Women in the Byzantine Empire

In premodern societies, such as Byzantium where the dominant ideology was male-centered, there was much discussion in various texts—moralist, legal, philosophical, religious, medical, and literary—about women’s weakness and inferiority, their “right” social and cultural place, and their responsibilities and rights. At the same time, epigraphic evidence and non-textual sources have much to say about actual women’s daily lives and worlds. However, systematic research on premodern women—in this case Byzantine women—did not start earlier than the 1970s, that is, the time when women’s studies emerged as an independent field. Earlier, Byzantinists (mostly male) did not consider women’s social and cultural roles as historically important. Now women’s studies have been largely replaced by gender studies, yet we are far from achieving a good understanding of Byzantine women’s roles, activities, behavior, treatment, and ideologies as determined by their origin, class, financial status, profession, and familial and health situation within a large period lasting more than a millennium and a huge territory that was changing through time. Most studies on Byzantine women concern urban and particularly Constantinopolitan wealthy women. These are chiefly individual elite women (empresses and women of the aristocracy) and nuns (mostly associated with the upper classes of Byzantine society) of the middle Byzantine period. What unifies all non-slave Byzantine women irrespective of origin and status was their responsibility to become wives, mothers, and caregivers of their children—either on their own or with the help of nurses and servants. All women were also responsible for the household and its invalid or sick members. However, Byzantine women’s familial lives have not yet received systematic scholarly attention. Even though there are many research gaps in the study of Byzantine women, existing scholarship has provided important information about their many achievements: they acted as rulers of the empire; they sustained the economy of a highly military society by running factories, mills, rural estates, and commercial enterprises; they founded monasteries and churches; they built hospitals and orphanages; they commissioned the creation of important monuments, artworks, and manuscripts; they organized literary circles; and they composed texts and music. Although they were acting in an androcentric society, Byzantine women often achieved much more than their male counterparts, a reality that renders their work even more noteworthy. The bibliography provided here constitutes an overview of studies, mostly in English, focusing on various aspects of the lives, representations, and ideologies of Byzantine women.