Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200Lynda Garland This volume brings together a group of international scholars, who explore many unusual aspects of the world of Byzantine women in the period 800-1200. The specific aim of this collection is to investigate the participation of women - non-imperial women in particular - in supposedly 'masculine' fields of operation. This new research across a range of disciplines attempts to provide an analysis of the activities of and attitudes towards Byzantine women in this period. Using evidence from sources as diverse as tax registers, monastic foundation documents, twelfth-century novels, historical texts, art historical evidence and the writings of women themselves, such as the hymnographer Kassia and the historian Anna Komnene, these papers elucidate the context in which Byzantine women lived. They emphasize the variety of female experiences, the circumstances that shaped women's lives, and the ways in which individual women were perceived by their society. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 17 | |
| 41 | |
| 77 | |
Woman and Empress Between Two Worlds 16 | 91 |
Middle Byzantine Family Values and Anna Komnenes Alexiad | 125 |
Women and the Carnivalesque | 163 |
Imperial Women and Entertainment at the Middle Byzantine Court | 177 |
Bibliography | 193 |
Index | 215 |
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Common terms and phrases
Achilles Tatius Alexiad Alexios Alexios I Komnenos Anna Dalassene Anna Komnene appears Bagrat Bagratid Basil Basil II Botaneiates burial Byzantine novels Byzantine Women Byzantium Charikles Choniates Chronicle of K'art'li Chronographia church confraternity Constantine Porphyrogennetos Constantine VI Constantinople court daughter depicted documents Dosikles Doukas dress Drosilla eleventh century emperor empress entertainment Eudokia Eugenianos example father female feminine garment gender Georgian Giorgi girl Glykeria Greek novel heroine household humour husband Hysmine Hysminias icon iconoclast imperial women Irene Doukaina Isaac Iviron Kassia Kazhdan Komnenian late antiquity later Lefort Leib Lynda Garland Makrembolites male Maria marriage married Mart'a Mary of Alania Mary's medieval Middle Byzantine monastery monastic monks mother Nikephoros Bryennios Nikephoros III nuns Pakourianos palace participated patriarch period Prodromos protagonists Psellos Rhodanthe role Sewter sexual Skylitzes society sources St Theodore tenth century Theophanes Theophilos Theophylact twelfth century virginity wife woman Zonaras καὶ
Popular passages
Page 165 - As for the common mob, it was already on the move, greatly^ stirred at the prospect of exercising tyranny over him who had himself played the tyrant. And the women — but how can I explain this to people who do not know them? I myself saw some of them, whom nobody till then had seen outside the women's quarters, appearing in public and shouting and beating their breasts and lamenting terribly at the empress's misfortune, but the rest were borne along like Maenads,69 and they formed no small band...
Page 130 - ... (these things must be divulged, and it is not self-advertisement to recall what Nature and my own zeal for knowledge have given me, nor what God has apportioned to me from above and what has been contributed by Opportunity); I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything,...
Page 205 - The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa. Translated from the original Armenian with a commentary and introduction by Ara Edmond Dostourian.
Page 125 - Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hampshire GU11 3HR, UK; email: info@ashgatepub.co.uk; web site: http://www.ashgate.com; price £47.50.
Page 181 - Let us first come to know these, O Emperor, and then command others to be brought in." At this, everyone, both men and women, burst into loud laughter; the emperor's face darkened and only when he had chastened the jester's freedom of speech was his anger curbed.
Page 164 - Seclusion, Separation, and the Status of Women in Classical Athens," Greece & Rome 36 (1989), 3-15.