A further problem in the history of women is relevant to the wider issue of gender involving both ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ persons. Gender historians such as Julia Smith and Lisa Bitel have attempted to reframe Joan Kelly Scott’s classic question, ‘‘Did women have a Renaissance?’’ in terms of the social and political transformation wrought by the end of antiquity (Smith 2000a). Given the fragmentary and indeed stereotypical nature of reference to women by ancient and early medieval sources (Bitel 2002), a satisfactory conclusion has yet to be posed. For the sake of clarity, we will consider the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity as discrete events, since the relationship between the two is open to debate.
Where the fall of the Roman Empire is concerned, the first and most straightforward question is whether women fared better under Roman or barbarian law. It is well known that Roman law allowed dramatically greater scope to women as property-holders than did the Germanic law codes (Arjava 1996; Smith 2000a), thus allowing them to control resources that could be used in their own interest. It should further be argued that married women at least were better served by Roman family law than by Germanic law. In Roman law, a married woman remained legally independent of her husband, benefiting from protection by (and accountability to) her paternal kin, while Germanic systems assigned the mundium or jurisdiction of a woman to her husband, and thus left him as the unchallenged arbiter of her interests, with the power simply to suppress those interests when they did not coincide with his own (Johlen 1999). In structural terms, the interests of the wife ‘‘disappear’’ within those of the husband in the barbarian law codes, while in the Roman system she stands at the intersection of two competing spheres of interest, with scope to invoke the power of one kin group against the other. Whether this reflected a wider tendency to downplay protection of women’s interests is not clear. The asymmetry between men and women’s rights in marriage was compounded by the fact of polygamy, and complicated by a spectrum of reproductive relationships in which the marriage contract played a far less central role than in the Roman Empire.
There is evidence, of course, that elite barbarian women could make fluent use of their own version of warrior authority. The fifth-century writer Priscus again serves as a useful source, remarking on the hospitality he and his companion received during their embassy to the Huns from the sister-in-law of Attila, who ran her own village (Priscus, Hist., fr. Blockley 1981: 260-1), and that Hereka, the mother of Attila’s eldest son, presided over her own establishment (Priscus, Hist., fr. Blockley 1981: 274-5). A woman’s rise to this kind of status seems to have involved establishing a privileged relationship to feral menfolk, with the production of healthy sons serving as something like the female equivalent of male success in battle.
At the same time, this is where the emphasis on the decline of public systems (Ward-Perkins 2005) attracts the attention of the gender historian. As the Roman system ofpublic justice ceased to function, those who could not defend themselves by force became increasingly vulnerable, although ecclesiastical courts or more informal mechanisms for adjudicating disputes were sometimes available. Access to public justice, even in the high empire, was patchy at best; but papyrus sources show that women did sometimes make use of the Roman legal system to deal, for example, with violence by men (see, for example, the affidavit against a violent husband preserved in P. Oxy. 903; Patricia Clark 1998).
Women and children were, of course, the paradigmatic vulnerable individuals, and the late Roman historians commented, as did the poets, on the brutal fates that sometimes befell them in the absence of enforceable norms of public order. The capture of Radegund during the destruction of the Thuringian royal family may be the most celebrated case of this vulnerability, due to its commemoration in The Thuringian War, a lament attributed somewhat uncertainly to Venantius Fortunatus (it is possible that the queen herself was its author). Another poem of Fortunatus, the lament for Galswinth, the wife of Radegund’s stepson Chilperic and brutally murdered by him, echoes a theme of bridal vulnerability that stretches across the fifth and sixth centuries (Leo 1881; Roberts 2001).
While the decline of Roman law was on the whole a minus for women, the challenge to ancient religious ideals was less conclusively negative. The christianization of the Roman world made a difference to how women were imagined, and imagined themselves, not only because of the different ‘‘shape’’ of Christian ideas, but also because the cultural uncertainty accompanying the long ‘‘handover’’ between the two systems created opportunities for experimentation that might not have been open in a more successfully static system. The social tension around christianization created a window of opportunity through which individuals could renegotiate their standing and claim acceptance for eccentricity. Given their comparative vulnerability, women were far less likely than men to find hidden opportunities in military or political uncertainty, but cultural uncertainty could bring opportunities as well as disadvantages.
The tension between the biological family and the family of faith was especially significant for women, who had long stood as the representatives of the ethos of family life. In the uncertainty generated by this tension, new identity strategies became possible. Again, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas gives a vivid account of what it was like to be part of a Christian community where awareness of rank and gender was suppressed in favor of the fragility of the body and the permanence of the otherworldly family. Even Perpetua’s father, whose authority she would in normal circumstances be bound to honor according to both Roman and Christian norms, must bow to the greater claim of her calling to martyrdom. The inversion of the social hierarchy here reaches back to the eschatological paradox of the Beatitudes (Matt. 5: 1-12). But it would be a mistake to see women’s religious views as intrinsically countercultural. Women’s expressions of authority were often framed in socially conservative terms (Brubaker 1997). For the most part, the women at the pinnacle of the social order are the ones we know something about. These women tended to be fully in tune with - and in some respects in charge of - the social order as it was.
