts make meaningful allusions to previous texts or stories—although they do that a great deal—but that what can seem as an original, sui generis story in fact fits with, or breaks with, a traditional pattern of behaviour, and that fitting or breaking is intended to send moral messages to the audience. When scholars read these stories without being aware of the patterns that are being played with, they miss some of the texts’ most important meanings. They also are at risk of making too much of some details and not enough of others because they are unaware of what parts of the story are present because they fit, or break with, the ancient or biblical models. Such practices of surface reading, therefore, mean that our accumulated data about Medieval Roman things, people, and events is less accurate than we would like to think. The mismatch between our common reading of Medieval Roman texts and the authorial goals behind those texts is particularly significant for the study of gender because a great many of the ancient and biblical models have to do with the proper performance of gender for men and women. Interpretations of gender norms are far more likely to be skewed by

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   13

surface readings of texts than assessments of, say, the use of horses. So, while we have compiled many stories about things Medieval Roman women and men did, we have a long way to go to understand what those stories really mean, and what the formation of character through imitation of ancient biblical models meant for the lived reality of Medieval Roman people. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were raised on much of the same body of ancient Greek, classical Roman, and biblical literature that contained the ideals that were models for Medieval Romans, but they were not attuned to how Medieval Roman authors interacted with those models. They instinctively recognized particular behaviours as either morally good or morally bad, according to ancient and biblical precepts, but missed how medieval authors attributed bad behaviour to one character for particular purposes, such as leading the audience to a specific political conclusion, or to burnish the reputation of a different character. Medieval Roman texts can seem full of weak men and powerful women because the authors were either exhorting their audiences not to be that way or using exaggerated immorality to score political points. Within the tradition of Medieval Roman history writing, in particular, authors were expected to be critical of emperors. The charge of sycophantism is the most ill-fitting of those made against the intellectuals of the Eastern Empire. The pages of Medieval Roman histories may be full of wimps and viragos, but it is a complete misreading of these texts to think that the authors approved of effeminate behaviour in men or female empowerment. The perception of Byzantium as a queer civilization stricken with twisted gender practices arises from reading texts that wield poor gender performance as a political weapon as if they upheld that behaviour as both morally appropriate and prevalent. The effect of this pervasive misapprehension of the data is perhaps greater on the study of masculinity because scholars have hardly ever taken male gender as a topic for inquiry. We tend to study women, sometimes eunuchs, but most of the time simply “Byzantines,” by which we mean Medieval Roman men. We generally have not been attuned to how

14  Chapter 1 texts denigrate or praise a man’s character through descriptions of his performance of gender. Stories that I would see as designed to exalt or denigrate a man’s masculinity appear in our scholarship as just stories about things that really happened. When we start paying attention to masculinity as a category of analysis, I expect that some of our basic political narratives will change. As an example of how Medieval Roman texts played with gender ideals, let’s take Theodora, the most famous of all Byzantine women. She is one of the most prominent cases of a woman depicted in a history as performing her gender badly in order for the historian to make a political point. Theodora was the wife of Emperor Justinian (527–565) who endeavoured to reconquer the Western Roman Empire and ruled at the time of the devastating outbreak of the bubonic plague. Theodora has two big scenes that figure prominently in any introductory course on Byzantine history. The first concerns her life before she married Justinian, in which she was a lowlife actress and prostitute. This story comes from Procopios’s Secret History, an invective account that savages Justinian’s character and policies. The second is a scene from Procopios’s Wars, in which Theodora prevents Justinian from fleeing riots in Constantinople that threatened their rule by goading him to take military action. In modern visions, such as the 1884 play written as a star vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, these two images are woven together to create a portrait of a strong woman who overcame multiple obstacles on her road toward power. In this story Theodora is heroic because of her strength and compelling because of her meteoric rise from poverty to the imperial throne. The modern appeal of the Theodora story is based on a different set of assumptions about gender and virtue than those which underpinned Procopios’s two texts. The story of her strengthening Justinian’s nerve is heroic, if one is rooting for Justinian and not the protesters in the hippodrome. The Wars is an ostensibly positive text about Justinian’s attempts to reconquer the Western Roman Empire, but beneath a veneer of politeness it contains sig-

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   15

Figure 4. Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in the play by Sardou. Photo W. & D. Downey.

16  Chapter 1 nificant criticisms of Justinian’s enterprise. The setting of Theodora’s speech is a military council between Justinian and his generals in which they consider whether it would be best to flee the city. She begins her intrusion by explaining that now is not the time to worry about whether women ought to speak in military councils, and goes on to make a vigorous, if entirely personal, case for standing firm: The impropriety the woman speaking boldly among men or stirring up those who were cringing in fear is hardly, I believe, a matter that the present moment affords us the luxury of examining one way or another. When you reach the point of supreme danger nothing else seems best other than to settle the matter at hand in the best possible way. I believe that flight, now more than ever, is not in our interest even if it brought us to safety. For it is not possible for man who is born not also to die, but for one who has reigned it is intolerable to become a fugitive. May I never be parted from the purple! May I never live to see the day when I am not addressed as Mistress by all in my presence! Emperor, if you wish to save yourself, that is easily arranged. We have much money; there is the sea; and here our ships. But consider whether, after you have saved yourself, you would then gladly exchange safety for death. For my part, I like that old saying, namely that kingship is a good burial shroud.3

This speech roused the men to action, and Justinian sent military troops into the hippodrome where they slaughtered some thirty thousand protesters. Procopios gives the audience plenty of information with which to draw the conclusion that this was not in fact a glorious moment in Roman history. The old saying to which Theodora referred was known from histories of Dionysius, the infamous tyrant of ancient Syracuse. Like Justinian, Dionysius faced violent riots early in his reign. He was counselled by one of his courtiers to stay and fight because, “tyranny is good burial shroud.” Those in Procopios’s audience who knew ancient history well would certainly recognize that Theodora was defending tyranny, and that Justinian was perhaps just as bad as Dionysius had been. This scene plays with Roman ideas of ideal gender in that Theodora acted with the boldness and courage was supposed

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   17

to be characteristic of men, while the men cowered with the fear that was supposed to characterize women. This puts the men to shame, which causes them to strive to uphold their masculinity, which they do by taking violent action against their enemies. From the late Roman perspective, Theodora functions in the scene both to point out how wimpy Justinian was and to implicate him in violent and tyrannous behaviour. Her boldness points out his timidity. This is a story of disrupted and inverted gender ideals. Aspects of this scene are repeated not infrequently through­­­ out Byzantine history, sometimes in ways that clearly echo Procopios, and others that simply play with the ten­­sion over whether a woman should give political advice. The repetitions of the scene are grounded in the idea that women should be concerned with domestic matters, and not with men’s sphere of politics and war. In the scenes that most closely mimic Theodora’s, the women are unsuccessful in getting the men to listen to them. In that they refuse to be influenced by their wives however, the men appear resolute and prudent. The story becomes a nice thing to say about a man who is losing power. When the tenth-century historian Genesios narrates the abdication of Michael I, in 813, he describes how Michael’s wife, Procopia, argues that he should fight for the throne, saying, “royalty was a good shroud.” Michael abdicated anyway, and was remembered as a peaceable man. Similarly, in the eleventh-century history of Michael Psellos, when Emperor Isaac I abdicates, his wife Aikatherine makes an impassioned speech arguing that he should cling to power. Isaac brusquely dismisses this advice as womanly pleading and proceeds with his plan to install another man as emperor. When the story is told again several decades later in the history of Nikephoros Bryennios, Isaac is described as offering power first to his brother Ioannes Komnenos, who declines. In this version, Ioannes’s wife Anna Dalassene is the one who begs her husband to take up the throne. Like Michael and Isaac, Ioannes ignores his wife’s advice and passes on the opportunity to rule.

18  Chapter 1 All three versions of the story seem intended to be read against Procopios’s story of Theodora advising Justinian. While Justinian listened to his wife’s goading, and secured his rule through the deaths of thousands of protesters, these men took the moral high road through their decision to step down. By recalling Justinian’s story, these historians remind their audience that these men might have been able to keep power had they been utterly ruthless. In addition to showing that they opted out of tyrannical slaughter, however, the mere act of ignoring their wives makes them look strong. Particularly in the deft authorial hands of Michael Psellos, the scene in which Isaac resolutely dismisses his wife’s pleading serves to construct him as a man of authority, strength, and calm good judgment. Psellos makes Isaac look good, even when he is the act of giving up on his political career, by presenting him as having the strength of will to ignore his wife. Nikephoros borrows this rhetorical ploy in an effort to make Ioannes seem strong while excusing him for passing on the opportunity to become emperor. They may have been stepping down, but at least they stood up to their wives. The speeches of Aikatherine and Anna Dalassene pop out of their texts as rare moments in which women speak, and initially they can seem like evidence that women participated in decision-making processes and were active in politics. But given how their speeches serve as ways of making their husbands look strong—even in their moments of weakness—it is not appropriate to take the speeches as data on the actual lives and experiences of these women. The speeches by Aikatherine and Anna let us know that people in the eleventh and twelfth centuries thought it was entirely inappropriate for women to try to influence political councils; so much so that a man could look powerful merely by ignoring his wife’s advice. So these episodes teach us about Medieval Roman gender ideals, but not, I believe, about anything Aikatherine or Anna said, or even how they really got along with their husbands. The personal gender ideals of the scholars looking at Byzantine history are revealed in whether those observers are rooting for the women to break the bonds of patriarchy or

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   19

castigating the men for their failure to step up and assert themselves. Before the middle of the twentieth century, the most commonly expressed attitudes mirrored those of Procopios: the occasional strength of the Byzantine Empresses proved the deficiency of their sons and husbands. In a far more general sense, the notion that women and eunuchs held power in Byzantium was enough to convince many people that the empire lacked real men. The powerful women of Byzantium have contributed inextricably to the empire’s reputation for corruption and perversion of the “natural” order. The flip side of the overbearing empress is the pushover emperor. Emperor Justinian is easily one of the most famous and widely discussed of the Byzantine emperors and his story contributes significantly to the image of Byzantine men as effeminate. The reason for this is simple: he was standing next to Theodora. Just as Procopios intended, the bold and transgressive actions of Justinian’s fight-hungry wife make him look like a passive weakling. That he eventually steps up and orders his soldiers to suppress the protests via mass murder does not do much to redeem him as a virtuous masculine leader. Rather he is remembered as the man whose wife told him what to do. The extravagant bloodshed that ensues from Theodora’s goading depicts Justinian as lacking in self-restraint. Justinian helps give Byzantium its reputation as a place ruled by emperors who were cruel and fundamentally craven. Another difficulty for the reputation of Byzantine men is that Medieval Roman historians, understanding their job as recording just criticism of their rulers, often disparaged ineffective emperors and generals in highly gendered terms. This is particularly true for the widely read history of Niketas Choniates. After the exploits of Justinian (traditionally taken as marking the last gasp of antiquity), interest in Byzantine history generally fades until the age of the Crusades when one inevitably encounters the Choniates’s history of the twelfth century. After Procopios’s Secret History, this is the text that heaps the most criticism upon the eastern emperors, but whereas Procopios’s only criticized Justinian, Choni-

20  Chapter 1 ates criticized all the emperors who ruled in the second half of the twelfth century, many of their ministers, and indeed his entire society. This criticism often takes the form of accusing men of being effeminate. For instance, he attributes the loss of the Roman provinces of Phrygia and Pisidia to the “softness and feminine domesticity” of the Roman rulers who could not be bothered to work hard and face dangers to protect their territory.4 When Corinth was sacked by the Normans, its commander was called “more effeminate than a woman.”5 Alexios Angelos was led around by the machinations of his mannish and immodest wife. Choniates disparages these and other leaders by attacking their masculinity. His overt claims that they were effeminate are frequently coupled with descriptions of men as incontinent in their sexual relationships, which as we shall see, was another way of undermining their masculinity. One reading Choniates’s history will easily get the impression that Byzantine men were emasculated fops who spent all their time trying to have too much sex with the wrong women. The background warrant of this criticism is that men ought to be brave, active, strong fighters who are sexually con­­ tinent. The criticism would only work in a culture that had a strict sexual morality and that valued aggressive courage in men. Choniates wants us to think that the men he castigates failed to embody these virtues. His criticisms may have been true. But to conclude that slothfulness, softness, timidity, and licentiousness were the moral norm for men in Medieval Roman society is a clear misreading. Similar examples could be drawn from a great many other Medieval Roman texts. To a considerable extent, the perception of the Eastern Empire as a place with strong women and weak men is a reflection of critical commentary by writers who were themselves deeply committed to an androcentric morality in which men ought to be dominant and women ought to be submissive. Regardless of the intentions of the Medieval Roman authors, the takeaway for most readers—for hundreds of years—has been that Byzantine men were effeminate, treacherous, and immoral. Readers who become acquainted

“Byzantine” People: Powerful Women and Wimpy Men   21

with Byzantium by reading Procopios and Choniates, perhaps stopping also to read Anna Komnene’s story of the First Crusade, are quite likely to get the impression that women wore the boots in this culture and the men were squishy. No wonder “Byzantium” conjures up images of intrigue, salaciousness, and perversion. * * *

Yet, since this reputation seems to derive in large part from misunderstanding the lessons rhetoricians intended to be drawn from their writing, it is not at all clear that it accurately reflects Medieval Roman society. We need a full-scale rereading of the evidence that is attuned to Medieval Roman ideas about proper gender performance. Before we can work out how the citizens of the Empire actually thought about gender, we need to understand the relationship between rhetoric and moral formation that drives the authorial choices of our surviving texts. To help in this, we turn next to the task of developing a view of Medieval Roman anthropology that can encompass their ideas of biology, nature, and moral development.

Notes 2 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals: From Augustus to Charlemagne (New York: Appleton, 1873), 13. 3 Anthony Kaldellis and H. B. Dewing, trans., Wars of Justinian (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 64. 4 Jan van Dieten, ed., Nicetae Choniatae historia, pars prior (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 72. 5 Van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae historia, 75.

