The social fabric to which Byzantium owed its resilience drew on diverse
human resources and the nature of that diversity is worth considering. An
elemental difference is that between men and women. The Byzantines’
assumptions and demarcations on matters of gender are now receiving
attention, as are the specific experiences and activities of women.61 In some
respects, such as life expectancy at birth, their condition seems to have
resembled men’s – living to between their late twenties and early thirties –
with expectancy rising markedly (to perhaps their late forties) for those
surviving their first five years on earth.62 These estimates apply, however, to
the early fourteenth century. Demographic and other social and economic
data for the middle empire, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, is
scanty for men and women, while the data available for the early period
is not really comparable.63 Exegesis and comparison of the roles of men
and women in Byzantine society and culture with due allowance for all the
variations in class, place and time is correspondingly difficult.
In the fifth and sixth centuries, women of wealth, status and also position
in public life are quite well attested,64 and it is no accident that Theodora is
portrayed with her female retinue on one side of the sanctuary of the church
of SanVitale in Ravenna, in equal majesty to her husband (see below, fig. 8b,
p. 211). But for subsequent centuries, the picture darkens in nearly every
sense. Already under Justinian, the church’s influence on imperial laws
was becoming marked, with a ban on the performance of judicial duties by
women and abandonment of divorce by mutual consent.65 Thereafter, little
evidence survives for verification of the restrictions on women imposed by
canon law, or the idealised portrayals of holy women in their Lives.66
Not that the picture is wholly dark. Women retained the right to own
extensive landed properties as well as chattels during the middle Byzantine
period, and strong-minded individuals of substance occasionally surface in
narrative sources, for example the widow Danelis.67 Lower down the social
scale, scraps of archival information such as tax registers take for granted
the role of women – often but not invariably widows – owning land in
peasant communities, heading households and paying taxes.68 Women in
the capital had important economic roles in crafts and trades, including
weaving and silk-working, could walk freely in the streets and occasionally
joined with menfolk in rioting against unpopular regimes.69 In the betterattested
sphere of religious life, there is evidence of women as writers of
hymns, and founders of nunneries in their private houses, and they probably.
World History