The women who stood high in the steep hierarchy of late Roman society were often extremely powerful by modern standards. While the empire lasted, there were real grounds for the complacency of these women with regard to their own role. We know ever more about the economic and political authority aristocratic women were able to exert in their own right, through jigsaw evidence preserved in inscriptions (Forbis 1990) or papyri (Rowlandson 1998). Scholars are only beginning to write the kind of composite or dynastic biography that can make sense of this fragmentary evidence (Kurdock 2003). Women were playing a crucial role as patronesses. Royal women were the obvious case in point: one thinks of Helen and the true cross, or of Constantina and the cult sites of the Roman martyrs (Brubaker 1997). But women of the senatorial aristocracy, too, were wielding enormous power. The women friends of St. Jerome, for example, should be seen as his patronesses, not his protegees (Rousseau 1995; Kurdock 2003). The fact that they did not play a clerical role is no longer seen as implying a lack of participation or authority: economic wherewithal and family standing could flow together in a powerful role as patron and arbiter (Elizabeth Clark 1990).
Women were certainly powerful as religious patrons, and their sensibilities were often dominant, sometimes to the dismay of the clergy. In the east, the empress Pulcheria fostered the Marian cult, at least in part because she believed that, like male emperors who had proposed themselves as the earthly counterparts of Jupiter or Christ, she as empress should stand as the avatar of an otherworldly power (Limberis 1994). A century later, Anicia Juliana built one of the great churches of Constantinople, St. Polyeuktos (Harrison 1989). Even for imperial women, there are important methodological problems here because of the fragmentary nature of the sources for women as historical agents (Brubaker 1997), but patterns are sometimes discernible.
The contribution of Roman women under Germanic rule can also be traced, particularly in the religious sphere. Some time around the beginning of the sixth century, for example, the aristocratic virgin Proba, probably a great-great-granddaughter of the Proba mentioned above, allowed the learned cleric Eugippius to use her library to compile a florilegium of the thought of the great North African father Augustine of Hippo: the result was the Excerpta Augustini, one of the standards of any medieval library. Another text from the same milieu, Ad Gregoriam in palatio, seems to be addressed to the mistress of a late fifth - or early sixth-century Italian aristocratic household (Daur 1992). Ad Gregoriam draws on the twin ideas of the ascent of the soul to heaven, made popular by Christian Neoplatonists such as Boethius, and the spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil in the Christian soul (psychomachia), made popular in the monastic literature and in the poetry of Prudentius (ad 348-410). Both themes are linked in this text to the concrete problem of running the household, which emerges as a wonderfully heroic activity. Ad Gregoriam in palatio in fact reflects a wider genre of household manuals for the married Christian laity, a surprising number of which are preserved from the period (Cooper 2007). This may mean that the monastic libraries that preserved the texts foresaw a pastoral role for monks with respect to aristocratic families, or that lay readers were expected to make use of monastic collections in some cases at least. (It may also reflect the tendency of lay aristocrats to bequeath their personal libraries to monasteries.)
At the end of the sixth century, we see married women - aristocratic matronae as well as queens - collaborating with bishops in the care of the Italian communities faced by the Lombard invasion. Gregory the Great and his female correspondents consoled one another, and sent money and even blankets back and forth between Italy and Constantinople. Indeed, Gregory’s friendship with Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards, was no accident, reflecting a tradition of popes and bishops corresponding and collaborating with the womenfolk of both Roman and barbarian rulers, without regard to lines of ethnic affiliation or the religious persuasion of the husband. At the same time, the Epistulae Austrasiacae (Gundlach 1892) reveal that across Europe, from Byzantium to Visigothic Spain, married women continued to serve a more traditional role, as the object of exchange in marriage allegiances aimed - unsuccessfully, as it turned out - at maintaining the fragile unity of the Mediterranean. But asceticism had opened an opportunity for women to side-step the roles assigned to them: again, we may think of Radegund who, after an unwilling marriage to her captor Chlothar, was able to embrace asceticism, initially by flight, and finally to live out her years as the foundress of an important monastery in Poitiers.
My suggestions about women’s more perilous situation with the decline of Roman law and Roman public justice, and the attractiveness of religious institutions and networks as a venue for their activity, should not be taken as applying exclusively to women. Men, too, were made vulnerable by the same circumstances, and the fact that women were left more exposed to male brutality does not mean that men were not similarly exposed to the brutality of other men, or that there were not variations within each class. Christian networks and institutions offered an alternative ‘‘relational matrix’’ for both. The difference, of course, was that the terms on which men and women could hope to negotiate their place in the new dispensation diverged, with new emphasis on military accomplishment for men and reproductive accomplishment for women.
World History
