Women, Men and Eunuchs

Gender in Byzantium

Elizabeth James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135105471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The collected papers in this volume present a unique introduction both to the history of women, of men and eunuchs, or the third sex, in Byzantium and to the various theoretical and methodological approaches through which the topic can be examined. The contributors use evidence from both texts and images to give a wide-ranging picture of the place of women and Byzantine society and the perceptions of women held by that society.
Women, Men and Eunuchs offers a unique and valuable exploration of the issue of gender in Byzantium, which will fascinate anyone interested in ancient and medieval history and gender studies.

1
Sacred and Profane Love: Thoughts on Byzantine Gender¹

Averil Cameron

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.

How gendered was Byzantine love? In George Herbert's beautiful poem 'Love', love seems to be cast in the male gender, and the term is boldly transferred to Christ, without explanation or defence. Something similar happened, as I shall argue, in an important sector of Byzantine literature, while conversely, the discourses of love commonly encountered in other societies, especially of course in modern ones,² are largely absent. This chapter will explore the implications of this absence, and suggest some of the problems and the possibilities inherent in any attempt to inquire into Byzantine gender and subjectivity.

In recent years feminist scholars have been much exercised by the question of gendered language. What does it mean to look for specifically male or female language? Is language itself gendered? Or does language become gendered in a given social context? And then (a different question), what might it mean for a scholar, and in our case a Byzantinist, to 'write as a woman'?³

Study of Byzantine gender poses both conceptual and methodological problems. First, there is the term 'Byzantine', which is used in a number of ways, depending on the relevant academic constituency. For most purposes this is not too serious, but it has serious implications for the present issue in view of the huge amount of recently published work on women and gender in late antiquity (fourth to seventh centuries).⁴ In view of the central role of the Church in society at large, the gender attitudes of medieval Byzantium, it may be plausibly argued, were themselves established in the early Christian, and especially the post-Constantinian periods. Thus, quite apart from other arguments as to terminology, it makes sense for us to take 'Byzantine gender' in a broad chronological sense, as Alexander Kazhdan does in an article on the attitudes to sex in Byzantine hagiography.⁵ Here, therefore, the term 'Byzantine' will be used to designate both 'late antiquity' and the succeeding period. But there is still a problem, in that the evidence from late antiquity offers so exceptionally rich a scope for sophisticated interpretation; gender questions are difficult to separate in that context from related but strictly dissimilar questions about issues such as asceticism, self and individuality.⁶ To carry these inquiries into the later period is a very different enterprise either from that of 'finding' Byzantine women, or from the essentially apologetic aim of demonstrating a sympathetic presentation of women in hagiographic and other texts.⁷ But this is the material that we must use, for Byzantium is also a society without fiction as such (for the Greek novels pose their own rhetorical questions), and, overwhelmingly, without the women's writings, letters, diaries and so on that make a similar inquiry possible for more modern periods.

Byzantine writing is overwhelmingly men's writing. The odd exceptions (above all Anna Komnene's Alexiad) are just that; the many 'desert mothers' of early eastern spirituality left an enduring legacy in the long tradition of Byzantine women's monasteries, but until the foundation charters of the houses founded by aristocratic women in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, their voices have been drowned out by their male counterparts, and are little heard in the spiritual tradition of the Byzantine Church; neither the popularity of ascetic stories of repentant prostitutes nor the Lives of female saints do much to redress the balance.⁸ Within the written tradition, a strongly misogynistic tone can often be found, embedded in the context of authoritarian prescriptions for the proper place for women, that is, on the outside, not intruding into male space.⁹ Alongside the female monastic tradition, that of total exclusion of everything female from male orthodox monasteries continues in some instances to this day. Byzantium was a traditional society in which one would not expect women to have played an overtly active role in public life. The well-known strong empresses in Byzantine history can therefore be accommodated within the familiar model of the indirect influence of women in a male-oriented society, where only a few exceptional women are likely to achieve prominence, and then largely by means of their potential influence on men, or by virtue of occupying the special roles of the mother of a young emperor or the marriageable daughter or widow of a deceased one.¹⁰ Yet at least in one period of Byzantine history the freedom of action of aristocratic women extended beyond this narrow circle.¹¹ And in a number of cases the actual behaviour of imperial Byzantine women such as Irene or Zoe indicates an apparently paradoxical determination and an ability to free themselves from the overt moral constraints laid on them by the prevailing male discourse.

There are therefore numerous contradictions inherent in issues of gender in Byzantium. Given the nature of much of the evidence, some aspects have received little study, among which one of them may be potentially most interesting, namely the subjectivity of Byzantine women. How did Byzantine women perceive their own role as females, and what conflicts did it present to them? As in other societies where a male discourse prevails, most women will have internalised its values for themselves, and even justified them to themselves with no sense of contradiction. In the case of Byzantium, the silence of women's voices adds an extra and serious level of difficulty. Perhaps we may look for some additions to the corpus: the female addressees in the correspondence of S. Theodore the Studite have recently come to the fore, for example.¹² But I wish to consider a different set of questions, and to ask how 'male' is the Byzantine language of love and gender, and if it is, what was the likely effect on society in general, and particularly on Byzantine women?

