Women of Byzantium

Church History, Sept, 2007 by Dorothy Abrahamse

Women of Byzantium. By Carolyn L. Connor. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. xvii 398 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Despite considerable scholarly interest in the past two decades, Byzantine women's history remains an elusive and difficult subject. Even more than in the medieval West, Byzantine literary sources reflect atypical women--generally empresses and saints--in texts written within rhetorical and hagiographical traditions not easily penetrated by the modern reader. Carolyn Connor's purpose in this work is to "present in a clear, contextualized, and accessible way the stories of the women of Byzantium" (xiii) for general readers. The title of the work is apt, for she does so in vignettes of women who are presented through detailed analysis of texts and artistic monuments. Professor Connor's women include imperial figures like Theodora, Anna Komnene, Zoe, and the fifth-century Theodosian empresses, as well as female saints ranging from the desert saint in male disguise, Mary of Egypt, to abbesses, a domestic model of sanctity, and the women who appear in the life of a sixth-century rural saint. Documentary sources for Byzantine women are extremely sparse until the late Byzantine period, but Professor Connor devotes an informative chapter to the description of a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century abbess as reflected in the detailed foundation charter of her monastery.

Each figure is used to illuminate issues in Byzantine women's history, with chronological coverage that spans the life of the empire from early Christian legends to a fourteenth-century mosaic. The narrative on which each vignette is based is presented to the reader in some detail, and extensive quotations are included to give the general reader a flavor of the sources. Many readers are likely to know little of Byzantine women other than the scandalous assertions about Theodora found in Procopius, and the presentation of these texts in an engaging format is an excellent introduction to lesser-known women and female hagiographical types.

Professor Connor is an art historian, and a strength of the work is her detailed analysis of artistic representations of her selected characters in a variety of media. Readers will learn what close analysis of coins can tell us about the role of the fifth-century empress Pulcheria, for example, or the imperial symbolism of the famed Theodora mosaic in Ravenna. Women as patrons of art are explored through Anicia Juliana and the fragmentary remains of her commissions in sixth-century Constantinople. Professor Connor devotes a chapter to images of female saints in middle Byzantine churches in Greece, Cappadocia, and Cyprus, arguing that the frequency of depictions of women increased in middle Byzantine church programs, and that Helena, paired with her son Constantine, holding the True Cross, become especially prominent as the symbolic importance of the cross increases. Representations of middle Byzantine empresses in mosaic and manuscript illumination are also given close analysis and used to expand literary evidence.

Many of Professor Connor's sources are controversial and difficult to use as evidence, as she acknowledges in a section on the "problematic" of the study of Byzantine women (73-77), noting that textual sources must be read in the context of their literary genres and of their often biased male authors, while "ordinary" women are generally absent. A wealth of current scholarship and scholarly debate addresses major issues in Byzantine women's history and different theoretical approaches to the study of gender in Byzantium. Professor Connor acknowledges the literature, but the format and her desire to tell a story sometimes overwhelm the problematic nature of the sources and make her selected women seem more understandable than they really are. This is especially true of female saints. Professor Connor gives readers an introduction to the hagiographical genre, but in the focus of her case studies on the narration of colorful texts of vitae like those of Mary of Egypt and the middle Byzantine abbess Irene of Chrysobalanton, readers inevitably will see them as biographical. It would be more illuminating to draw the readers into thinking about the lives of female saints as only one element in the growth of a cult, looking at when they were written and for what purpose, how they were copied and transmitted, and who might have read them. Such an approach would contrast the efforts of middle Byzantine monasteries and the aristocratic families who established them to perpetuate the miracles and postmortem cults of their sites with the inclusion of women in disguise among the ascetic heroes of late antiquity and the broad dissemination of their legends. Professor Connor also makes a valiant attempt to include "ordinary" women in her text, but this categorization is too imprecise to be useful in understanding non-elite Byzantine women, and the sources for them are probably too marginal and scattered to be easily amenable to a case-study approach for any particular period or category of women.