Chapter 2

Medieval Roman Anthropology

Both physiological differences between men and women and what we would consider culturally constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity were thought to be products of nature. As such, they were the given constraints within which human lives were bounded. But nature was not always immutable. The practice of creating eunuchs allowed humans to modify the physical development of the male body. The supposedly natural inclinations and cognitive proclivities of men and women were open to manipulation through ethical effort or training. Medieval Roman conceptions of gender were formed, on the one hand, by a set of beliefs about male and female human nature, and on the other, by the conviction that humans had moral agency to modify their performance of their gender for good or ill. Nature dealt each human a hand at birth by endowing him with a male body and a proclivity toward steadfastness or her with a female body and a proclivity toward fickleness (for example). Yet those humans were not helplessly bound to live out those dispositions in their lives. Medieval Roman texts abound with stories of women overcoming their natural weaknesses and men whose vices make them unnaturally weak. Stories of female ascetics who so far conquered their nature that they passed as male monks were perennially popular and witnessed to a measure of human control even over the manifestation of physiological aspects of gender. The bonds of nature were powerful and the hand one was dealt at birth was clearly the central deter-

24  Chapter 2 minant of one’s life path. Nevertheless, belief in the power of human moral agency made the performance of gender by Medieval Romans much more than merely a matter of doing what came naturally. To understand Medieval Roman gender, therefore, we need to establish what they thought was given by nature, what was open to human manipulation, and the ideal moral and physical gender virtues to which they strove. This chapter takes on nature and its manipulation: what Medieval Roman people believed to be natural about the physical differences between male and female bodies, and about male and female spiritual and mental proclivities and inclinations, as well as conceptions of the processes of moral and ethical formation. This background will set us up to understand gender ideals in the following chapter. Medieval Roman conceptions of human biology were based mostly on the medical teachings of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and above all Galen (129–210 CE). We have more Medieval Roman copies of Galen’s medical treatises than any other author from antiquity, indicating that his medical ideas were pervasive.6 In this medical tradition health was brought about by keeping four humours—heat, cold, moisture, and dryness—in balance. Within this system men were considered naturally warm and women cold. The flesh of men is naturally hard and dry, while that of women, children, and eunuchs is naturally soft and moist. The foods one consumed should match the natural tendencies of one’s body. So children and women should eat cool, moist foods, and men warm, dry foods. Byzantine medical treatises contain long lists of foods categorized as hot, cold, moist, or dry. Since men and women had to eat different kinds of foods to be healthy, eating was a gendered activity. Galen taught that humans were the most perfect of all animals, and that men were more perfect than women for the reason that they had more natural heat. All human embryos initially had the same generative organs but when an embryo had sufficient heat, the penis and testicles would descend and project outside of the body, whereas when an embryo

Medieval Roman Anthropology  25

had insufficient heat they would remain inside the body becoming ovaries and a vagina. The lack of heat prevented some embryos from developing perfectly to maleness. Galen consistently discusses female characteristics as imperfect versions of male physiognomy.7 Childbearing was considered the natural goal of a woman’s existence. Galen explains that the reason Nature allowed half of the human embryos to become women is that their underdeveloped genitalia were necessary for procreation. In describing how the sisters of an ineffective emperor were not allowed to marry, an eleventh-century author says, “he did not even allow the girls, who were ripe for marriage, to unite with a husband in lawful matrimony and dedicate themselves to their natural duties.”8 Preventing the girls from marrying is here presented as a crime against nature. Having children was what women were for. This medical theory posits masculinity as, physiologically speaking, something that a male child grows into and that an elderly man may grow out of. Throughout the course of a lifetime the amount of heat a body has can change. When a male child goes through adolescence, his body becomes progressively drier, warmer, and harder. This increase in heat makes him a man. As people age they can become colder. So men could lose some of their masculine characteristics. Young men could be described as “becoming perfected in being a man,” reflecting the idea that masculinity was something that a boy grew into.9 Eunuchs began life as male children but were deprived of their testicles before puberty. They grew to be tall and longlimbed, with little musculature, no facial hair, and high, childlike voices. They aged quickly and died young, which modern doctors attribute to “cardiac and skeletal problems connected with prolonged testosterone deprivation.”10 Eunuchs shared the moist, cool humours with women and children. Galen taught that eunuchs became like women because they lacked heat and they lost the masculinity and virile strength of men.11 Eunuchs were destined by nature to become men, just like pre-pubescent boys, but they remained perpetually

26  Chapter 2 not-men whereas the boys eventually hardened up and dried out. Eunuchs were thus fundamentally male, but lacked the virility, heat, and generative capabilities of men. Such a theory of human physiology makes it reasonable to understand masculinity as a matter of degree rather than an absolute attribute one either has or not. An adult male is a physiological ideal to which women, male and female children, and old men fell short. Medieval Roman ideas about the natural bodily excretions and defilement are various. From commentaries on canon law we learn that seminal emission was considered a natural bodily function that in no way should impede a man from participating in holy Communion. The nocturnal secretion of semen (without masturbation) is likened in the Canon commentaries to sweat and excrement that do not cause ritual impurity. If a man, however, indulging in an evil desire, had caused the emission through fantasy or masturbation, he needed to perform repentance before participating in the divine mysteries.12 The general principle that defilement is a consequence of sin rather than bodily processes is contradicted by interpretations of canon law on menstruation. A woman’s menstrual flow was considered a cause of impurity that barred women from participation in Eucharist. Women’s secretion of menstrual fluid was ritually defiling, a view formally inconsistent with the canonists’ theological stance that nothing created by God is impure by its nature. The idea that menstruation was defiling may have derived from readings of Leviticus, but it was certainly enabled by a culture that saw woman’s bodies as imperfect. Further evidence that menstruation was considered more yucky than natural is seen in a tenth-century manual on farming, which advises that both hail and wild animals can be warded off by the sight of a menstruating woman’s private parts.13 Beyond these matters of biology, Medieval Roman people believed that men and women had different innate dispositions regarding self-regulation. Men were thought to have a natural capacity to control their responses to stimuli whereas

Medieval Roman Anthropology  27

women were thought to be passively subject to the effects of feelings and longings. The most fundamental meaning of the Greek word for emotion, pathos, is passivity. Passivity was seen to be a basic characteristic of women, just as activity was ascribed to men. Women, being passive in the face of emotion, were controlled by their feelings and were subject to the sensations of their bodies. They were considered naturally predisposed to indulge in sexual desires and to give vent to their feelings. Men were considered naturally endowed with the ability to resist sexual impulses and control their emotions.14 Men were hence naturally steady and deliberate while women were flighty and inconstant. These were considered natural dispositions that could be adapted through human ethical effort. The individual could choose to refine and develop the strength of his or her character so as to achieve a higher degree of self-regulation, and hence masculinity. A man of unrefined character, who allowed himself to be driven by his passions, was effeminate because he did not exercise his ability to control himself. A woman who cultivated the strength of her character, so that she controlled her passions and regulated her emotional responses, possessed the quality of andreia, which means both “manliness” and “courage.” Through training their habits and their ethical choices men, women, and eunuchs could either increase or decrease their natural level of masculinity.

Character Formation Ethical formation was thus deeply entwined with gender in Byzantine culture, and so we must pause to consider the theory and practice of character formation. An essential element of Byzantine anthropology has to do with the formation of personal character through patterning one’s behaviour on ideal archetypes. Imitation of ancient and biblical models played a central role in the construction of self and the expression of personal character. We have long known that Medieval Roman culture engaged in imitation of traditional classical and biblical mod-

28  Chapter 2 els. In the words of the great nineteenth-century medievalist Jacob Burckhardt, Byzantine civilization was characterized by “an incredible stubbornness in the constant repetition of obsolete motifs.”15 Classical imitation gave rise to the image of Byzantine culture as static and unchanging, and as a broken mirror poorly reflecting antiquity without revealing its true self. The work of Alexander Kazhdan, which mostly became known to western audiences in the 1980s, pulled back the curtain of classicizing imitation to expose the specifics and individuality of particular moments, and set the field working on documenting the many changes in Medieval Roman culture. The scholarly movement celebrating change has since run in tandem with philological work documenting the depth of engagement and richness of the classicism of Medieval Roman literary culture. So in the past thirty years we have become far more appreciative of the skills of rhetors as classicists, and of cultural dynamism and individuality, without doing too much to conceptualize how the two fit together. In what I see as major advance, scholars working with different source material have begun developing a theory of Medieval Roman construction of self that explains how creation of individuals was achieved via imitation of ancient and biblical models.16 Our written texts were created by people who had at least some education, and education entailed some connection with the various classical and biblical heritages that fed into Medieval Roman civilization. The authors of literary texts tried to write in a language that approximated the classical Greek of ancient Athens, or at least the simplified standard Greek of the New Testament. The more educated the author, the closer his writing was to ancient Greek. Education in language went hand-in-hand with education in knowledge of biblical and classical models of ideal behaviour. This means that when people came to write about the world around them, they tended to craft their presentation along ancient and biblical models. Beyond this, we have good reason to think that many people, not only the highly educated writers, conceived of

Medieval Roman Anthropology  29

learning virtue as a matter of imitating biblical models of virtuous people. Hymns and liturgical prayers had congregants ventriloquize the thoughts and feelings of biblical characters such as Adam or David. In these cases, the congregants were expected to imitate and learn the emotional stance of the character as depicted in the hymn. They were praying, but they were also learning the proper emotional response to a given situation. Engagement in the hymnody and liturgy did not require education and was open to a far larger population than those who studied rhetoric. A standard part of education was for young men to practise making speeches in which they took on the persona of an ancient character. For instance, they would be called upon to declaim, “what Hercules would say when he receives the Oracle from Zeus that he will be killed by a dead man,” or, “what the Mother of God would say when Christ transformed the water into wine for the wedding.”17 These two examples illustrate nicely how easily classical and Christian culture elided in the minds of Medieval Romans. This aspect of education taught young men to practise inhabiting the minds of classical and biblical characters. So it seems that many people thought the way to learn how to be a good person was to practise patterning one’s behaviour on biblical or classical models. At least, we see these models at play in nearly all of our descriptions of medieval behaviour. They are pervasive. The vast array of ancient and biblical moral models provided men and women with a host of different kinds of characters that they could emulate and mash up. People routinely described each other as acting in accordance with one particular model for action or another, and I think they actually got along with each other by trying to inhabit and enact those roles. I think the woman described as acting like a poor woman from the Psalms crying out for justice really did think the best way to get what she wanted was to sound as much as possible like a poor woman from the Psalms crying out for justice. How better to get people to help her? I don’t see this as the dissolution of the self under the pressure of a social script but rather the formation of

30  Chapter 2 an effective self-expression. These patterns are seen even more clearly in our least rhetorical and most poorly written texts than they are in the high-art texts, where the authors were playing far more subtle games. Decades ago, when I was trying to figure out how provincial people organized their communities in the absence of government interest, I was advised to reject as non-evidentiary any text that described provincial people acting in line with stock motifs from Proverbs or Psalms because “that is just a topos; it is evidence for the society that wrote Proverbs and Psalms, not the tenth century.” Beyond the fact that that advice would have me reject nearly all written evidence, the substance of most provincial fights was over who got to enact which topos, who got to play which stock role. The patterns are not “mere rhetoric” to be scraped off to find the reality, but the structural substance of character formation and gender expression. These people learned how to act by singing Psalms. Self-expression and choice lay in deciding what patterns to inhabit and how best to bend those characteristics to one’s situation. In chapter four we will see examples of people choosing roles that work to express their needs and desires. The upshot of the Medieval Roman practice of forming character through imitation of models is that we need to know those models (which often related to gender performance) and be attuned to how medieval people were interacting with those patterns. Gender expression was thus a mixture of nature and ethical deportment. While men and women were given different bodies by nature and thought to have natural propensity for certain kinds of behaviour, they also could learn how to tame their bodily desires and master pathos. Men had a natural head start on their ability to control their emotional and physical responses, but that advantage was no guarantee of manly behaviour, and women could catch up through practice. We turn next to the virtues and vices that defined good behaviour for men and women.

Medieval Roman Anthropology  31

Notes

6 Timothy Miller, in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 252. 7 Margaret Tallmadge May, trans., Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body: Peri Chreias Moriōn. De Usu Partium, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 2:628–47. 8 Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis, trans., Michael Attaleiates: The History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 555. 9 Ihor Ševčenko, Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur Liber quo Vita Basilii Imperatoris amplectitur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 16. 10 Kathryn M. Ringrose, “The Byzantine Body,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 372. 11 Aristotelian medical teaching on the other hand held that castration rendered eunuchs fundamentally female because they lacked masculinity. This line of thought was less prevalent by the era of late antiquity. Charis Messis, Les eunuques à Byzance, entre réalité et imaginaire (Paris: EHESS, 2014), 54–55, 95–96; Shaun Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London: Routledge, 2008), 34–35. 12 Patrick Viscuso, “Theodore Balsamon’s Canonical Images of Women,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005): 317–26; Patrick Viscuso, trans., Sexuality, Marriage, and Celibacy in Byzantine Law. Selections from a Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Canon Law and Theology: The Alphabetical Collection of Matthew Blastares (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2008). 13 Andrew Dalby, trans., Geoponika, Farm Work: A Modern Translation of the Roman and Byzantine Farming Handbook, 1st ed. (Totnes: Prospect, 2011), 67. 14 Stratis Papaioannou, Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 192–230. 15 Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (New York: Dorset, 1989), 345. 16 Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Papaioannou, Michael Psellos. 17 Jeffrey Beneker and Craig A. Gibson, trans., The Rhetorical Exer­­ cises of Nikephoros Basilakes: Progymnasmata from Twelfth-Century Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Chapter 3

Gender and Virtue

Personal virtue in Byzantine society had a great deal to do with the proper performance of one’s normative gender role. Men ought to act like good men, and women like good women. This chapter deals with ideals of proper, morally upstanding behaviour for women and men in an effort to illustrate how Medieval Roman people thought they ought to be. The masculine and feminine virtues in turn derived from the larger project of enabling order and keeping chaos at bay. The fundamental ideology undergirding Byzantine culture held that order was good, chaos bad, and men ought to be in authority. Men upheld the order of society and good women were called to support them in their efforts. Bad women worked to undermine the social structure by tempting men to lose control of themselves. Actions that worked to maintain the proper order of society, in which men were active and in control, and women were passive and obedient, were considered good and anything that threatened to disrupt that order was bad. The natural tendency of women to be ruled by their emotions and desires implied that they always wanted to indulge sexual impulses, and hence that they posed a dire threat to men’s self-control. Although men were naturally predisposed to be able to govern their appetites, their self-mastery was seen as sufficiently tenuous that women needed to help them out by behaving in a demure and modest fashion. The greater degree of masculine strength that a man possessed, the greater his ability to remain unmoved

34  Chapter 3 in the face of either profound emotional distress or sexual temptation. Two virtues of self-control were profoundly important in Medieval Roman culture: σωφροσύνη, sophrosene, and φρόνησις, phronesis. Sophrosene meant discretion and moderation, and hence chastity. Phronesis meant understanding and wisdom, but chiefly the wisdom not to do something, prudence. It was the wisdom to maintain self-restraint. Βoth virtues had to do with keeping oneself under control and moderating one’s response to stimuli. The discreet and wise person was supposed to keep it together and not be swayed by animal impulses. These virtues of self-control relate strongly to gender because of the belief that men had a natural capability to master pathos. Men naturally had a leg up on women and eunuchs in their ability to exhibit sophrosene and phronesis, although women and eunuchs ought to do their best as well. When men failed at exhibiting sophrosene and phronesis they therefore failed not only with regard to those virtues, but as men. Their masculinity was impugned. The chief passion that needed to be resisted with modesty and prudence was the desire for sex. Moralists lay the need to subdue sexual passions on both men and women. Sexual attraction was considered a natural part of human existence, but one that people could be expected to exercise control over. Galen’s teachings on human reproduction (but not Aristotle’s) held that both women and men needed to have an orgasm in order to conceive a child. Yet the canonists taught that sexual activity of spouses was supposed to be conducted without excessive lewdness or unrestrained desire. Married sex ought to be conducted in thanksgiving for God and God’s natural creation. Sex, like wine and meat, was made by God and therefore good, but could easily be perverted by people who indulged to excess. Canon law commentaries recommend abstinence from intercourse between husbands and wives prior to receiving communion. Although sex within marriage was not sinful, couples were admonished to practise chastity the night before partaking in the holy mysteries. Priests, who were normally married, were sup-

Gender and Virtue  35

posed to abstain from intercourse for three days before celebrating Eucharist. Bishops were expected to be chaste and were required to divorce their wives. Sexual activity therefore was seen as polluting despite taking place within lawful marriage. Marriage was approved as a way of escaping or reme­­­dying the sin of fornication. The canonists, however, considered celibacy far better than the worldly life of marriage. Second marriages required penance and excommunication for a period of time. Third marriages were considered even worse, and even after the period of excommunication had ended, such a couple was only able to receive communion three times a year on feast days that followed fasts (Nativity, the Assumption of the Virgin, and Easter). According to some canonists the fasts that preceded these feast days ought to include abstinence from sexual relations. While the fulminations of canonists and monks against sexual activity are well represented in our surviving source base, the survival of the Roman species indicates that chastity was not in fact universal. The dominance of concern with control over passion and prudence in our records of Medieval Roman culture should not blind us to the evidence of a counter discourse. Keep in mind that every one of our bawdy, erotic, sex-filled ancient Greek texts survives to the present because some Medieval Roman person paid to have it copied. Somebody liked this stuff. None other than a canon lawyer gives a detailed description of cunnilingus and attributes his knowledge to his careful study of ancient texts.18 The streets of Constantinople were also filled with ancient erotic sculpture that had been gathered from all over the Empire to decorate the new capital. The most visible monument in the city was a column topped by a gigantic naked statue of Constantine. The physical products of ancient Greek attitudes toward the beauty of the naked human form continued to be exalted in public places throughout Constantinople. Examples of ancient art were probably visible in multiple provincial centres as well. We should not imagine that medieval people were somehow unmoved. The Medieval Roman Empire produced its own erotic and homoerotic poetry.19 Romances and

36  Chapter 3 love stories testify that “love begets the kiss, and the kiss desire.”20 A recurring storyline in edifying stories written for monastic audiences is that a pious monk comes to a strange place and finds a naked woman hidden in a bush. After having been tossed a robe, she tells a story of how she miraculously escaped from sexual danger and had survived for years praying in the wilderness.21 These stories all conform to the moral view that sex is bad, but they are still stories about naked women and sex. I take them as evidence that even the monks were titillated. Yet, regardless of what Medieval Roman people did between the sheets, we cannot doubt that the prevailing cultural moral­­ity prized chastity and control of one’s passions.22 The injunction to live modestly and prudently manifested itself differently for men and women. For Medieval Romans being a good person largely entailed either being a good man or a good woman. In the following we will examine how this calling created a set of normative and valorized behaviours for women and for men. This discussion is limited to those virtues that were significantly modified by gender. Many other virtues were common to both men and women and did not require different behaviours depending on gender. The virtue of piety, for example, might be expressed in different ways for men or women but did not reveal particularly striking differences in gender. In the following sections the discussion is limited to the ways that being good related to being a woman or a man.