In this connection, it is worth considering our own subjectivity as scholars and writers. In writing about Simone de Beauvoir, and about the role that a training in psychoanalysis has played in her own formation as a feminist writer, Luce Irigaray comments: 'there are centuries of sociocultural values to be rethought, to be transformed. And that includes within oneself.'¹³ In the same collection, she answers the question of whether she writes 'as a woman': 'I am a woman. I write with who I am. Why wouldn't that be valid, unless out of contempt for the value of women, or from a denial of a culture in which the sexual is a significant subjective and objective dimension?'¹⁴ In the past, many of the Byzantinists who have written about Byzantine women (and especially about the most spectacular empresses and aristocratic women) have themselves been male scholars. This is now changing. Perhaps it is time therefore to look at the subjectivity of the scholar him/herself. We too are bound by our cultural prejudices, by the constraints of the surrounding discourse and by our own writing-practice. Women are well represented among the present generation of Byzantinists; is that not relevant in itself?

A Personal Note

When I was beginning research, the women's movement was beginning too; like many others at the time, however, I did not wake up to it for quite a while. Perhaps I am one of that generation of successful woman academics who consciously or subconsciously adopted male strategies. Of course I read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir, but I probably first encountered women's history as such only in 1967, in the early stages of the then highly controversial Women's Caucus of the American Philological Association. At that time and since, the politics of the women's movement in the United States and in Britain were very different. Moreover, I did feel, I admit, that women's history as such could only ever be part of the story; what I wanted to be was a historian, not a women's historian or a historian of women. Much later, I began to sense an expectation on the part of others that I should be doing something about women's studies. I think that in my case this was again probably because of later experiences in North America, and in particular of my awareness there of the strong pressures on senior academic women to act as role models for the younger or less senior women in their departments. But if young female academics feel under pressure, the ambiguities of the situation for those who have already reached senior positions may in fact be no less. Belonging to the female sex may be a distinct advantage in some cases, but quite the opposite in others. In the comportment of senior male academics towards their female colleagues, it is none other than a re-enactment of the age-old sexual pattern of advance and withdrawal. But in turn, after a generation's worth of teaching and writing since the early days of the women's movement, is it not possible to recognise the familiar female claim, not to think of oneself as a woman scholar as such, but simply as a scholar, for what it actually is - an internalisation of the surrounding (male) cultural values? Why did it take so long to reach this simple realisation?

One reason for the delay is suggested by the self-consciousness with which the female scholar is forced to act. Not least revealing are the ploys adopted by women scholars themselves when speaking in academic gatherings on issues of gender. The chosen strategy depends heavily on the nature of the intended audience; it can range from deliberately eschewing female adornment to the equally familiar tactic of adopting a highly seductive look while ostensibly talking in an apparently earnest manner about overtly sexual topics. The public dress codes of the modern academic woman can take many forms. In 1993, the Guardian newspaper contained a defence by Germaine Greer, an early feminist icon, now proudly postmenopausal, of the outfit in which she had chosen to appear in a recent television programme - 45cm shorts worn with sheer tights;¹⁵ the occasion for her television appearance was the publication of a book in which she had praised the older woman's release from the necessity of cosmetic allurements. Conversely, the refusal of feminine allure may stand as a badge of cultural reversal; as Gillian Clark has pointed out, the first requirement of a woman ascetic was to make herself as non-sexual as possible by removing any external aid to female beauty.¹⁶ The gaze of late antique and Byzantine males was all too prone to be seduced.

The age of the modern female writer is also significant in relation to the reception she can expect. In a short essay entitled 'How old are you?', the same Luce Irigaray comments: "'How old are you?" is a question that should hardly ever be put to a woman, for example, for risk of offending her. Because it would seem she's only loveable or desirable in her youth, or for other reasons, during her child-bearing years.'¹⁷ Fortunately, passing that stage also conveys a certain freedom, including the freedom to indulge in self-analysis. I am now much more aware than formerly of the actual difficulties I have had as a woman writer. I am referring to the subjective conflict arising from cultural notions of gender and femaleness, or 'femininity', and success in the 'masculine' domain of creativity.

This is a well-known problem: in my generation, the successful woman in the creative sphere may typically have tried to ignore it, or to over-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Women's studies, gender studies, Byzantine studies
• 1 SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE: THOUGHTS ON BYZANTINE GENDER
• 2 WOMEN AND ICONS, AND WOMEN IN ICONS
• 3 MEMORIES OF HELENA: PATTERNS IN IMPERIAL FEMALE MATRONAGE IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES
• 4 IMPERIAL WOMEN AND THE IDEOLOGY OF WOMANHOOD IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES
• 5 GENDER AND ORIENTALISM IN GEORGIA IN THE AGE OF QUEEN TAMAR
• 6 SALOME'S SISTERS: THE RHETORIC AND REALITIES OF DANCE IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND BYZANTIUM
• 7 WOMEN AS OUTSIDERS
• 8 BYZANTINE EUNUCHS: AN OVERVIEW, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THEIR CREATION AND ORIGIN
• 9 HOMO BYZANTINUS?
• Select bibliography
• Index