Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 315 - Wiser Than Men - Gender in Byzantium.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Wiser than Men, Gender in Byzantium. Anna Komnina was unique. No other woman in the Byzantine period wrote a work with the scale and intellectual ambition of her Alexiad, and no other Byzantine woman played such a significant role in the interpretation of pagan philosophical literature. Yet Anna was also one example of a familiar type. The aristocratic woman close to or at the center of the circles of political power in Constantinople. The historical chronicles we have recently discussed are full of information about royal women like Irene, Theodora, Zoe, and Eudokia, to the point where whole books have been devoted to the subject of Byzantine empresses. Such historical reports can be combined with hegographical accounts of holy women, with writings in which male Byzantine authors talk about women from their own families, and information about the life and reading habits of nuns in female monasteries. As a result, there is plenty of material for learning about the situation of women in this culture and the extent to which they could aspire to intellectual pursuits. Anna's own writings are already revealing in this respect. We already know about her early efforts to gain an education and the way she carefully curated her persona as a female author. Occasionally, she refers to this quite explicitly. In one passage of her Alexiad, she shies away from detailing a heretical movement, writing, "...modesty prevents me as the beautiful Sappho says somewhere, for though a historian, I am also a woman, and the talk of the vulgar had better be passed over in silence." Of course, it is entirely in character for her to quote and tacitly compare herself to a classical pagan author like Sappho. Similarly, Tourniquet's Oration in Anna's Honor calls her wiser than men and compares her to the female Pythagorean sage Fiano and the late ancient mathematician and pagan martyr Hypatia. Anna herself already compared her own mother to Fiano in the Alexiad. She tells a famous anecdote about Fiano, who was complimented on her shapely forearm, and said, yes, but it is not for the public. Anna then adds that her mother was so modest that she did not like showing her eyes either, or allowing anyone but intimates to hear her voice. As this passage illustrates, women were encouraged to be private and retiring individuals. Pale skin was admired in women, but not in men. The latter should be out proving themselves on military campaign, whereas elite women should stay indoors and allow their servants to run all the errands, emerging from seclusion only for events like religious ceremonies. When they did venture into public, upper-class women seemed to have worn veils, which may be what Anna has in mind when she says that her mother kept her eyes hidden away. A full veil could be worn as a show of piety, though a scarf framing the face was probably more common. Given this cultural context, it is remarkable that women did manage to hold political power, and unsurprising that men often grumbled about their doing so. The most famous case is the Empress Irene, who in 780 ascended to the throne as regent to her young son, who was called, what else, Constantine. Coins from the period depict her alongside her son, but the image of family harmony was misleading. As Constantine grew older, he pushed her aside, but was then forced to share power with her again. Ultimately, and notoriously, she had him blinded in order to secure rule for herself. This may have encouraged the Western ruler Charlemagne to take the provocative step of adopting the title Emperor for himself, the rationale being that, with a woman sitting on the throne in Constantinople, it was effectively vacant. It's interesting to see how historians deal with such female rulers. The chronicler Theophanes accuses Irene of being seduced by wicked advisors into grasping after power, and says in this context that she was deceived like a woman. Yet the same Theophanes admits that when Irene was ultimately deposed in favor of her finance minister, the social climber Nacephorus, the people of this city were angry and bewildered that God had permitted a woman who had suffered like a martyr on behalf of the true faith to be ousted by a swineherd. Similarly, mixed feelings were provoked by the sisters Zoe and Theodora. Michael Pselos admitted the legitimacy of their rule as offspring of a Mao emperor, but also voiced some disquiet at the spectacle of women ruling the empire, commenting that "...the women's quarters were transformed into an imperial council chamber." It is of course these affluent women of the ruling and literary class who are best represented in our written sources. You won't get any sense of the life of an Anatolian peasant woman from Anacomnena or Pselos. Obviously, most women of the empire, and men for that matter, would have been illiterate. The ability to read had to be acquired from tutors at an expense that would have been unaffordable for most, or in a religious context, particularly among those cloistered in monasteries. Even in the latter case, there was a distinction between so-called church nuns and laboring nuns, with the former having an upper-class background and instructing their illiterate sisters. The usual reading list was thoroughly Christian. A story about one of the most popular female saints, Decla, has her miraculously granting literacy to another woman so that she can read the Bible. Even a royal woman like the 12th century literary patroness Irena Sivasto Kratoresa, perhaps the Byzantine figure who was most reminiscent of Anacomnena, was warned by male advisors not to concern herself with the potentially corrupting literature of the pagans. Here we should recall the story of young Annas taking precautions against the potential ambush laid by non-Christian texts. And we should also make mention of one other famous female author from the Byzantine period, the poet and musical composer Cassia, widely admired for her religious hymns. A nice anecdote has her standing up against misogyny. When a man remarked