Virtuous Women Women could aspire to emotional and sexual control. The problem does not seem to be that women were expected to want sex that much more than men did, but that they could not naturally control the impulse. Women were considered to be weaker than men, but assertions of women’s natural weakness of character almost always appear in stories about women who had exceptional strength. For example, a late tenth-century story about a female saint, Ioustina, says of her strength under torture, “suffering this way, she endured so

Gender and Virtue  37

bravely that she showed nothing ignoble nor what one would expect of her female and weak gender.” The same author wrote about a different female hero that she, “devise[d] a course of action that was wiser than one would expect of a woman.”23 Similar statements are extremely common in hagiographies about women. As Susan Harvey pointed out decades ago, these stories simultaneously extolled the virtue and strength of the female heroines, and upheld the ideology that women were inferior to men in terms of strength of character.24 They are stories about strong women that remind everyone that women are not expected to be as strong as men. When women exercise strength and self-control, they became more like men. Although they did not possess the natural inclination toward andreia, they could certainly acquire that virtue through practice and ethical training. A woman with excellent faculties for self-control would be considered manly. Anna Komnene was praised for having manly strength in dealing with her father’s doctors.25 In another story a woman who left her life of wealth and leisure to join a monastery by dressing as a man was praised as having “a manly soul and [she] show[ed] great manliness in all respects.” This heroine, Eugenia, is exhorted by a bishop, “May you defeat your nature in even more with your will.” Her strong and powerful will is her tool for combating the weaker aspects of her female nature. Within the context of her story, the nature that she overcame was an inclination toward luxury, beauty, and pleasure. She turned these things down, which she had in abundance, in order to pursue an ascetic life of Christian piety. Although they have greater weakness than men, women do not have lesser virtue. In fact, they may have had greater virtue, because they were starting from a place of greater fundamental vice. This seems to be the logic behind the introduction to the story of a repentant prostitute: “recounting the virtue of women, since it is in no way outclassed by that of men, is advantageous and beneficial for all. And it is so much more advantageous, to the degree that this virtue has been introduced so as to balance a comparable vice. In this way, the male gender could be incited to surpass female

38  Chapter 3 nature, women could strive to not be outclassed by the virtue of their fellow women, and the evil habits of both, which are generally difficult to expunge, could be erased.”26 The story proceeds to speak of a woman of extreme vice, Pelagia—the greatest harlot in Antioch —, who in turning from her life of sex to one of extreme asceticism, exercised an extraordinary degree of virtue. Because she had sunk so low, she had a very great distance to travel in becoming a celebrated ascetic, and therefore had the opportunity for an extraordinary display of moral improvement. Virtue for women was deeply important for the men around them because it helped them maintain their self-control. The modest and demure behaviour of ideal women signalled both that the woman was working on her self-control and that she supported the men around her in their quest for sophrosene and phronesis. Virtuous women combated their innate predisposition to give in to lustful desires because it threatened to undermine men’s sexual self-control and hence disrupt the natural order. Women were not allowed to appear in court because their presence would be disordering.27 It would make it more difficult for men to get their business done in a rational fashion if they were tempted or distracted by the appearance of female bodies or women expressing extreme emotion. It was because men could not risk losing their self-control, and giving into their own sexual appetites, that it became so important for women to police their deportment to avoid provoking lust and men. In the context of a court room, it was just better not to have them around. The way to be a good woman was to display one’s restraint ostentatiously. Virtue entailed making it clear to all observers that they were endeavouring to overcome their natural inclination to indulgence in whatever passion or feeling was present at the moment. The good woman strove to help men uphold their self-control by acting in a demure and un-enticing fashion. They were expected to behave demurely, scrupulously avoiding any gestures, glances, or movements that would have the potential to undermine men’s sexual self-control. Eyes in particular were considered entrée points

Gender and Virtue  39

for seduction. A woman’s eyes ought to be steadily looking down rather than directly at someone. Her hair should be covered and held back neatly. Movements of arms and limbs should be sedate and minimal. Rushing, waving bodies and hair were signs of unrestrained female passion. A virtuous woman also carefully governed her speech. Female speech was considered dangerous in its ability to provoke emotional and sexual responses. Eve’s speech persuaded her husband and undermined his judgment. Within the Medieval Roman theological tradition, Eve was dangerous because of her “ability to produce deceptive speech that exposes Adam to pathos, suffering.”28 Ideally, women should not be heard. Psellos praised the eleventh-century empress Maria of Alania for only speaking to her husband, noting “the tragedian’s” aphorism that “silence is a woman’s glory.”29 Anna Komnene similarly commends her mother for never letting strangers hear her speak.30 By not tempting men with the sound of their voices or the sight of their bodies or hair in movement, women upheld the order of the world through their modesty. Grief or misadventure could cause women to lose their tenuous control over their passions. Difficulties or adverse circumstances could easily undermine their decorum. Women in states of extreme emotion tear at their garments and faces and allow their hair to become dishevelled. The breakdown of restraint is caused by the emotional state of grief, but it leads to behaviours that are contrary to the physical modesty women were supposed to enact for the sake of helping shore up men’s sexual self-control. When Thessaloniki was attacked in the early tenth century the women of the city stopped behaving modestly: [The women] insisted on crying out, on wailing, on embracing their children. Overwhelmed by grief, they no longer cared to observe the proprieties or to withdraw themselves from the sight of the men. On the contrary, they were completely unabashed. With their hair let down and with scant regard for modesty they performed dirges, crying out in unison, and groaned at the calamity.31

40  Chapter 3 Extreme emotion here causes a complete loss of control. The great calamity causes the women to become overcome by grief, and in giving way to their emotional responses, they lose the restraint of modesty and no longer care about keeping out of sight of men and maintaining a quiet demure behaviour. They make noise with their hair down. When, according to one history, the ninth-century reigning empress Theodora realizes that her brother and son had conspired to murder one of her main advisors, she transforms from an entirely competent and decorous empress into a shrieking, cursing, vengeful woman who “ran about with hair unkempt.”32 Her extreme lamentations were an appropriate response to grief and betrayal, but also marked her as out of control. She was forced out of power by the end of the paragraph. There are some indications that women’s modesty was enforced by keeping them physically sequestered and out of sight. We don’t know how far the cloistering of women went in reality, and it was always only an option for elites. The ideal was for young women to stay within the house, completely out of the public sphere. One twelfth-century official was described as having an excellent wife, who was “reared by a good mother and kept at home.”33 The heroine in a hagiographic novel was raised chastely by her mother, “studiously avoiding the eyes of men.”34 During the tenth-century sack of Thessaloniki the norms of female seclusion broke down: Wherever there was […] a maiden who had not yet left the protection of her home and was safely preserved for marriage and properly schooled in decorum, she would put aside all shyness at being seen, and in her fear not even considering that she was a woman, she would walk about in the middle of the market place, join the other women in their lamentation and shriek at the top of her voice.35

Normally, the author implies, elite young women would not go into the marketplace. Being properly schooled in decorum meant not leaving the protection of the home, and proper preparation for marriage entailed never being seen. The terror of the attack on the city causes the women to lose control

Gender and Virtue  41

of themselves. Their response causes a complete breakdown of social order. The description of women becoming chaotic is a description of the society falling apart. An eleventh-century general, Kekaumenos, supported not only keeping women within the house, but argued against enter­­taining male guests in order to maintain the complete seclusion of private domestic spaces. If a man lets a friend stay at his house: […] your wife and your daughters and your daughters-inlaw are not free to go out of their room and make the necessary arrangements in your house. But if there is pressing need for them to come out, your friend will exclaim and fasten his eye on them. Even if you are standing with him, he will seem to you to lower his head, but he will be watching carefully how they walk, and turn, their hips, their glance, and, in short, everything from top to toe; and when he is alone with his own men, he will imitate them and laugh. […] If he should find a chance, he will make gestures of love to your wife, and will look on her with licentious eyes, and, if he can, even defile her; if not, he will go out and make boasts that should not be made.36

The failure to sequester his women lessens the host’s ability to control the interactions between the guests and his women. The loss of control is itself a knock on his masculinity. Clearly there was an ideal world in the minds of some Medieval Roman people in which a girl would leave her house only to attend religious services. In these norms of seclusion for women, the medieval practice mirrors precisely that of classical Athens. As in that case, it is unclear how far the rhetorical representations of society in elite texts correspond to lived reality. Obviously, most women had to leave the house regularly to work. The ability to keep women inside was a sign of wealth and servants. Gender was linked to class by virtue of the money it would take to keep women sequestered. The ability of a woman to stay out of the marketplace, where people shouted and raised their voices, became a marker of high social class. Women who could not afford servants to go to the market for them were

42  Chapter 3 implicated in the immodest behaviour of talking loudly and haggling with men to whom they were not related. The more financial resources the household had, the more they were able to keep their women, particularly unmarried daughters, at home, out of the public eye and out of public conversations. A bride who had never been seen in public was considered exceptionally valuable. This connection between wealth and the ability to maintain more extreme levels of female modesty may help explain why nobility was thought to bring with it a greater ability to control one’s emotions and impulses. People who were considered wellborn or innately noble were considered naturally more masculine than the common rabble. Aristocratic women were credited with being able to exercise rational control over themselves, the way men did. For example in a text written by Michael Psellos the Empress Theodora (1055– 1056) substantiated her ability to address the court, although female, by explaining that she had “blossomed from royal blood.”37 Theodora’s social class was emphasized as one of the things, along with extensive study of Scripture, that gave her the exceptional self-control needed for public speaking. The implication is that a common woman, lacking in nobility, would not be able to compose herself sufficiently to speak sensibly before a group of men. Similarly, in the twelfth century, when Anna Komnene needed to convince the audience for her history that she had the capacity for rational thought necessary for writing history, she emphasized her birth in the royal palace as a sign of her extreme nobility. Anna can come across as a snob because of her emphasis on her own high social class, yet this was a ploy to make her appear capable of having a masculine degree of self-control. Wealth allowed women to spend time practising their virtue and restraint and kept them out of situations where they would need to raise their voices or move about. On the issue of whether aristocratic women actually tra­ velled outside their houses we have mixed evidence, but I think that regardless of what they did, they wanted to maintain their reputation as women who protected their modesty with

Gender and Virtue  43

physical seclusion. Anna Komnene reveals that both she and her mother travelled with the emperor on military campaigns, but she is deeply apologetic about it and does rhetorical handstands to convince her readers that she and her mother were extremely modest despite leaving the palace. She reveals in passing that it was not remarkable for aristocratic women to travel with their servants to Constantinople on shopping trips. In the later twelfth century, emperor Manuel’s sister-in-law travelled with his military camp, and the elaborate decoration of her tent is described in a poem. It is possible that she was kept near the emperor because he suspected her of plotting, but the matter is unclear. A story in Choniates’s history in which the villainous Andronikos Komnenos is caught making love to his niece in her tent in the emperor’s military camp is sometimes interpreted as indicating that aristocratic women commonly travelled with the army. This is possible, but since the scandalous story of adultery and incest certainly does not reflect standard morality, I’m not sure we should take the set up as indicative of normal behaviour either. These stories indicate that women could move about out­­side of their houses. Anna Komnene’s ability to engage in philosophical disputations proves that some aristocratic women were able to talk extensively with men with whom they were not related. The connection between sequestering and social class gave male authors an incentive to claim that their women were kept inside, regardless of whether they actually were. I see keeping women out of sight as an ideal to which many people ostensibly supported and upheld, but expect it was honoured in the breach fairly regularly. Nonwealthy women, who had no choice but to leave the house to go to market, get water, or work, probably emphasized their modesty through their dress and deportment.

Virtuous Men Since men were expected to be naturally more able to control their emotions than women, emotional restraint was an expression of masculinity. The association between mascu-

44  Chapter 3 linity and emotional self-control, and femininity with subjection to emotion, is clearly enunciated in a text describing an ideal emperor, Basil I (867–886), in which the hero confronts the death of his beloved firstborn son: [The son died] abandoning his father to inconsolable sorrow. But a man of culture must use reason to rule over irrational passions, and the emperor knew that he, too, was a human being, and the mortal one at that, and that he had a son who was mortal as well. So he left immoderate grieving for this event to the women’s quarters, considering such behavior to be ignoble and unworthy in a man, and most speedily regained control of himself.. He rather turned to consoling the mother and the siblings and went on with his usual pursuits.38

Grief is here depicted as an irrational passion that the emperor, like any good man, must rule through rational thought. He leaves the lamentation for the women, for whom it is appropriate, and displays his masculinity by going about his regular business. The women grieve because they are naturally subject to their passions, lacking the capacity of reason to govern their emotional responses. The control men were expected to have over themselves was a prerequisite for their exercise of authority over others. Emperors and generals were required to first master themselves before they could attempt to rule others. Basil’s ability to put his grief aside marked him as a capable emperor and man. A man who could not control his desires was wanton and unworthy of respect. A description of vices attributed to the Emperor Michael III (842–867), by an author attempting to justify his murder, runs: This wretch surrounded himself with an impious band of wanton, foul, and depraved men; he dishonored the gravity of imperial majesty and spent his days in carousing, drinking, wanton lust and shameful tales, and moreover with charioteers, horses, and chariots, falling into the madness and frenzy of mind that comes from such pursuits; and he extravagantly squandered public monies upon such men as these.39

Gender and Virtue  45

In a sense, this is a fairly generic list of bad behaviour, but on further reflection it emphasizes chaotic movement and absence of physical restraint. These men lack sophrosene and phronesis. The author wants an emperor who will behave with proper decorum, which was not compatible with Michael’s interest in horseracing. All emperors had ceremonial functions at which they presided over races in the hippodrome. Michael is being called out for actually getting wrapped up in the drama of the races rather than watching with calm dispassion. He lacks moderation in the control of his emotional and sexual responses. A clear manifestation of the importance of self-control for masculinity is seen in the narrative of the capture of Thessaloniki written in the early tenth century by Ioannes Kaminiates. We have already quoted his descriptions of how the attack caused a breakdown in women’s modesty. Ioannes, who as a man ought to have had authority, was deeply disempowered through his experience of capture. He was deprived of his autonomy, stripped of his property, and unable to protect his wife and children. His efforts to narrate his own disempowerment without becoming effeminate reveal a lot about his culture’s conceptions of masculinity and are worth examining in somewhat greater depth. The link between masculinity and control over emotion is made forcefully as he narrates the story of his own experiences and those of his fellow captives. He narrates the misfortunes of the captives, most of whom were sold into slavery, in terms that are designed to provoke pity and sadness from the audience for the poor people who suffer greatly at the hands of the raiders. He does not call for pity for himself, however, but assiduously avoids presenting himself as personally suffering or grieving. In the midst of describing the profoundly emasculating circumstance of being taken captive and unable to protect his family, his narrative works to attribute to himself a high degree of masculine emotional self-control. For instance, he describes how during the long, overcrowded voyage from Thessaloniki to Crete, in which hundreds of prisoners were packed tightly into ships, people,

46  Chapter 3 especially children, began to sicken from thirst and hunger and were thrown overboard where they writhed on the surface of the waves until they died. When the convoy arrived in Crete the captives were allowed onto the beach where the relatives who had been separated tried to find each other: Hapless women were wandering about with disheveled hair and tear-stained eyes, looking around in every direction to see which of their children they would come across first. […] How, unable to restrain the tide of their emotions, they tore their clothes? How they would not keep still for a moment but wandered aimlessly around completely at the mercy of their own irrational impulses and casting glances in all directions in the hope that they might somewhere catch sight of their loved ones or contrived to hear from someone with firsthand knowledge of their fate and thus bring some relief to the anxiety that was praying on their minds?

