Exploring Gender Identities through Byzantine Seals

Legends on Byzantine seals provide researchers with invaluable information for studying imperial institutions and the prosopography of Byzantine society, as witnessed by the rich bibliography of a discipline that is still flourishing. Nevertheless, these short texts, written in a variety of formulations by the owners of the seals or approved by them, are much more than a simple ‘visiting card’; they reflect their self-perception and the image they wished to project in public following social approved models. Because of their role in guaranteeing the authenticity, ownership and content of documents or objects, seals, which were essentially asexual objects, were accessible to all Byzantine social groups. As personal objects personalised by their owners, seals provide discrete first-person accounts that shed light on the mechanisms of gender construction, the expression of membership of a particular social group and conformity to sociocultural conventions.