to her that evils came to humankind through a woman, namely Eve, she retorted that it was through another woman that better things began, namely Mary. We can get more light on female literacy from a study by Claudia Rapp, who looked at how women used manuscripts in Byzantine history. She confirms that female readers were often nuns and that they were often reading hagiographies, that is, the life stories of saints. This genre of literature, which goes back to late antiquity, offered moral instruction to both men and women, or perhaps we should say boys and girls, because this kind of text was often read by or read out to young readers. The saints were to be admired and imitated in stories about miracles and liven the tales. As we might expect, women readers were steered especially towards lives of female saints. There they could find both bad news and good news. True, they had been born with an inferior gender, but this did not prevent them from becoming moral exemplars. One hagiography explains that the good works of women are in fact more impressive than those of men, for they have the lot of a weaker nature and yet they were not hindered by this at all to climb up to the summit of virtue, but they made the female element male through a virile mind and accomplished the same and even more than the men. It would be worth focusing on one female saint in particular because of her importance in the history of philosophy, Macrina the Younger. I've mentioned her before because she was the sister of the Cappadocian Church Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Raiseria. But that was more than 200 episodes ago, so you may need a quick reminder. We know her especially from two works by her brother Gregory, a biographical work and a remarkable treatise called On Soul and Resurrection. Here she is depicted on her deathbed in dialogue with Gregory himself, calmly providing him with philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul. The setting is of course intended to remind us of Plato's Phaedo, with Macrina replacing Socrates as the philosopher facing bodily death and proving that it is not true death, even as intimates are giving in to their grief. This is highlighted by a passage at the beginning of the dialogue in which Macrina is described as reining in Gregory's emotions like a skilled charioteer so that the two of them can have a rational discussion about the nature of the soul. It almost goes without saying that this is an inversion of stereotypical gender roles. In an infamous passage at the start of the Phaedo, Plato describes how Socrates sent away his lamenting wife Xanthippe so that he could spend his final moments in philosophical discourse with his male friends. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates chastises these same friends for acting like women as they weep over his imminent demise. Thanks in part to these passages, a typical way to present someone as a consummate philosopher was to show them unmoved in the face of their own death or the death of family members. Just as typical was the assumption that women were, by nature, all but incapable of such self-restraint. We can see this from a number of surviving letters of consolation written in the Byzantine period. Our bibliophile friend Photius wrote one of them to his brother on the occasion of the death of his niece. He admits that he himself is distraught, but encourages his brother not to give way to lamentation for men must set a good example to women and not act like women. Similarly, his friend Nicolaus Mysticus wrote to the emperor Romanos I Lycopinos when his wife Theodora died in 922. He offered the consoling thought that it was better that she should die than the emperor, since as a woman she would have been less equipped to deal with the grief. By having his sister Macrina adopt the role of a perfectly rational philosopher, Gregory was therefore offering the most striking of role models to his readers, both male and female. We might assume that he was showing how even a woman could act in a properly masculine fashion. Certainly, Byzantine women were sometimes praised for acting like men. A classic case would be the so-called transvestite nuns like the 3rd century saint Eugenia, who disguised herself as a man to enter a monastery. A 13th century account of her life has her say, But I think that Gregory of Nyssa was trying to say something slightly different by presenting his sister in this fashion. In the dialogue, Macrina argues that the soul must be immortal because it is an image of God, and it is most of all an image of Him when it engages in pure reasoning. Furthermore, God, as Gregory affirms in other works, has no gender. So, by subduing her emotions and living in accordance with nothing but reason, Macrina was not necessarily acting like a man. Rather, she was acting like God, and thus transcending gender altogether. This was part of a philosophical project of attaining likeness to God insofar as is possible for humans, a goal named by Plato in one of his dialogues and embraced by Macrina in this Christian rewriting of Plato's Phaedo. These ideas, and in fact this very dialogue by Gregory of Nyssa, would have been on the mind of Michael Pselos when he wrote a rhetorical showpiece called Encomium for His Mother. It was praised in magnificent terms by the 12th century scholar Gregory of Corinth, who judged it one of the four best speeches ever written. In the speech, Pselos describes his mother Theodora's extraordinary virtue and piety. He tells of how she valued scholarship, studying in secret as a young woman as Anna Komnena would later do, and then seeing to it that Pselos himself received the finest education possible. Her character is praised in much the same terms that Pselos uses to praise good rhetoric. We saw him admiring the way that Gregory Nazianzus was able to combine contrary qualities in his writings. Likewise, Theodora's nobility consisted in her combining apparently opposite personality traits. She was both contemplative and given to action, both humble and authoritative, both gentle and stern in moral judgment. Pselos does share his culture's assumptions about the weakness