Rereading Sexual Violence in Byzantine Hagiography from the Fifth to the Twelfth Centuries

The reception of Byzantium in modern times is not always positive. Myths of medieval whiteness and gender are mobilised by the American Alt-right, religious and political institutions, and in mainstream media, which participate in maintaining white patriarchy in the present. For instance, Douglas Galbi’s website, purple motes, co-opts Medieval texts to communicate a misogynist agenda. One blog post on the site compares the false allegation of rape made against St Eugenia to men on US college campuses who, he claims, are victims of false accusations, and contends that modern courts, like Roman courts, are biased against them. Galbi even declares Eugenia the ‘patron saint for men falsely accused of rape’ (2017). The divide between academic and popular writing, however, is not that stark. While the misogyny of purple motes and the racist ideology of the Alt-right are dangerous myths of history, they are also fundamentalist and niche discourses; their reach is limited. Historiography has the power to maintain and reproduce harmful cultural discourses in the mainstream, yet it is perceived as rational, objective, and trustworthy—this makes it more dangerous. This paper will critically assess the only history of sexuality as it appears in Byzantine hagiography—Byzantine Hagiography and Sex from the Fifth to the Twelfth Centuries by Alexander Kazhdan (1990)— to show how sexual violence has been deemphasised, dismissed, and excused. He reframes instances of sexual victimisation as erotic and romantic encounters, which obscures an historical understanding of both sexual violence and consensual sex as it appears in the hagiography and reproduces modern misogyny and patriarchy. By rereading sexual violence in Byzantine hagiography, I aim to disrupt harmful histories that reproduce present-day rape culture.