Only much later in the story does he reveal that his own child was one of those who died of thirst and hunger in this voyage. Kaminiates expresses no grief at the death of his child, but merely mentions in passing that when they arrived in Crete he found his wife “with two children (the third child had perished at sea).”40 At this point the reader realizes that Kaminiates’s own wife was among those women who frantically ran around the beach searching unsuccessfully for her child. His description of mothers and children desperately search­­ ing for each other omits any mention of the fathers who were also present. It is possible that the men did not participate and left concern for children entirely to the women. I think it more likely that, in the moment, the men tried to help their wives find their children, but when it came to write about it and record the event for posterity, Kaminiates chose to present this wretched scene as a matter exclusively for women and children. How could he have described men as searching for their children, without attributing to them the female characteristics of emotional agitation and frantic behaviour? Given that he later reveals that his own child was among those who could not be found, any description of men in a state of frantic distress would eventually implicate himself in that behaviour.

Gender and Virtue  47

Rather than have his audience think that he could have run wildly around on the beach desperately seeking for his child, he attributed this emotional response exclusively to the mothers, depicting himself, by implication, as calmly observing with the same stoic dispassion with which he announced that his third child had died at sea. The characteristics he attributes to the searching mothers clearly articulate the association of masculinity with rational control and femininity with irrational chaos. The women were “unable to restrain the tide of their emotions” and “completely at the mercy of their own irrational impulses.” The lack of emotional restraint went along with physical disorder: their hair was dishevelled, tears stained their eyes, they tore their clothes, were physically agitated, and ran around casting glances everywhere. This portrait is in contrast with the demure female ideal in which women were quiet, kept their gaze down, their hair restrained, and their movements carefully un-provocative. Grief makes women behave immodestly. By describing this scene as something that happened to unspecified others, Kaminiates distances these experiences from his own family. He does not say explicitly that his wife behaved this way. He repeats this rhetorical process in describing how some of the captives were sold into slavery on Crete and others shipped off to slave markets across the Mediterranean. His description of the horrors of being sold into slavery is placed at considerable rhetorical distance from the information that his own wife, children, and brother were shipped for sale in Syria. After describing the sale of some of the captives on Crete he reveals that “my brother’s wife was among those sold, an occurrence which caused us considerable anguish.” He refers to his “poor unhappy brother,” but in no other way expresses any personal sorrow at the sale of his family. In fact, he separates the information in such a way that readers must work to figure out what happened to his family. The reality of slavery is lamented in a general sense, but hidden in so far as it reflected on Kaminiates’ own family, and hence his inability to protect and control them.

48  Chapter 3 Kaminiates’ passionless self-portrayal should be seen as a way of rhetorically upholding his masculinity, rather than reflecting a real callousness of character. He had no ability to control his situation or the tragedy that was tearing his family apart, but at least he was able to control himself and his emotional responses. In retelling the story he would not add to his own emasculinization by depicting himself as subject to pathos, but rather constructed a strong rhetorical persona for himself as a man who had the strength to maintain control of his emotions even in the face of great tragedy. In some ways the remedy that allowed men to maintain their fortitude was similar to that of women: extreme decorum. A man ought to keep his eyes looking downward in the presence of women. In explaining how to be a good servant, Kekaumenos advises that one should treat one’s mistress with honour, as one would a mother or sister, “and if she wants to play with you, keep away and standoff. Bow low in talking with her.”41 As we have seen, his advice against having a friend stay in a man’s house reveals that a decent man ought to avert his eyes and “lower his head” when the women of the house are about. But while he upholds the ideal that a good man should have the discipline to avoid looking at another man’s woman, his expectation is that a guest will peek and even push for an affair. For moralizing authors, excessive sexual activity did not show that men were virile, but that they lacked the self-control that indicated real masculinity. Choniates’s description of the libertine behaviour of Andronikos Komnenos (1183–1185) marked Andronikos as weak and in need of medical treatments for impotence.42 Andronikos was not able to become man enough to solve his problems. Psellos’s portrait of Constantine IX (1042–1055) as a kindly libertine has greatly undermined the latter’s reputation as a military leader, although his reign is depicted in non-Greek sources as a period of significant military accomplishments. In Late Antiquity Christian bishops and monks tried to refashion Roman masculinity to put themselves at the pinnacle because of their celibacy. By displaying a greater level of self-control in maintaining sex-

Gender and Virtue  49

ual continence, they claimed a higher degree of masculine discipline than the men who needed to have a sexual outlet in marriage. Their texts were copied and prestigious in the Middle Ages, but I’m not sure how widely abstinence from sex was considered a sign of high masculinity. The safer claim is that excessive indulgence in anything was a sign of weakness. Male sexual activity is glorified in the adventure story of the half-Roman, half-Arab lord of the eastern borders, Digenis Akritas. This is an atypical story (at least among surviving texts) of blood and romance set in the Arab–Byzantine frontier of the tenth or eleventh centuries, probably as nostalgically imagined from the vantage of twelfth-century Constantinople, when that frontier was a distant memory. Digenis is a fantastically brave and militarily strong figure who killed bears as a young child and single-handedly defeats hordes of enemies. Digenis’s sexual encounters add to rather than diminish his masculinity, but even here sex is a matter of weakly giving in to lust. In the case of the girl he abducts and marries, the lovers plan to elope at first sight because “when passion is the master it enslaves good sense and subjugates reasoning, as a charioteer subjugates a horse.”43 When Digenis began to lust adulterously for different woman, he recalled, “at first, I tried to subdue this ungovernable intention and I wanted, if possible, to escape the sin,” but he was overcome and, unable to control his passions, he raped her. A few battles later, faced with a third woman he was again, “all on fire,” and “made every effort to escape the sin,” but his “reason was defeated by vile desire.” In all three cases, he was utterly powerless to subdue his passions. He feels guilty about adultery (and kills the third woman to make it better), but his very helplessness in the face of his sexual passions works in the story to absolve him from any real moral culpability—there was nothing he could do about it. Digenis’s helplessness in the face of lust was caused, in at least the adulterous encounters, by the immodesty of the women, one of whom is alone in the desert and the other who fights like a man. In that the story spends far less time describing sex than talking about how badly he felt about caving in, it shows

50  Chapter 3 the ascendency of the ideal that men ought to control their passions. In that the hyper-masculine hero has a lot of sex, it shows cracks in the moralizing tendencies of Byzantine culture. Men could also fail in their performance of masculinity by being rash or angry. Both acting without thinking through consequences and unleashing anger were failures to moderate one’s behaviour. Men who give in to anger are frequently described as wild beasts. They are not acting with the rational deliberation of real men. Rash action for men indicated a lapse in phronesis. Just as women were supposed to move little, tightly controlling their actions, men were supposed to move in a deliberate, measured fashion. Men were expected to be far more physically active, but neither men or women ought to rush around aimlessly. Military defeats were often attributed to the rash or angry actions of men who insufficiently governed their responses to stimuli. Just as women ought to strive for ethical masculinity, so men needed to work to avoid falling into feminine laxity. As women could through effort and self-discipline become more like men, so undisciplined men could become effeminate. To describe a man as effeminate was almost equivalent to describing him as evil. One text, wanting to denigrate the character of a particular man, calls him “a worthless scoundrel, effeminate, and particularly vain about his hair.”44 The comment that he cared about the appearance of his hair immediately marks the man as womanly, and concerned with things that should only be of importance to women. Seventh-century canon law forbade men to adorn their hair because it was “bait in the way of unstable souls.”45 Twelfth-century commentators clarify that the problem with men who fussed with their hair was that they were acting like women. The twelfth-century jurist Zonaras viciously mocks men who curl or dye their hair or beards or use extensions or wigs.46 Choniates denigrated the character of a man he calls a “girlman” by saying that he liked to clean his teeth (and use false teeth) and lie around in bed with darkened curtains.47 The excessive interest in personal appearance went hand in hand with sloth and lack of masculine vigour.

Gender and Virtue  51

According to the moralizing canonists, both men and women ought to adorn the soul with virtue, rather than one’s external appearance. Of course, their commentaries also provide delightful evidence of toupees, artificial curl rolls, and hair dye among twelfth-century men. Choniates’s shocked opprobrium lets us know some people had false teeth in twelfth-century Constantinople. We can assume that not all the ideals of virtue were maintained. Michael Psellos’s playful poking at his culture’s obsession with self-control also reveals other possibilities. Psellos depicts himself in a private letter as subject to extreme emotion as a means of feminizing his persona and constructing himself as an object of his male reader’s desire.48 He is playing with well-defined and pervasive ideas about what counted as appropriate behaviour for men and women. A significant exception to the normal call for male emotional control was that tears were a sign of true repentance and necessary for certain kinds of intense prayer. A man gained forgiveness from God by weeping over his sins. Symeon the New Theologian described the shedding of tears as a prelude to mystical experience of divine light. For him tears were a sign of repentance and humility before God.49 Other theological texts portray tears as a necessary sign of contrition.50 Tears for both men and women were part of the process of supplication. When women acted as tearful supplicants they were imitating the Mother of God, who shed tears when begging for forgiveness for humanity, and so that was probably a positive role for women. When men needed to weep for their sins, their subjection to pathos was an expression of the sincerity and intensity of their repentance. I think it was because men were expected to control their responses to emotions that the act of crying was powerful proof of true repentance.

Eunuchs While eunuchs loom large in research on Byzantine gender, nearly all Medieval Romans would go their whole lives with-

52  Chapter 3 out meeting or seeing one. Even in the eras in which eunuchs were most prevalent at the imperial court, they were likely not more than several dozen in imperial service and perhaps a hundred in Constantinople. The rarity of eunuchs may account for the divergent assessments of their morality and the apparent absence of a consistent normative set of gender expectations for eunuchs. Attitudes toward eunuchs described in Medieval Roman texts vary widely from disgust to admiration and depend far more on the rhetorical purposes of the authors than on variations of character among actual eunuchs. The eunuchs in histories look nothing like the eunuchs in hagiographies. Since the assumptions expressed about the fundamental nature of eunuchs varied depending on the kind of text discussing them, it is more difficult to discern a set of ideals about their performance of gender. Some descriptions of eunuchs fall in line with the general theory of Medieval Roman gender posited thus far. In the fourteenth century Nikephoros Gregoras praised his uncle, the eunuch bishop John of Herakleia, on the grounds that since John was a eunuch, and hence womanly, he naturally had less capacity to control his impulses. John’s virtuous behaviour was thus even more laudatory.51 This is the same reasoning that we have seen applied to virtuous women, who managed through ethical discipline to acquire the masculine self-control they lacked by nature. This line of thought fits with the medical theory that the masculinity and virility of men came with their transition out of boyhood. Eunuchs, who were generally castrated before adolescence never gained full masculinity. This neat conceptualization of eunuchs, however, is relatively rare in Medieval Roman texts. Rather, different textual situations called out different ideas about the moral tendencies of eunuchs and their gender construction. There is usually some sort of logic working within each discourse, but when they are all brought together the images of eunuch are so contradictory and incompatible that no general social understanding of eunuchs has emerged so far.52 Denigrating eunuchs for effeminacy was fairly routine, and they were probably most often considered mutilated men

Gender and Virtue  53

who lacked full masculinity. They were sometimes described as being neither male nor female. One text describes them as monstrous in that their male nature was changed to appear female, making them simultaneously non-male and non-female.53 Another calls them, with less condemnation, a “strange sex.”54 Some scholars have seen eunuchs constituting a third gender in Byzantine society, and others have been unconvinced.55 Given how masculinity seems to function as an ideal that women and men were called to strive for, and femininity a failing that was a potential danger for all, it seems more likely that Medieval Roman people would have placed eunuchs on various points on the scale of virtue rather than conceiving of a separate gender for them. Some descriptions of eunuchs present them as enslaved to carnal passions, but more wicked than women in that they were indiscriminate in desiring sex with both men and women. Others present them as free from sexual desire and so having a unique freedom from one of the central moral problems of their culture. Their supposed lack of sexual desire rendered them pure and innocent. In theological literature eunuchs are discussed mostly as the evil foil for the heroic “spiritual eunuchs” who were regular men with such strength of will that they completely conquered their sexual desires. In this discourse the eunuchs who were actually castrated get no credit for their ability to withstand sex since they supposedly came by it effortlessly. They are rather denigrated for being unnatural. Eunuchs were employed at the imperial court because they were symbols of power and royal authority.56 It made the emperor appear to be more regal when his court was decorated by eunuch servants. Guides to court ceremonial from the ninth and tenth centuries indicate that certain ranks and positions within the administration were reserved for eunuchs. Roman emperors of the fourth century onward adopted the practice of employing eunuchs at court from eastern imperial traditions that were much older. The employment of eunuchs at the imperial court led to some positive views of eunuchs. From the Medieval Roman

54  Chapter 3 point of view, it went without saying that the prophet Daniel was a eunuch because the story of how he came to enter the service of Nebuchadnezzar matched their expectations for court eunuchs.57 In the ninth to tenth centuries heaven was imagined to be a court with many of the same properties as the emperor’s earthly court, and the more the earthly court imitated the divine one, the more God seemed like an emperor. God was imagined as attended by angels that looked like eunuchs, and eunuchs were thought to look like the angels of God. In stories about visions and dreams there is a recurring scene in which an imperial eunuch walks into the room and participates in the drama until he does something miraculous, and somebody recognizes, “that’s no eunuch, that’s an angel!” The prevalence of the connection between angels and eunuchs led to some positive descriptions and associations with eunuchs. Eunuchs were described as beautiful, shinning, and pure. They could be regarded positively as ideal imperial servants and mediators. Yet the power of eunuchs at court also led to a tradition of denigrating eunuchs for usurping the authority that rightly belonged to whole men. In this discourse eunuchs were effeminate, greedy, treacherous, corrupt, cowardly, deceitful, and servile. This line of complaint was well established in late antiquity and continued through the medieval era. Numerous Medieval Roman texts take these negative assumptions about eunuchs for granted. When eunuchs were praised, it was generally for exhibiting the masculine virtues of courage, strength, or constancy. Much of the criticism falls into the category of feminine vices such as of lack of reason, capriciousness, cowardice, self-indulgence, or weakness. Messis argues that eunuchs were most consistently denigrated when they infringed on the male spheres of military and political action and considered innocuous when they were involved in working with women or the church. Those who were able to engage in governmental or political work and remain praiseworthy were exceptional eunuchs who transcended their deformed nature.58

Gender and Virtue  55

* * *

We have discussed how ideas about gender led to a set of rules that men and women ought to follow in order to perform their gender properly. In a longer book this analysis could be extended to discuss how the performance of other virtues such as generosity, forgiveness, or piety differed for men and women. Given how often our sources either glorify characters for upholding the rules, or denigrate them for breaking the rules, it is much easier to tell what the rules were than how much they impacted the lives of Medieval Romans in real life. I think the rules were pervasive and consistent enough that there was a strong shared understanding of what a good man and a good woman was like. I take it for granted that not everyone tried to live up to those ideals all the time or equally thought they were important. Moralists would not have been preaching sophrosene and phronesis if everyone strove after those virtues all the time. The question of how many people tried to live in line with the rules is less interesting to me than how people played with the ideals in order to do what they wanted. The next chapter explores how women used the rules and patterns we have discussed to undertake a remarkably wide range of activities. The key that allowed Medieval Roman society to be so relatively open to the actions of women, while maintaining a thoroughly androcentric ideology, is that people had great flexibility in how they chose to enact the various valorized roles for their gender.