of women, and so praises his mother by saying that, Pselos himself was different. In another of his writings, he spoke of himself as female by nature, in the context of admitting how emotionally he reacted to the birth of his grandson. None of that for his mother. Pselos describes how she reacted to the death of Pselos's sister, namely by expounding at great length to Pselos's father about the passage to the better life, which looks to be an obvious reminiscence of Macrina. Theodora was also valiant in her war against the desires and demands of the body, eating so little that she became Alluding to a famous remark about Plotinus, Pselos says that his mother seemed to be ashamed of being in a body, and that she resisted the attempts of her family to get her to see to the needs of her body. On one occasion, she was almost persuaded to eat a fine meal, but then gave it away to a destitute woman. Pselos seems to have mixed feelings about his mother's asceticism, which he calls her philosophy. He is unable to follow her example and admits modestly that his devotion to philosophy is limited to its cloak, though he goes on at the end of the encomium to describe his own philosophical inquiries. Here we have an unusually explicit contrast between the two meanings of philosophy in Byzantine culture. His mother was a philosopher because of her pious, ascetic way of life, whereas Pselos is a philosopher because of his book learning and expertise in pagan intellectual literature. Though Pselos would no doubt like to have the last word on this subject, we can't conclude a discussion of gender in Byzantium without saying something on the much-discussed topic of eunuchs. You'll probably be aware that eunuchs were present at court and as servants in aristocratic society more generally, something so famous that it has inspired a character in the Game of Thrones series. Eunuchs played a vital social role because they could serve and protect noble women with no danger of seducing or at least impregnating them. Also, since they could not have offspring, they were considered unthreatening in political terms, effectively unable to seize power for themselves. Yet some eunuchs rose to great eminence. Some were generals or powerful officials, like Basil Le Capenos, son of an emperor and successful as a military leader. Much of what we have observed regarding Byzantine attitudes towards women reappears in exaggerated form in remarks about eunuchs. They were thought to be given to greed and to bodily desires, desires they might be physically unable to satisfy. Often they were associated with homosexuality, a common assumption being that eunuchs enjoyed being the passive partner in male-male sex. Yet they were also resented for being, quite literally, cut off from other kinds of sexual activity because they had achieved the virtue of chastity on the cheap. For this reason, some churchmen condemned the practice of deliberately turning youngsters into eunuchs surgically or, even worse, castrating men who were past the age of puberty. Eunuchs who arose naturally through accident or disease were more likely to be accepted. Sometimes, presentations of their sexless condition were strikingly positive, as in texts where they are compared to or confused with angels. Yet, even as they became a fixed part of the Byzantine ruling elite, or perhaps precisely for this reason, eunuchs were by and large subject to abuse and critique. A brutal aphorism from the 12th century advised, if you have a eunuch, kill him. If you haven't, buy one and kill him. Such hostility could be explained by a fascinating proposal made by Catherine Ringrose to the effect that eunuchs constituted a third gender. Despite being biologically male, that is, men in respect of their sex, they were perceived as occupying an ambiguous cultural middle ground between the male and female genders. Thus, we find them being called androgynous, womanish, or artificial women. As Ringrose writes, this made their contemporaries uneasy because they were seen to move too readily between the worlds of men and women, between earthly sensuality and heavenly spirituality, between imperial presence and ordinary space, and between the church and secular world. Such uneasiness provoked not only the aforementioned abuse, but also at least one text which speaks out boldly in defense of eunuchs. It was written by Theophylactes of Ochrid, who cunningly compared the condition of the eunuch to that of the monk. With their vows of chastity, monks were also refusing to employ their sexual organs in the way nature intended. Castration was simply a more radical step in the same direction, like cutting down an unwanted tree. Theophylactes admitted that some eunuchs are wicked, devious, and debauched, but then again plenty of non-eunuchs are too, and moral judgment should concern the individual, not the group. One might argue that with this line of argument Theophylactes was merely asking his contemporaries to apply to eunuchs the sort of perspective they normally took on women. While inferior as a class to physically intact or bearded men, on an individual basis they are frequently worthy of great admiration. A revealing fact about Byzantine eunuchs and their centrality to Byzantine court life is that certain political offices were reserved solely for them. This is just a small example of the way that the legal provisions of the empire give us a window into wider cultural attitudes. And of course, the practice of law raises its own philosophical issues. How do laws acquire their legitimacy, and how should jurists determine the right conclusion in individual cases? This is an area we'll be getting into in the next episode as we continue to look at philosophically intriguing aspects of Byzantine culture. We'll be seeing how Byzantine law, like Byzantine Platonism and Aristotelianism, had its roots in late antiquity. We'll also be investigating a couple of specific issues that arise within the legal and practical realm, namely warfare and economics. Two things are certain in this world, death and taxes, and next time you're certain to hear about both, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.