This Thematic Session examines narrations of attitudes and beliefs about gender and desire in a variety of medieval East-Roman genres, including hagiography, historiography, speeches, and letters. How did Byzantine authors writing from the ninth to twelfth century use stories to encode and manipulate ideas about male and female and the differences between them? To what purposes? How were these concepts different from those operative in late antiquity? Stories of masculine women and effeminate men in particular articulated the boundaries of gender binaries even as they blurred them. Such stories decoupled connections, often assumed to be natural, between gender and sexual desire. Tales of ambiguity might trouble, thrill, or delight. Saints’ lives recounted stories of heroic women. Monastics of either gender might transcend gender norms, their love of God rendering them queerly desirous, even in their chastity. Historians and rhetors told of eunuchs, either admired or reviled, who upheld or troubled assumptions about maleness. Nuns who “disguised themselves as monks” might find authors and scribes alike confused about which pronouns and grammatical markers to use when telling their stories. Men who remained unmarried, such as emperor Basil II, called into question the stability of gendered life. Fictional and historical narratives conveyed expected patterns of gender expression and self-identification, offering regulatory modes of communication between authors and audiences. These narratives also at times gave glimpses of the unexpected and its subversive effects.
Medieval East Roman saints’ lives celebrated their heroes’ rejection of cross-sex romance and marriage, childbearing and childrearing. Saintly men renounced household roles including assuming authority over wives, children, and slaves. Saintly women abandoned husbands and even children or they avoid their parents’ plans for their marriage altogether. Most found community with members of their own…
In this presentation, I consider a passage from the tenth-century historiography, Theophanes Continuatus, that puts questions to standard interpretations of military masculinity and its relation to same-sex desire. In book 4 at section 23, the historiographer who wrote Theophanes Continuatus depicts Karbeas (the leader of the break-away Paulician state based in Tephrike) as curiously interested…
Byzantine trans saints such as Theodora/us of Alexandria and Pelagia/us of Antioch have long been understood to represent genderfluid lives. More recently, scholarship has also begun to consider the fluidity of their Lives, that is, of the texts through which these saints are mediated. Indeed, hagiographical narratives are designated as ‘living texts’ due to the…
The records of rituals performed on behalf of the Roman state by Constantine VII known to us in the Book of the Ceremonies can be fruitfully explored on the analogy with texts of liturgies in that we have scripts of rituals whose meaning was created anew each time they were performed. The repetitions of these…
Characters emerge from the dialectical relationship between acts of reading (the interpretative, imaginative, and constructive interaction between an engaged reader and a finite set of textual elements) and regimes of reading (an assemblage of textual and readerly norms, constituted of many acts of reading, that govern an act of reading). In this, the production of…