Notes Viscuso, “Theodore Balsamon’s Canonical Images of Women.” Marc Lauxtermann, “Ninth-Century Classicism and the Erotic Muse,” in Desire and Denial in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 161–70. 20 Elizabeth Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292. 21 John Wortley, The Spiritually Beneficial Tales of Paul, Bishop of Monembasia (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1996). 18 19

56  Chapter 3 22 Within the context of this culture, it is impossible to read the ceremonies for ritual brother-making between men as marriage rites: Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late-Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 23 Stratis Papaioannou, trans., Christian Novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 43–45, 143. 24 Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Reversing the Story,” in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 36–59. 25 Jean Darrouzes, George et Demetrios Tornikes. Lettres et discours (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1970), 267. 26 Papaioannou, Christian Novels, 63, 205. 27 Pierre Noailles and Alphonse Dain, eds., Les Novelles de Léon VI, le sage (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1944) 189–90. 28 Papaioannou, Michael Psellos, 216. 29 Diether Roderich Reinsch, ed., Michaelis Pselli Chronographia (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 290. 30 Diether R. Reinsch and Athanasios Kambylis, eds., Alexiad (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 365. 31 David Frendo and Athanasios Fotiou, trans., John Kaminiates: The Capture of Thessaloniki, Byzantina Australiensia 12 (Perth: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 2000), 68–69. 32 Michael Featherstone and Juan Signes Codoñer, eds., Chronographiae quae Theophanis continuati nomine fertur, libri I–IV (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 244. 33 Michael Choniates’s description of his sister-in-law. Alicia J. Simpson, Niketas Choniates: A Historiographical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16. 34 Papaioannou, Christian Novels, 121. 35 Frendo and Fotiou, John Kaminiates, 68–69. 36 Maria Dora Spadaro, ed., Raccomandazioni e consigli di un galantuomo (Strategikon), Hellenica 2 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), 148–50. 37 Antony Robert Littlewood, ed., Michaelis Pselli Oratoria minora (Leipzig: Teubner, 1985), 1–4. 38 Ševčenko, Vita Basilii Imperatoris, 318–21. 39 Ševčenko, Vita Basilii Imperatoris, 81.

Gender and Virtue  57

Frendo and Fotiou, John Kaminiates, 123. Spadaro, Raccomandazioni, 56–57. 42 Van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae historia, 321–22. 43 Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions, 86, 148, 198. 44 Ševčenko, Vita Basilii Imperatoris, 97. 45 Henry Percival, trans., “Council in Trullo (A.D. 692),” New Advent, Canon 96, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm, accessed November 9, 2018. 46 Ioannes Zonaras, Theodori Balsamonis […] Joannis Zonarae... Commentaria in Canones, Patrologia Graeca 137 (Paris: Migne, 1865), 845–48. 47 Van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae historia, 244; Michael Grünbart, “Typisch Mann, typisch Frau: Beschreibungen von Kaiserinnen in der byzantinischen Historiographie,” Byzantinoslavica 74, no. 1 (2016): 44–60 at 52. 48 Papaioannou, Michael Psellos, 192–231. 49 Daniel K. Griggs, trans., Divine Eros: Hymns of St. Symeon, the New Theologian (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2010), 49–52, 391–92. 50 Hannah Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief: Tears of Contrition in the Writings of the Early Syrian and Byzantine Fathers (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 51 Niels Gaul, “Eunuchs in the Late Byzantine Empire, c. 1250–1400,” in Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond, ed. Shaun Tougher (London: Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth, 2002), 201–3. 52 Ringrose described the development of a positive appreciation of eunuchs in the middle Byzantine period, but it is only by dismissing the contemporaneous negative descriptions of eunuchs as mere repetition of classical tropes that is she able to claim that the positive vision was the norm: Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Tougher, The Eunuch, 98–99. In the late eleventh century Theophylact of Ochrid wrote a text that defended the virtue of eunuchs: Margaret Mullett, “Theophylact of Ochrid, In Defence of Eunuchs,” in Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond, ed. Shaun Tougher (London: Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth, 2002), 177–98. 53 Messis, Les Eunuques à Byzance, 90–91. The description by Cyril of Alexandria was made prevalent in the Middle Ages by its inclusion in the history of George the Monk and the Suda encyclopedia. 54 Noailles and Dain, Les Novelles de Léon VI, 320–27; Tougher, The Eunuch, 111. 40 41

58  Chapter 3 55 Ringrose, The Perfect Servant, 67–86; Katharine Ringrose, “Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1993), 85–109. See the thoughtful criticism in Tougher, The Eunuch, 109–11; Messis, Les Eunuques à Byzance, 361–68 56 Tougher, The Eunuch, 52. 57 Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Reconfiguring the Prophet Daniel: Gender, Sanctity, and Castration in Byzantium,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 73–106; Ringrose, The Perfect Servant, 87–102. 58 Messis, Les Eunuques à Byzance, 318–19, 365.

Chapter 4

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?

There is a fundamental disjuncture between the ideals of proper female behaviour, which involved sitting quietly and stilly out of sight, and the variety of things that Medieval Roman women did, which included ruling the empire. The conceptions of gender explained thus far would seem to lead to a society in which women did quite little aside of child rearing and weaving. Yet this image of complete repression simply does not square with the rest of the evidence, in which women are seen as engaging in numerous other activities. Women served as doctors and attendants in imperial hospitals. Women owned and ran factories, mills, and estates. Women were investors and engaged in commerce. Women successfully conducted disputes with bishops and other prominent male landowners. Women built churches and endowed monasteries. Women wrote hymns, poems, and history. And women engaged in politics and occasionally ran the empire. Obviously, not all these options were open to everyone, but neither can the experiences of these women be dismissed as exceptional. Some of the churches built primarily by women are tiny structures reflecting limited economic resources.59 You didn’t have to be a rich woman to leave a prominent mark on your community. Women apparently acted with relative autonomy and power continuously through the history of the Empire. The answer to the apparent contradiction between the fundamental ideology of female subordination and the rel-

60  Chapter 4 atively abundant evidence for women’s exercise of various kinds of personal authority, is that women were able to play with their society’s ideas about gender in ways that advanced their own agendas. I see two main modes women used to act with independence and authority. One was to claim exceptional strength of character that allowed one to act with masculine levels of rational self-control. This was the mode used by female saints and their hagiographers to explain why they were able to be so staunch and courageous. With proper ethical training, women could be like men. The other mode was to act with the feminine weakness that called on men to protect and help them. This stance of exaggerated femininity could also be used to effectively empower women. Both modes rely on and reinforce the theories of men and women’s natural capabilities and responsibilities outlined in chapter three, but they allow for outcomes in which women have far greater self-determination than casual interaction with those theories would suggest.

Don’t Act Like a Woman Women could overcome the naturally weaknesses in their gender through moral fortitude and practice of self-control. As we saw in the discussion of how women performed manly self-discipline, stories about female saints uphold the dominant ideology of female weakness at the same time that they praise each individual woman as exceptions to the rules. The same tactic seems to have been repeated nearly every time a woman sold land. In the act of making a sale or donation women ritually claimed that they were not acting like women. The idea that women had lesser rational capacity than men was a regular part of the legal formula for selling or donating property. In the standard medieval Greek form for selling property, the seller declared that he or she was not acting under the influence of a long list of things that could be grounds for overturning the sale later. For example, in the late twelfth century the seller promised that he was selling his land “willingly and without second thoughts, not

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  61

from some necessity or force, or fear, or trick, or fraud, or robbery, or lack of skill, or rusticity, or ignorance of deeds, or some other blameworthy reason annulled by laws, but with all enthusiasm and whole-hearted good will, still after having thought about my intention, with time for reflection, and with the approval of all my party.”60 When women sold land it was common for them to add that they were not acting under the influence of “female simplicity.” Georgia, for instance, sold her land “freely, by my own will and self-determining decision, and not from any necessity, or trick, or fear, or force, or guile, or difficulty, or haste, or enticement, or garnishing, or theft, or womanly simplicity, or anything in any way contravening the laws and holy canons, but rather with every enthusiasm and whole-hearted intention […].”61 The underlying assumption is that a woman might be able to dispute or overturn her sale by saying she had been tricked into it because of her innate womanly simplicity. Yet we know that women sold land and donated land regularly throughout the entire medieval period. They did so by enacting masculine rationality and dispassion. This returns us to one of the main features of Medieval Roman gender: masculinity and femininity were not absolute categories but behaviours that both men and women could perform. While it was believed that there was a natural tendency for women to be simple, it was also fairly normal for women to claim the ability to act with masculine rationality and therefore forswear womanly simplicity. The women were able to make legally binding sales by assuring all parties they were not acting like simple women. Female simplicity was a behaviour one could either manifest or avoid. We do not know what sort of performances would have gone along with the formulaic claim that one was not acting like a simple woman. Presumably all the things that marked woman as being in control of herself—a calm, modest, stately demeanour; clear, unhurried speech—could help create an image of a woman as serious and dignified. The witnesses for such a woman’s act could easily accept that she was not acting as a weak woman, that is as a flighty, unstable,

62  Chapter 4 rash, or easily manipulated individual. Rather she exhibited sophrosene and phronese and could therefore be trusted to stand by her decision. We see these women acting like men in the records for land sales that survive in monastic archives. But I hazard the guess that similar outright denials of womanly behaviour could work in other situations to lead everyone involved to recognize that a particular woman was an exception to the norm, and therefore could be trusted and treated like a man. It appears to have been fairly common to compliment women by saying they were manly, suggesting that it would not be terribly surprising for a woman to be able to act in a masculine way. If the community, or the parties to an agreement, could come to a consensus that a particular woman was manly, I expect that she would be able to conduct business like a man. Do not forget that nearly all the female characters in hagiography turn out in the end to have masculine strength of character. They were all exceptional and above average. A set of clear behaviours indicated restraint and prudence, and so could be enacted when necessary. Any woman who had the capacity to act with prudence, modesty, and self-restraint could transcend the ostensible expectations of her culture. Since the script for proper behaviour was so clear, it can’t have been all that difficult for women to enact and hence act like men. Part of why women were occasionally able to be active in imperial politics seems due to the ability of the ruling communities to accept that those women constituted exceptions to the norm of female weakness. Especially since nobility was thought to bestow an edge in gaining masculine levels of rational action, imperial wives, mothers, and sisters, who also trained themselves in virtue throughout their lives, could act and speak with masculine authority. Occasionally the ability of ruling women to behave like men is described explicitly. For instance, a tenth-century history describes Theodora, when ruling on behalf of her young son Michael III (842–867), dealing with a potential invasion by Bulgarians. They heard that a woman is ruling and decided

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  63

it is a good time to attack, but Theodora, “not thinking like a female nor unlike a man,” says that she will lead an army against them herself. Someone of Theodora’s status could be described matter-of-factly as just not thinking the way women normally think, but rather the way men think. That this is not an aberration of Byzantine gender expectations of female weakness is shown in the next sentence in which she explains that even if the Bulgarians were to win, they would lose because they would only have defeated a woman. They decide not to fight.62 The logic of her threat is that they would be humiliated even if they scored a victory against a female general because women were so much weaker than men. So, the general weakness of women remains a constant background assumption, even though a particular woman could simply think like a man. Throughout the discussion of her time in power this history does not treat Theodora’s decisions or responses differently from those of the male emperors. Within this narrative she succeeds by acting like a man. When faced with the murder of one of her main advisors, however, she is described as suddenly enacting the classic behaviours of a vengeful, hysterical woman, and is quickly forced out of power. She fills the palace with loud lamentations, runs around with her hair undone, and calls on God to curse the foul beasts that perpetrated the murder.63 Her behaviour is not unjustified, as a normal female reaction to death and betrayal, but it is not compatible with ruling the empire. The exceptional ability to think like a man is implicitly claimed throughout the Alexiad of Anna Komnene. This history, written by the daughter of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118), is the only surviving work of history written in Greek by a pre-modern woman and a vital source for the history of the Eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century. History writing was a masculine discourse in Anna’s culture, so when she took up the task of writing about the deeds of men in war and politics, she was thinking and writing like a man. She succeeds in taking on a masculine voice so well that most of this long text reads like any other narrative

64  Chapter 4 of military and political events and follows the conventions of classicizing Greek history writing closely. Her battle scenes are so good that even recently a Byzantinist has suggested her husband wrote them.64 Anna made a case for her exceptional ability to write like a man in several ways. She claims a stunningly good classical education, including study of philosophy, in the first paragraph of her book and displays it through elegant rhetoric and quotations of ancient texts. She proclaims her status as the imperial daughter, born in the porphyry royal birthing room of the palace. Anna’s nobility and study of philosophy marked her as the type of woman who would have a good chance of transcending the weaknesses of her nature. For reasons we will discuss later, Anna also portrays herself as mourning and subject to pathos, but every time she does, she makes a great display of drying her eyes and explicitly getting her emotions under control. Her displays of emotionalism become vehicles for allowing her readers to see her ability to master pathos and take up the masculine role of dispassionate historian.

Act Like a Woman The second major way I see for women in Medieval Roman society to pursue their self-determination was, paradoxically, to play upon their community’s assumptions about female weakness. Women could become powerful and act with autonomy when they used beliefs about female infirmity to their advantage. Beyond all the legal advantages that came with widowhood, widows had power because Psalms and Scriptures regularly enjoined men to uphold the widow and orphan. Part of being a good man was coming to the aid of poor, old widows. It seems that at times women were able to draw on this long-standing cultural rule to corral and apply the influence of men in their surrounding communities for their own benefit. In the inversion of the women who forswore their feminine simplicity in making sales, we have one text in which a

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  65

woman overturned a sale she had made previously apparently on the grounds that she been a powerless woman. When the widow Glykeria wanted to overturn a donation that she had made under oath, she positioned herself as a poor, old widow who was buffeted by tribulations and disasters and who had been coerced by men whose power she was too weak to resist. Her weakness and powerlessness, which were in part an aspect of her female nature, meant that she had not been truly free when she made the donation she wanted to overturn. With the support of prominent men from her community, and some of the leading monks from the Great Lavra monastery, she was able to make a new donation that, apparently, fulfilled her true desires.65 The details of the story can tell us quite a bit about the interplay of gender and power in Byzantine society. In the surviving act of donation, Glykeria narrates all of the difficulties that she has had with respect to her property and explains why she was making a new donation that overturned her previous one. Glykeria and her husband Ioannes wanted to donate their land to her spiritual father, Eustratios, the hegoumenos of Lavra. While her husband was alive, they maintained a running fight with the local bishop over control of the monastery they founded on their land on the island of Skyros. The bishop claimed that he should control the new monastery. Glykeria and her husband wanted the land to be independent of the bishop’s control. Her husband went to Constantinople to ask the patriarch to give the monastery freestanding status, which he did. This decision was not accepted by the bishop however, and soon the church Glykeria and her husband had built burned down in the middle of the night. At this point Ioannes died, leaving Glykeria alone to carry on the fight. Her narration is designed to spark the witnesses to pity the poor old woman bereft of husband and children. She donated her land to the monk Eustratios of Lavra, but the bishop was so incensed that he put intense pressure on Glykeria to annul that donation and give the land to him. The text is sadly damaged at the crucial part of the narrative, but it seems that she claimed the bishop

66  Chapter 4 threatened her in a church with some sort of saw. Unable to resist, she donated her land to the bishop. She subsequently however called for help from Eustratios, who by then was abbot of the Great Lavra. He sent the ecclesiarch and several other representatives to Skyros to help Glykeria act freely. In their presence, and that of other prominent male citizens from Skyros and neighbouring islands, Glykeria narrated her troubles, explained that she had been coerced into making her previous donation, annulled it on the grounds that had not been made freely, and donated the property, again, to Eustratios. While framed as a story of female weakness and helplessness, Glykeria actually exerted a remarkable degree of personal autonomy and authority. We can never be sure if our paper trail gives us the end of the story, but as far as we can tell she managed to do what she wanted with her land over the vigorous objections of her bishop, who nominally ought to have had far more power than she did. The bishop had significant formal authority as the governing member of the state-sanctioned church hierarchy. The right of the bishop to control all the monasteries in his territory was guaranteed in the canons of the Council of Chalcedon. Glykeria was defying fundamental tenets of church law as well as her bishop. She was able to pull this off precisely by playing the role of the poor helpless widow who needed the protection of all the good men around her. The first time she donated her land to Eustratios, the bishop may have been able to present her as an unruly and disruptive woman who did not respect male authority. We do not have the text the donation she made to the bishop, or any information about how he attempted to garner support in the fight. But within this culture it would have made sense for the bishop to argue that she was foolish and did not understand canon law, or that she needed to learn to respect his authority. When she was independently defiant, carrying on a dispute from a position of power, she may have been at risk of losing social standing. Yet once the bishop brought the saw into church, and Glykeria could reasonably claim to be helpless in the face of oppression, she

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  67

gained real power. She was able to activate the moral imperative for good men to defend the widow and orphan against the oppression of the unrighteous. In another case we can see a woman, Eudokia, momentarily inhabit the role of the helpless woman whose very piteousness requires men to help her, and shed that persona to act with personal authority and rational judgment. Eudokia wanted to sell a portion of her dowry to the monastery of Docheiariou in 1112. It was illegal for women to sell their dowries because that land was supposed to support their children, or revert back to the woman’s family if she died childless. The monks were worried that Eudokia would attempt to get her land back in the future because of the illegality of the sale. So they asked her to get a written exemption from the governor of the region, Andronikos Doukas. Eudokia wrote an appeal to the governor in which she presented herself as desperately trying to feed her children who were on the brink of starvation. She called herself the governor’s unfortunate and unworthy servant and beseeched him in extravagantly piteous terms to have mercy on her. She says her husband cannot provide for her and her children: […] he has been brought to complete poverty and helplessness […]. Not having any other source of salvation, we are in danger of dying from hunger and from lack of necessities. Therefore, I am in need that there be an order by you [to allow the sale]. Let an accommodation be made for me your unlucky and unworthy servant, lest we perish badly and pass from this world. And may God guide you.66

She does not mention that her husband was still alive, that he was an imperial titleholder—a protospatharios—or that they would have considerable property at their disposal even after the sale. How could Andronikos respond to such a request? He could either be a strong, worthy man who, like God, would providentially care for the weak and the needy, or he could be an evil, greedy man lacking in moral principles. Unsurprisingly, he ordered his subordinate to draw up the necessary

68  Chapter 4 paperwork to legalize the sale. Even if he suspected that, since she had the ability to write to him, Eudokia was probably a woman of considerable means who was not literally on the brink of starvation, her humble and piteous petition put him in the position of needing to help her. The exchange substantiates his provident masculinity as much as her feminine weakness. Back at the place of sale, the monks were still suspicious, and brought together a substantial number of locally important men who were tasked with quizzing Eudokia about whether she was herself responsible for sending Andronikos the letter and whether she had really meant it. The monks were apparently afraid she would later claim that someone else had asked the notary to write the letter. They wanted witnesses to attest that they saw her listening to someone read the letter and agreeing that she had intended to express those sentiments. She claimed to have dictated the letter herself. The committee of witnesses was not interested in determining whether or not she was in fact poor. There was no economic investigation of her situation, but concern about whether she would change her story. There is a stark contrast throughout the document between Eudokia’s claims of life-threatening indigence and the fear the monks have of her ability to contest the sale. Anyone who was as poor as Eudokia claimed to be could hardly have mounted an extensive legal fight with a powerful monastery. Given the presence of her titled husband at her side, and the existence of her other real estate possessions listed in the document, it is reasonable to assume that Eudokia was in fact a fairly powerful individual. Weakness and misery may not have been a state of being so much as a cloak of social convention that she put on for the sake of getting her way. The same dynamic of men meeting to come to the aid and support of a widow seems to have provided some ideological support for some empresses who ruled independently. Empress Eirene ruled on behalf of her minor son from 780 to 790, and independently, after the deposition of her son, from 797–802. Many factors contributed to Eirene’s ability to

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  69

maintain her position as ruler. The Chronicle of Theophanes, in explaining how Eirene restored the veneration of icons, says that God allowed Eirene to rule so that the restoration of Orthodoxy could be accomplished by a widow and her infant son.67 The miracle of the restoration was greater in Theophanes’s eyes because of Eirene’s expected weakness: it was a wonder that she could have done anything. In this sympathetic historical treatment, Eirene is not depicted is a woman of power and might, but as a disempowered widow. Eirene was able to rule for several years after her son reached adulthood, and even several years after she deposed and blinded him. She must have had the support of people who were worried that Constantine would revive his father’s iconoclast religious policies. In addition, it is likely that she was able to present herself in a way that allowed contemporaries to think of her as a prudent, serious, and wise woman who had the self-restraint necessary to act like a man. Anyone trying to understand how Eirene managed to take power back from her son Constantine VI needs to take her son’s lack of masculinity into account. Constantine’s poor performance as a military leader and lack of prudence in divorcing his wife to marry his lover were both flaws of masculinity. Since his competent mother was pushed aside as ruler to make way for a man to rule, Constantine’s failures to act like a proper man paved the way for her return. The Empress Theodora who ruled on behalf of her young son, Michael III, from 842 to 855, seems also to have her authority enabled by her performance of meekness. Her story is known largely from the hagiography written about her a generation after her death.68 She was considered a saint because of her role in ending the second period of iconoclasm and, like Eirene, in restoring the veneration of icons. According to her hagiographer she was reticent and humble, not speaking before men, throughout both her time as the imperial consort to Emperor Theophilos and her time as regent. Her deference to male authority, and fear of her husband, explains why she did not argue with Theophilos about his heretical iconoclast views or attempt to persuade

70  Chapter 4 him to restore icon veneration, despite feeling “sick at heart” over his heresy. The more common hagiographical trope is that the saint has the courage to speak freely in the face of the judge, or father, or husband, for the sake of preaching the gospel. Even when the authority figure threatens the saint with physical punishment or death, the saint persists in arguing the Christian line. Reading the Life of Theodora as a standard hagiography, we would expect her to heroically face down her husband and argue vigorously for the restoration of icons. The heroism of the saint who speaks truth to power stems from the saint’s inherent disempowerment. The authority figure holds the power of life and death over the saint, who yet acts defiantly. The reality of Theodora’s power as empress, however, created other requirements for her hagiographer. Given the fundamental ideology that women ought to be deferential to male authority, a female ruler was problematic. This tension would be greatly lessened if Theodora were a humble, deferential, needy widow who called on the men around her for help. Her supporters could then take on the valorized role of the good men who helped the poor widow, rather than the comic role of men who are bossed about by a woman. The need for a humble and meek Theodora trumped the standard call for the saint to be defiant and bold. Hence she was portrayed as submitting to live mildly with a heretic rather than disputing her husband’s authority. The central action of Theodora’s reign, the restoration of icon veneration and the end of the second period of iconoclasm, is attributed by her hagiographer to her five-year-old son Michael III, with Theodora merely present implicitly as his co-ruler. Even though it is clear that Theodora was the instigator of the change in doctrine, and that this change was her main claim to sainthood, the hagiographer chose to give explicit agency to her son. Theodora is not depicted is actively doing anything. The hagiographer explains that her political career ended after fourteen years when she “fell out with” her brother, the Caesar Bardas, over the latter’s murder of her minister Theoktistos, and retired to a monas-

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  71

tery. In the exposition of this political story the hagiographer says explicitly that she left the palace involuntarily. Yet in the following paragraph Theodora is entirely reconciled to the development and, “free from the responsibility of providing for the people,” she was content to spend her time praying for her son Michael III, whom she exhorts to rule with justice. Theodora is praised for having been a good mother of many children and a pious woman. Overall the hagiographer constructs a portrait of Theodora as a remarkably passive woman, despite having ruled the empire for fourteen years. Only once she has left the palace, given up power, and retired to a monastery does she offer a (coherent and rhetorically appropriate) speech of advice to her son.69 So strong was the negative connotation of female power within this culture that the way to create a positive portrait of a successful female ruler was to portray her as not acting with power. It is easy to see that the hagiographer, wanting to create a positive portrait of this powerful woman, described her as pious, fertile, and as either deferential to men or passive in the face of the events. One wonders how she in fact presented herself in interacting with her ministers. We do not have anything like the source material needed to answer this question definitively. Acting as if she needed the help of her ministers seems likely to have helped them save face in serving her, without particularly diminishing her autonomy in deciding what to do. It is possible that she let Theoktistos or Bardas take care of all the decisions for her, but the examples from the legal documents indicating that the enactment of weakness was a path to autonomy and authority for women suggest that a performance of deferential meekness may have helped her guide the ship of state. We see yet another example of a woman acting in a humble, weak, and piteous way in order to gain personal freedom of action in Anna Komnene’s Alexiad. While most of the text is written with historical dispassion, at the beginning, end, and several notable places throughout, the fabric of the text changes radically from describing historical events to expressing the piteous emotional state of Anna, the author.

72  Chapter 4 In these passages Anna speaks in the first-person feminine and the subject of the discourse becomes Anna’s own feelings of misery and mourning. At the opening she mourns the death of her husband and father, and at the end her father, husband, and mother. At other points in the text she pauses to mourn her fiancé and her brother. In a discussion of her sources that comes near the end of the history she interrupts to lament her own misfortunes and then to mourn husband, mother, and father. Throughout the rest of the history she adopts the voice of a first person plural male narrator for phrases such as “we shall see” or “let us return,” but here the subject of the history is the narration at hand rather than Anna herself. In the passages focusing on Anna’s own emotions, she expresses grief in a rhetorically extravagant fashion. Her expression of her mourning for her husband that opens the history is, as we would say, over the top: At these thoughts my soul becomes filled with vertigo and I wet my eyes with streams of tears. Oh! What a councilor is lost to the Romans. […] The suffering about the Caesar and his unexpected death reached to my soul and wrought the depth of pain. I hold all the misfortunes coming before this terrible misfortune as but a drop of rain compared to the whole of the Atlantic or the waves of the Adriatic. Rather it seems they were the prelude, and the smoke from the furnace of this fire overwhelmed me, both this scorching heat of that unspeakable burning and the continuous flames of the unutterable funeral pyre. Oh! Fire that turns to ash without matter! Fire burning secretly! Burning, but yet not consuming! Parching the heart, yet appearing that we are not also burned; even though we receive fire-wounds until the division of bones and marrow from the soul.70

So far, the most common response to these emotional outbursts has been to wonder what was wrong with Anna. Anna’s excessive emotionalism is usually interpreted as motivated by her profound anger, born of her shattered political ambition to become empress. The story of her failed effort to get her husband Nikephoros Bryennios to ascend to the throne

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  73

instead of her brother Ioannes is treated as the backstory that explains why she was so upset, and her expressions of grief are taken as cover for the real emotion that overwhelmed her: anger. For the past several centuries readers have been content to see Anna as a hysterical woman who could barely get her emotions under control and so left evidence of her fury sprinkled throughout her history. Meanwhile the story of the supposed coup has grown from vague suggestions in the medieval sources into an unquestioned fact about twelfth-century history largely because of the way that it helps explain Anna’s emotionalism in the Alexiad. Circularly, Anna’s emotional state in the Alexiad provides much of the reason to believe that Anna was involved in a coup. The problem with this interpretation is that it takes the vehemence of Anna’s emotions at face value, while disputing its causes, rather than asking what rhetorical purpose the expression of extreme emotion served in Anna’s project of writing. Anna was a rhetorician, trained in the same methods as her male contemporaries. Our question, therefore, is not what was wrong with Anna, but why did she present herself as having those emotions in her history. The rhetorical tradition in which Anna worked focused on manipulating the emotional responses of an audience to the rhetorician’s discourse. We need to ask what emotional response Anna wanted us to have when we read about her misery. I see Anna’s presentation of herself as a miserable, mourning widow as designed to elicit our pity and condescending goodwill. We are supposed to feel sorry for her. For centuries, Greek writers had used expressions of personal misery as a way of making it less obnoxious for them to talk about themselves. Talking about oneself was considered rude and self-aggrandizing because it was fundamentally self-centred and created an imposition upon the audience. By making discourse about oneself into a tale of woe, in which the speaker discussed all the horrible things he had suffered, the speaker could place himself below the audience as an object of pity and hence offset the self-aggrandizement inherent in talking

74  Chapter 4 about himself. Anna seems to have borrowed this basic technique to humble herself before her audience. She needed to humble herself because she was caught in the act of writing a history, which was an activity for elite men who engaged in politics. We do not necessarily think of history writing as a particularly gendered activity, but the reasons why Anna was the only ancient or medieval woman to write a history in Greek run deep. The subjects of history were the deeds done by men in war and the things they said in politics. History writing engages fundamentally in matters of the public sphere of male action. The veracity and trustworthiness of the historian were substantiated by his personal experience in war and politics which allowed him, either to witness things firsthand, or to understand what his witnesses were telling him. History writing also required deep education that allowed men to see through the rhetorical tricks in their sources and to write Greek in ancient Attic style. All of these characteristics of history writing conspired to make it an inappropriate activity for a modest and virtuous woman. Women were not supposed to be interested in war or politics, and they necessarily had no experience in either. Women had no way to question witnesses or gather evidence since they were not supposed to have interactions with men outside of their household. They were not sufficiently educated to write in classical Greek. In her text, Anna countered all of the potential objections that could be made to her authorial project. She constructed her subject is the history of her father, the emperor, hence blurring the distinction between public and private. She insisted on her high level of education, both overtly, and through the quality of her rhetoric. She admits that she did interview old soldiers and gather written texts about her father’s reign. But of course, everything she did to substantiate her ability to write history made her seem even more arrogant and immodest. It was the need to counter the impression that she was transgressive and self-aggrandizing that drove Anna to construct an authorial persona in which she was a humble, weak, mourning widow. Her self-presenta-

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  75

tion as a grief-stricken widow was not only a humbling stance, but a disempowered stance. In calling on her audience to pity her in her misery, Anna was drawing on the same cultural tendencies that Eudokia did in her petition to Doukas. Men were taught that it was vitally important to care for, protect, and help crying women. Anna was not asking for her audience to do something particular for her, as Eudokia was, but she wanted their goodwill. In the tradition of Greek classicizing history, the character of the author matters a great deal because the moral standing of the author was the audience’s only guarantee that he had been truthful and fair in his exposition of events. If Anna’s audience decided that she was a bad woman, they would not trust her to get the history of Alexios right. So to be a trustworthy historian, she also had to be considered a virtuous woman, and therefore a modest and demure woman. By prompting the audience to say, “oh poor dear,” she became humble in their eyes. When people read the Alexiad without an understanding of twelfth-century ideas of gender, they often perceive Anna’s authorial persona as arrogant and vain. This is because they clearly see her efforts to substantiate her skills and abilities to write history, but they are completely blind to her counterbalancing displays of humility. Anna makes a rhetorical play to appear modest and humble every time she makes a statement that could be construed as self-aggrandizing, but for many modern readers the humbling gestures only make her seem unhinged. When her apparent emotional state is explained as lingering political disappointment and anger, she becomes another Byzantine virago. This time, she is a frustrated would-be empress, who grasped unsuccessfully after power. Like Theodora and Justinian, Anna and Nikephoros become another example of a butch Byzantine woman with a wimpy husband. Also like Theodora and Justinian, the origin of this characterization goes back to a Byzantine historian trying to make a political point. Writing in the late twelfth century, Niketas Choniates painted an unforgettable portrait of Anna yelling at

76  Chapter 4 her husband after he failed to murder her brother Ioannes in which she complained that nature had given them the wrong genitals. Choniates’s description of the murder attempt is presented in a long counterfactual sentence explaining what would have happened, had it happened, in which Nikephoros’s failure to kill Ioannes is depicted using an extended metaphor of failed orgasm. Nikephoros in Choniates’s hands becomes the ultimate limp, emasculated man while Anna becomes an archetype of bloodthirsty female ambition. The rest of Choniates’s story of the transfer of power from Alexios to Ioannes is equally dripping with innuendos of bad sex. He describes the conspirators as lusting to conceive imperial power, equating longing for power with female sexuality. Anna’s mother Eirene is depicted as hating her son and badgering her husband, who cravenly ignores her until he loses control and yells at her. Eirene and Alexios thus also invert appropriate gender norms as she tries to run the house and he lacks self-restraint and authority over his wife. Ioannes meanwhile does not wait for his father to die before seizing power and refuses to go to his funeral. The whole household is a mess, and this seems to be Choniates’s point. He presents the foundation of the Komnenos dynasty as a site of moral depravity, substantiated through poor gender performance. This immorality at the root of the reigning dynasty appears to play a causative role in Choniates’s history. The troubles of his own era were the outgrowths of the rot at the core of the house of Komnenos. Writing initially while serving as a highly placed official in the administrations of Isaac and Alexios Angelos (grandsons of Alexios Komnenos) and revising the text in exile after the crusader conquest of the empire in 1204, Choniates’s history is a long exercise in blaming people other than Choniates for the political trouble and eventual fall of the empire. One of many rhetorical moves designed to shift the blame away from himself was to preface his history with the strange tale of complete gender inversion in Alexios’s household. It was a way of saying the whole dynasty was corrupt from the outset.

How Did Medieval Roman Women Get So Much Done?  77

Choniates’s writing is both so seductive and so poorly understood, however, that his poisoned portrait of Anna has been profoundly influential in how she is remembered. The vulgar speech he has Anna address to her husband has often been taken as something she actually said, and his story of the murder attempt undone by flaccidity cooling hot passions is taken as a real event. Anna’s own self-portrait as a modest and demure woman, who yet possesses the skills necessary to write a history, has been entirely drowned out by Choniates’s more familiar characterization of Anna as a power-hungry Byzantine woman. That his portrait is a caricature, rather than a realistic description of any human, has not dampened enthusiasm for it. In this I see a reflection of the general tendency to expect Byzantine society to be clearly composed of masculine women and effeminate men. Choniates’s portrait of Anna seems realistic because we expect Byzantium to be inhabited by such stock figures. It is possible that Anna’s contemporaries were more persuaded by her self-portrait in the Alexiad. They certainly would have understood her expressions of mourning as a humbling gesture and they may have been more sympathetic to her efforts to appear to be both a good historian and a good woman. Whether or not her attempts to play the poor old widow actually worked beyond her immediate circle of friends, we can see that it was clearly an attempt to play upon her culture’s assumptions about female weakness. She presented herself as both the exceptional woman with the ability to think like a man and the poor old widow who needed goodwill. The cultural imperative to help distressed women handed women a ready way to coax support out of the men around them. One of the ways Byzantine women were able to act with strength and authority was paradoxically by using their ability to act helpless and needy.

78  Chapter 4 Notes 59 Sharon Gerstel and Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Female Church Founders: The Agency of the Village Widow in Late Byzantium,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Lioba Theis et al., Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 60/61 (Vienna: Bohlau, 2014), 195–211. 60 Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, eds., Acta et diplomata Graeca medii aevi sacra et profana, 6 vols. (Vienna: Gerold, 1860–90), 4:122. 61 P. Lemerle et al., eds., Actes de Lavra. Première partie. Des origines à 1204 (Paris: Lethielleux, 1970), 85–91. 62 Featherstone and Signes Codoñer, Theophanis continuati, 321. 63 In the discussion of her role in the restoration of icons the text is careful to portray her as a good, supportive wife, “the noble and true helper of her husband,” even though she was overturning his policies. In this she is depicted as enacting a traditional valorized female role. See Featherstone and Signes Codoñer, Theophanis con­­ tinuati, 216–44. Elsewhere her depiction is remarkably free of gender differentiation. 64 James Howard-Johnston, “Anna Komnene and the Alexiad,” in Alexios I Komnenos, ed. Margaret Mullett and Dion C. Smythe (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1996), 260–302. 65 Lemerle et al., Lavra I, 141–44, 155–61. 66 Nicolas Oikonomides, ed., Actes de Docheiariou (Paris: Lethiel­­ leux, 1984), 67–73. 67 Cyril A. Mango and Roger Scott, trans., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 626–27. 68 Alice-Mary Talbot, Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), 353–82. 69 Talbot, Byzantine Defenders of Images, 376. 70 Reinsch and Kambylis, Alexiad, 9.

Chapter 5

Masculinity and Military Strength

Byzantine men have a reputation for military weakness, cowardice, and deviousness in both western medieval texts and eighteenth- through early-twentieth-century historiography. More recent scholars of Byzantium have tried to rehabilitate the military reputation of Medieval Roman men somewhat through discussions of military history in which they defend the practice of hiring mercenaries or point to deceptive stratagems in ancient Roman military handbooks. These discussions dance around the driving issue of military honour and do not consider gender. I see the reputation for weakness as deriving more from differing conceptions of proper gender performance and male honour than from differing military tactics or strategies. Nearly all the Medieval Roman texts from which the details of military history are derived were using stories about war to comment on the morals and character of the leading men, so we need to bring the study of masculinity overtly into the conversation about military prowess. As this subject is in its infancy, this chapter does more to lay out problems than offer explanations. Questions of the actual degree of militarism in the Eastern Empire, as opposed to the highly militarized and violent Western Europe, are entwined with Medieval Roman conceptions of the role of militarism in the construction of an ideal man. The later appears to have been a contested arena with different voices, in different eras, providing somewhat contradictory witnesses.

80  Chapter 5 A structural social explanation has been offered for why elite East Roman men often seem less warlike then their Western European counterparts. Compared with Norman elite men, for example, there is no question that the Medieval Romans were less frequently engaged in warfare. Mark Whittow attributed this, in part, to differences in the underpinnings of power. In Western Europe power came from possession of land which was maintained through armed conflict or the threat of it. Men became powerful because they were able to fight and lead men in warfare. In the East, men became powerful because they worked for the imperial government. Such work might be military, but it could also be administrative, leading Whittow to interpret Byzantine ideals of manhood as relatively independent from military valour. The masculinity of Byzantine men was not impugned within their society by their status as civilians.71 It does seem clear that in various eras the Eastern Empire supported what could be seen as a civilian elite, including both imperial administrators who acquired great wealth and power without any military service, and wealthy urban populations whose status was in no way connected with military activity. One did not need to be a warrior to be an upstanding man in the Medieval Roman Empire. The disinterest of Medieval Roman men in fighting was observed by outsiders as striking. Benjamin of Tudela, an Iberian Jew who wrote a description of the communities through which he travelled in the twelfth century, commented that the Romans hired mercenaries because “the natives are not warlike, but are as women who have no strength to fight.”72 Coming from a highly militarized society, Benjamin took the civilian nature of the male population of Constantinople as an expression of effeminacy. Civilian elite men were not automatically perceived as effeminate within Medieval Roman society however, in part because they could draw on earlier Roman modes of reimagining masculine strength as a matter of self-control. Ever since the professionalization and provincialization of Roman military service, and the political change from Republic to Empire, elite Romans grappled with recasting their construc-

Masculinity and Military Strength  81

tion of masculinity in ways that were compatible with their demilitarized status. Roman elite men throughout the Eastern Mediterranean struggled to find new ways to construct themselves as manly after the establishment of the empire cut off opportunities for the display of martial prowess in battle.73 In part, the establishment of self-control as the measure of a man, rather than the ability to exercise violence against others, may derive in some sense from the shifts brought about by the civilianization of the Roman Empire. In Late Antiquity masculine strength displayed through Christian asceticism or learned restraint, however, remained in tension with traditional discourses exalting martial prowess.74 As heirs to this culture, Eastern Roman men had a set of civilian masculine virtues at hand. Even for emperors, personal military prowess was not necessarily a required virtue. Virtue for emperors included generosity, chastity, intelligence, righteousness. The masculine virtues described in chapter three are entirely compatible with civilian life. Civilian status, however, can certainly coexist with an ideo­­logical valorization of military strength as part of ideal masculinity. The evidence for the medieval Empire indicates that the importance of military capacity in the construction of masculinity varied a great deal. If one were a soldier, it was virtuous to be able to fight well, but no one would think a rhetor was unmanned because he had not trained in the arts of war. Because more texts written by monks and bishops survive, the idea that ascetic athleticism for Christ far outshone other displays of bodily strength may be overrepresented. Among the authors of narrative history, military strength was highly prized. Numerous texts routinely praise military courage and associate it seamlessly with masculinity. A tenth-century history says of Theophilos (829–842): “loving honor and nobility [he] set off for war, thinking of nothing unmanly or soft.”75 Since the main word for bravery in medieval Greek, andreia, literally means “manly,” men who lacked it were not only cowardly, they were unmanned. The older brother of Manuel Komnenos (1143–1180), Isaac, was not fit for the throne, according to Choniates, because he was

82  Chapter 5 so timid that he was “not like a man.”76 I’m inclined to think that military strength was a positive part of masculinity more often than not. Some of the evidence that was used to construct the idea that “Byzantine” men were militarily wimpy often stems from histories that were assessing the careers of those men critically and blaming them for the Empire’s military problems. As we saw in the opening chapter, it is the critical stance that Medieval Roman historians take toward their subject, and belief that one of the purposes of history is to mete out praise and blame, that contributes to the idea that Byzantine men performed for their gender poorly. An army struggling against an enemy in the ninth century “very resolutely acted like men for a long time” before being forced to flee.77 Logically as soon as they gave up and fled, they stopped acting like men. Individual generals and soldiers could be blasted in histories for a poor military showing, but the lesson to be drawn for the study of gender is that people approved of men who are militarily successful. The criticism levelled at unsuccessful emperors means that cowardly or militarily incompetent behaviour was considered unacceptable. The image of Byzantine men as lacking in martial prowess also owes a great deal to negative assessments made by western European observers, particularly historians of the Crusades. Perennial interest in the history of the Crusades has magnified their views of Medieval Roman men in every subsequent century, continuing to the present day. Anna Komnene’s history of Alexios (1081–1118) looms large in discussions of the First Crusade and the military valour of Byzantine men. Anna’s history has been used by western historians to reconstruct the history of the First Crusade for hundreds of years. Anna depicts her father, Alexios I, as an Odysseian helmsman guiding the ship of state through countless storms and troubles, using whatever trick or stratagem could help him gain the upper hand against the adversaries who always grossly outmatched him. She depicts Alexios as fighting against the odds by whatever means necessary. This portrait obviously plays into western stereotypes of Greeks

Masculinity and Military Strength  83

as wily and devious. The Alexiad is commonly used as evidence that, in fact, the Greeks really were wily and devious. This reading assumes that Anna’s portrait of Alexios would be recognized as a normatively ideal type of masculine hero in Medieval Roman culture. I think she was responding to the history written by her husband Nikephoros Bryennios which portrayed Alexios as a craven man of poor character because he used tricks and fought deviously. Nikephoros made a strong case that only fighting face-to-face was honourable and that by fighting with tricks Alexios and the Turks were morally lacking. Hardly anyone has read Nikephoros’s history—either now or in the twelfth century—and so his stance against trickery has passed unnoticed. Yet the desire to counter her husband’s negative portrait of Alexios seems to have driven Anna’s attempts to put a positive spin on Alexios’s tricks. Historians of Byzantium who have wanted to redeem Alexios’s reputation have pointed to military handbooks that prescribe deceptive strategies as a normal part of classical Roman military strategy, in an effort both to valorize military trickery as a respectable moral stance and to say that this was considered good behaviour according to the norms of Alexios’s culture. This takes it as given that the values expressed in the Alexiad match those of Medieval Roman society generally. They might, but we don’t know that. Shouldn’t we rather compare her work to the military values of other histories to see who is the outlier? This systematic work has not been done yet, but based on my reading so far, I think it is possible that Anna was the oddball and Nikephoros, Attaleiates, Kinnamos, and Choniates valorized fighting by getting to the enemy and fighting face to face. These histories have been read for content—who fought whom—but rarely if ever with an eye for how the way the battle is described reflects on the moral conduct of the actors. For the study of gender, the question is not whether Alexios really fought using tricks (he probably did) but whether his contemporaries thought he was upstanding and clever or a craven cheat. Only by reading Nikephoros’s history sys-

84  Chapter 5 tematically can you see that all the good guys fight through straightforward, direct engagement and all the bad guys fight with deceptions that avoid coming to grips. Scholarship has focused on Anna because her text deals with the First Crusade and it has long been available in English. When we start looking at other histories more closely, we will be better able to discern what Medieval Roman military values really were. Western European medieval politics differed fundamentally from Eastern Roman politics in ways that had ramifications for medieval European assessments of Roman masculine honour. Loyalty to one’s lord was a component of most western European constructions of masculine virtue. Hereditary lords and kings enjoyed a degree of prestige and devotion that was utterly foreign to East Roman political sensibilities. Eastern Romans dismissed their emperors regularly, and without remorse, because the emperors existed to serve the Roman polity, and if they did not they were not owed loyalty. It was rather the responsibility of other members of the Roman polity to replace an ineffective Emperor. Likewise officials, governors, and generals served the Roman state and could be hired and fired at will. No one wrung their hands in agony at having to serve a new governor when the old one was replaced, because loyalty was owed to the Roman state, not to whatever individuals were working for it at a particular moment. When viewed by Western Europeans, the East Romans who sacked their emperors seemed morally depraved. This is certainly a difference in morality between two societies, but I think it also plays into conceptions of proper masculinity. Part of being a good man in Western Europe was supporting one’s liege lord. When those raised in this moral system observed easterners blithely replacing emperors, they perceived those people as bad men, and described them as such. Conversely aspects of Medieval Roman morality made the western knights seem womanish. Medieval Roman culture placed a premium on deliberate, measured action as opposed to rash, bold action. Martial prowess was certainly prized, but it needed to be exercised within the bounds of a well-ordered military endeavour. If one were not engaged

Masculinity and Military Strength  85

in military activity, one could still exercise a full degree of masculine self-control and control over one’s household. The Medieval Romans routinely criticized Westerners as being rash, impulsive, and uncontrollable. The martial gusto which the crusading knights were so proud came across as a feminized characteristic to Roman observers. In the Middle Ages European and Eastern Roman attitudes about fighting and masculinity were different enough that they disapproved of each other. Medieval western values and judgments were largely seconded by later European historians. The task of assessing these hostile judgments is complicated by the nature of the eastern evidence. Elite men who were only able to exercise civilian virtues were motivated to downplay the importance of military virtues. Most of our texts were written by civilians. Nikephoros Bryennios was a rare historian who was also a military commander, and forthright military courage was everything to him. The penchant for writing critical assessments of generals and emperors means we have stories about men fighting badly, but we do not know enough about common ideas of martial masculine virtue to know whether the views of an individual historian were normal or aberrant. As more people study Medieval Roman masculinity and military values we will probably be able to draw firmer conclusions than we can at the moment. It is clear that civilian status did not automatically cast a man as effeminate, but I’m not sure how much military skill was admired, or whether people agreed on what constituted military prowess. I hope that those disappointed with my lack of definite answers in this chapter will help further the study of Medieval Roman military honour.

Notes 71 Mark Whittow, “How the East Was Lost: The Background to the Komnenian Reconquista,” in Alexios I Komnenos (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1996), 55–67. 72 Marcus Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (New York: Feldheim, 1907), 23.

86  Chapter 5 73 Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 74 This is a much more complex process than this summary suggests: Kate Cooper, “Gender and the Fall of Rome,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Malden, MA: Wiley– Blackwell, 2012), 187–200; Guy Halsall, “Gender and the End of Empire,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 17–39; Michael Edward Stewart, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Leeds: Kismet, 2016); Mark Masterson, Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014). 75 Featherstone and Signes Codoñer, Theophanis continuati, 158. 76 Van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae historia, 52. 77 Featherstone and Signes Codoñer, Theophanis continuati, 164.

Chapter 6

Change Over Time

This account has been a remarkably static image of Medieval Roman gender. I have culled information from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and amalgamated it into a common meatloaf. This is regrettable because Byzantine culture and society were not unchanging or monolithic. We know that many aspects of Medieval Roman society and culture changed. I just lack sufficient certainty about changes in gender for me to make unambiguous statements about them. Here I will outline some changes that have been posited along with my reasons for scepticism. The uncertainty does not arise from any inherent unknowability of the historical problems, but from lack of fundamental research. Alexander Kazhdan and others suggested a major shift in Byzantine culture from glorifying civilian virtues and civilian leadership up through the eleventh century to glorifying military aristocracy in the twelfth. This has become generally accepted in the field and I basically think it happened. There is no doubt that there were many administrative and governmental changes in the eleventh century, and the depictions of emperors changed along with desires for what emperors should do. It is natural to think of this shift in culture as also entailing changes in ideas about how to perform gender properly. It may have, but I think the evidence is less straightforward than it may seem at first sight. Eleventh-century cultural change was concurrent with a change in the style in which histories

88  Chapter 6 were written. Histories became more classicizing, and this entailed more concern with moral action of the key figures and more deliberation about what events meant and discursive elaboration of the characters. Histories shifted from relatively brief statements that such an emperor attacked so and so and who won, to long accounts of what happened that could include speeches debating the best course of action, descriptions of how the generals arranged their camps, how the troops were deployed, who led which division, and how everyone behaved on the field. The discursive classicizing histories seem to use the details to craft a moral story of heroism and good and bad masculine behaviour. I am sceptical about how much more real information they provide about military history than the earlier bare-bones texts. We have two long descriptions of the Battle of Mantzikert by Michael Attaleiates and Nikephoros Bryennios but both are obviously concerned foremost with telling a story that excuses the Roman failure and either exonerates or blames the various individuals involved. Contemporary military historians trying to understand what happened on the Mantzikert campaign now spend more time working with Geographic Information Systems and archaeological data than the stories in the histories. The earlier, sparse histories speak almost exclusively of the emperor, and use the story of the emperor as a metonym for the entire court. The later classicizing histories become full of rich stories about the lives of emperors and empresses at court. The court seen through these histories has many characters, and while the story is focalized around the emperor, he is depicted as interacting with a significant number of people who may attempt to sway his opinion in one direction or the other. As a consequence of this change in depiction of the court, we know much more about court women from the eleventh century on. A second change in the nature of our sources is that later medieval intellectuals prized, and copied, the rhetorical works of court orators of the mid-eleventh century and onward. We have a relatively rich body of court poetry, let-

Change Over Time  89

ters, and orations that give us far more information about the people at the top of the imperial government than we have for other eras. We have much less of this sort of thing from earlier periods. I don’t think this was because ninth-century emperors did not like having orations performed about them, but that those texts were far more rarely copied. Hardly anyone bothered to save anything from the seventh and eighth centuries. Does that mean that no one wrote court rhetoric? Our dearth of texts is a consequence of the copying decisions of later medieval people, not a certain indication that early medieval people didn’t write anything. There are a couple of upshots of these changes in the nature of our source base for the study of gender. First, we see a lot more women from the mid-eleventh century on. This has often been taken as a sign that they enjoyed greater freedoms and became more prominent in society. But how much of this is a change in social norms and how much a change in literary fashion? When the earlier histories describe the emperor alone as doing everything, we assume that he directed a host of administrators, generals, and soldiers who were just left out of the story. The early emperors certainly had wives, sisters, and daughters, just as they had generals and officials. Should we assume that they were really less active, influential, or prominent just because they were similarly not considered relevant to the history? When later sources start giving us hints about things women did, should we assume those are new behaviours, or just things no one thought to mention previously (or mentioned in texts that no one wanted to keep)? When Psellos mentions that an eleventh-century empress liked to make perfume, should we think that the use of perfume was new in the eleventh century? I don’t think so. Psellos was just the first person to write about such a thing. The twelfth-century poem describing the tent that the emperor’s sister-in-law used on campaign has no precedent, but does that mean that twelfth-century women had unprecedented freedoms, or simply more popular poets? There is no change in our records for female land-holding or other indicators of economic independence.

90  Chapter 6 There is no change in inheritance law or the legal systems for circumscribing female power. Women in the early ninth century ruled the empire and women played roles in ninthand tenth-century imperial politics that were as significant as those that played in later centuries. The change in cultural depictions of women therefore might not have all that much to do with a change in social freedom. Second, the change in source material may indicate a growing importance of military skill in constructions of ideal masculinity. It is commonly taken as reflecting a new set of military values, and it probably does. On the one hand, the growing popularity of the classicizing histories in itself argues that people liked listening to long stories about men acting heroically, or cravenly, in battles and military campaigns. Insofar as the substance of these histories reflects the values of the elite, they seem more interested in talking about men’s military honour. On the other hand, we know that martial courage among generals and soldiers was admired before the eleventh century. Even the sparse early medieval histories praise courage and condemn cowardice among leaders. Also, many of the classicizing histories only survive in one or two copies. The only copy of Nikephoros Bryennios’s history was lost in the eighteenth century. So it is a bit of misnomer to say that classicizing histories became “popular,” and it is difficult to judge whether they reflect a more widespread change in values. We may be on more solid ground in thinking that the eleventh-century changes in political culture eventually affected attitudes toward eunuchs. The positive descrip­­tions of eunuchs become far more rare from the twelfth century on and eunuchs seem to become less numerous. The change in the appreciation of eunuchs is easily connected with the host of changes in the way the imperial government presented itself and conducted business. The imperial court of the ninth and tenth centuries worked hard at placing itself in a mimetic relationship with how the participants imagined God’s heavenly court to be. They imagined Christ as an emperor, sitting on the throne, surrounded by a court of angels and the

Change Over Time  91

heavenly host. So, they tried to arrange the earthly court to match their vision of the heavenly court by paying careful attention to the way that guards, servants, and officials looked and arranged themselves in a carefully ordered array. Tremendous effort was put into making people in a particular group take on a uniform appearance and having them all stand in the right places so as to create a beautiful, orderly vision. Eunuchs played a significant part in this court culture because they were thought to look like angels and angels were imagined to look like eunuchs. It was important for emperors of this era to be surrounded by ranks of eunuchs because that helped maintain the earthly court’s imitation of the way they imagined the heavenly court. Twelfth-century Byzantine political culture does not look much of anything like that of the ninth and tenth centuries. Emperors ruled on the basis of individual relationships with particular men, rather than matching ranks of courtiers. Emperors imitated Jesus by suffering on behalf of the Empire because Jesus was now imagined as a saviour who suffered for the sins of humanity, and less often as Ruler of All. In this new political culture of personal connection, eunuchs had no ideological purpose that anyone cared about and became simply mutilated men. Caution again is in order however, since the loss of an ideo­­ logical need for eunuchs does not necessarily mean that people’s ideas about the gender of eunuchs changed. The nature of the complaints against eunuchs in the twelfth and later centuries were not different from those of earlier eras. The positive descriptions of eunuchs as beautiful and angel-like simply disappear as court eunuchs became more rare. Eunuch monks and churchmen seem to have remained a feature of Medieval Roman society and small numbers of court eunuchs are attested through the fifteenth century.78 Although the eleventh-century changes in political culture affected the numbers of eunuchs created, it may not have constituted a significant change in gender attitudes. All of which it to say that the assessment of whether Medieval Roman conceptions of gender changed significantly

92  Chapter 6 over time is an ongoing project of uncertain outcome. As we continue to study gender, and particularly masculine military honour, we will be able to give a more refined portrait of change over time. Given the role that ancient and biblical models played in Medieval Roman ethical formation, I would expect change in gender ideals to be slow, if not glacial. I would expect far greater disparities in expectations based on social situation and wealth. Contemporary rich, poor, urban, or rural people probably had more differences in what they considered appropriate gender behaviour than did rural poor people of different centuries.

Notes 78 Tougher cautions that eunuchs did not disappear after the twelfth century: Tougher, The Eunuch, 119–27.

Conclusion

We began by pointing out how some of the most common images of Byzantium are grounded in negative gender stereotypes imputed to that civilization by Western European commentators. Byzantium the exotic, decadent, cruel, corrupt, superstitious, Oriental empire is imagined as a place ruled by power-hungry women and eunuchs whose flaccid men fought by means of treachery and bribes. While this image derives largely from Byzantium’s status as the negative foil that reinforces the positive values Western Europeans attributed to themselves, we have seen how Medieval Roman texts do contain descriptions of powerful women and cowardly men. I hope that you now will be able to read those texts with some understanding of the authorial intentions behind them. Texts were designed to tell readers both who to emulate and who to revile. Images of powerful women were intended to reinforce the value of female deference to male authority while stories of craven men taught the value of courage. Since so many Medieval Roman texts depict traditional patterns of behaviour in order to teach men and women how to behave, we can reasonably suppose that at least some of the time they actually acted that way, or at minimum believed that they ought to. They seem to have been well aware that which roles they played, and how well they played them, determined whether they were seen as good or bad men, eunuchs, or women. Our texts revealing provincial disputes show people jockeying to avoid getting pushed into

94  Conclusion playing a negative role or deliberately taking on a role that would likely spark a particular behaviour in another. We have seen in the previous pages numerous examples of women and men apparently getting what they wanted through the deliberate performance of a particular gender role. The stock roles do not seem to have been straightjackets but rather a wide repertoire of behaviours that people could mimic or embody in order to craft the responses others would have to them. The traditionalism of Medieval Roman society and its love of modelling behaviour on ancient architypes seems in practice to have provided people with a rich toolbox for creative self-expression. Gender, like much of social interaction, seems thus to have been highly performative. Medieval Roman texts abound with stories of men whose failings rendered them feminine and women who acted with masculine strength. Proper ethical formation, strength of character, and daily practice of proper gender behaviour were needed for men, women, and eunuchs to maintain their appropriate roles and decorum. The very importance placed on the individual’s moral agency in taking up the obligation of being a good woman or good man within this society may contribute to the prominence of images of poor gender performance in Medieval Roman texts. It is ironic that a society deeply concerned with having men and women learn to perform their gender strictly would leave a textual record that has enabled outsiders to see them as a perverse hotbed of gender transgression.

Further Reading

Bjørnholt, Bente, and James, Liz. “The Man in the Street: Some Problems of Gender and Identity in Byzantine Material Culture.” In Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453), edited by Michael Grünbart, 51–56. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007. Exploration of gender signalling in some visual sources.

Brubaker, Leslie. “The Age of Justinian: Gender and Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, edited by Michael Maas, 427–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Overview of gender in the sixth century with special attention to the writings of Procopios.

Constantinou, Stavroula, and Mati Meyer, eds. Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Essays exploring the connections between gender and emotions, with excellent introductory and concluding essays on the state of the field and recent bibliography.

Galatariotou, Catia. “Holy Women and Witches: Aspects of Byzantine Conceptions of Gender.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9 (1984): 55–94.

This is the article that introduced the study of gender to By­zantium studies. Insightful assessment of Byzantine perceptions of women.

96  Further Reading Garland, Lynda. Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527–1204. London: Routledge, 1999. A chronological survey providing narratives of lives of empresses.

—— . ed. Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience AD 800–1200. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Volume of essays on women’s history.

Gerstel, Sharon E. J. “Painted Sources for Female Piety in Medi­­­ eval Byzantium.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 89–111. Innovative use of painted churches to discuss gendered aspects of lay piety.

—— . Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeo­­logy, and Ethnography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Includes rich, wholistic discussions of the lives of women and men in their material environment.

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, ed. Anna Komnene and Her Times. New York: Garland, 2000. A collection of essays on Anna Komnene including studies of the relationship between gender, literature, and authorship.

Grünbart, Michael. “Typisch Mann, typisch Frau: Beschreib­ ung­ en von Kaiserinnen in der byzantinischen Historiographie.” Byzantinoslavica 74, no. 1 (2016): 44–60. Overview of how perceptions of gender affected the presentation of empresses in histories.

Hatzaki, Myrto. Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium: Perceptions and Representations in Art and Text. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Analyzes perceptions of male bodies and beauty. A rare book about men.

Further Reading  97

Herrin, Judith. Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in By­­ zantium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. A collection of essays on women’s history written between 1980 and 2009, some of which set the agenda for the study of Byzantine women.

—— . Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001. Describes the careers of several ruling empresses of the late eighth and ninth-centuries and explores the social values that allowed them to rule.

Hill, Barbara. Imperial Women in Byzantium, 1025–1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology. New York: Longman, 1999.

A detailed study of the actions of eleventh- and twelfth-­ ­century empresses and women in the imperial court. Argues that women cooperated to combat an ideology of oppression.

James, Liz. Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Explores the political power invested in the role of empress in the fourth to eighth centuries.

—— . ed. Women, Men, and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium. Lon­­ don: Routledge, 1997. Excellent book of foundational essays on gender. One of the first attempts to study gender rather than women’s history. Includes a chapter on men.

Kalavrezou, Ioli, ed. Byzantine Women and Their World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2003. A revealing exploration of women’s lives as illuminated by material evidence. This is a detailed catalogue of an exhibition of objects relating to women, organized thematically with insightful framing essays.

98  Further Reading Laiou, Angeliki. Gender, Society and Economic Life in Byzantium. Variorum Collected Studies 370. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992. A collection of essays including foundational studies of the social and economic position of women.

Markopoulos, Athanasios. “Gender Issues in Leo the Deacon.” In Athanasios Markopoulos, History and Literature of Byzantium in the 9th–10th Centuries, item XXIII (replicates pagi­ nation of original article). Variorum Collected Studies 780. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Analysis of how Leo the Deacon’s ideas about gender affected his writing of history.

Messis, Charis. Les Eunuques à Byzance, entre réalité et imaginaire. Dossiers byzantins 14. Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2014. A thorough and thoughtful analysis of Byzantine depictions of eunuchs systematically discussing nearly all of the surviving texts.

—— . “Lectures sexuées de l’altérité. Les Latins et identité romaine menacée pendant les derniers siècles de Byzance.” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 61 (2012): 151–70. A significant analysis of the ways that medieval western European and Byzantine conflicting assessments of gender led to increasing cultural antagonism.

Meyer, Mati. An Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art. London: Pindar, 2009. The fundamental starting point for exploring depictions of women in Byzantine art.

Neil, Bronwen, and Lynda Garland, eds. Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Collection of essays mostly dealing with Byzantine women.

Further Reading  99

Neville, Leonora. Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Describes how Anna Komnene’s gender affected the composition of the Alexiad and re-assesses the evidence for Anna’s role in a conspiracy against her brother.

—— . Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The “Material for History” of Nikephoros Bryennios. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Argues that appreciation for ideals of Roman masculinity affected Nikephoros Bryennios’s historical narrative.

Papaioannou, Stratis. Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Although focused on the writing of Michael Psellos, this is a ground-breaking book for understanding Byzantine gender in general.

Ringrose, Kathryn M. The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Argues that a positive view of eunuchs developed in the middle Byzantine period. Focuses on understanding the roles and relationships of eunuchs serving the imperial court. See also Ringrose’s other articles.

Smythe, Dion. “Gender.” In Palgrave Advances in Byzantine History, edited by Jonathan Harris, 157–65. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Good general introduction to the field, with bibliography.

Talbot, Alice-Mary. Women and Religious Life in Byzantium. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Rich collection of essays on late Byzantine women’s history focusing on religious devotion.

100  Further Reading Theis, Lioba, Michael Grünbart, Galina Fingarova, and Matthew Savage, eds. Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond. Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 60/61 for 2011/12. Vienna: Böhlau, 2014. A collection of essays on women’s roles as patrons and founders.

Tougher, Shaun. The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society. London: Routledge, 2008. Careful and insightful discussion of eunuchs. Tougher’s many articles on eunuchs and gender are all also worth reading.