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Author: Maroula Perisanidi Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781009499798 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
What does it mean to be a man? What makes one effeminate or manly? What renders a man 'Byzantine'? Drawing from theories of gender, posthumanism and disability, this book explores the role of learning, violence and animals in the construction of Byzantine masculinities. It foregrounds scholars and clerics, two groups who negotiated the hegemonic ideal of male violence in contrasting and unexpected ways. By flaunting their learning, scholars accumulated enough masculine capital to present more "feminine" emotional dispositions and to reject hunting and fighting without compromising their masculinity. Clerics often appear less peaceable. Some were deposed for fighting, while many others seem to have abandoned their roles to pursue warfare, demonstrating the fluidity of religious and gender identity. For both clerics and scholars, much of this gender-work depended on animals, whose entanglements with humans ranged from domination to mutual transformation.
Author: Maroula Perisanidi Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781009499798 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
What does it mean to be a man? What makes one effeminate or manly? What renders a man 'Byzantine'? Drawing from theories of gender, posthumanism and disability, this book explores the role of learning, violence and animals in the construction of Byzantine masculinities. It foregrounds scholars and clerics, two groups who negotiated the hegemonic ideal of male violence in contrasting and unexpected ways. By flaunting their learning, scholars accumulated enough masculine capital to present more "feminine" emotional dispositions and to reject hunting and fighting without compromising their masculinity. Clerics often appear less peaceable. Some were deposed for fighting, while many others seem to have abandoned their roles to pursue warfare, demonstrating the fluidity of religious and gender identity. For both clerics and scholars, much of this gender-work depended on animals, whose entanglements with humans ranged from domination to mutual transformation.
Author: Almut Höfert Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317182375 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.
Author: Lynda Garland Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 9780754657378 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
This volume brings together a group of international scholars in new explorations of the world of Byzantine women in the period 800-1200. The specific aim of this collection is to investigate the participation of women - non-imperial women in particular - in supposedly 'masculine' fields of operation. Contributions focus on women's participation in the street life of Constantinople, their appearance in Byzantine fiscal documents, their monastic foundations, their costume and engagement with entertainment at the imperial court, and the way heroines are portrayed in the Byzantine novels.
Author: Larissa Tracy Publisher: DS Brewer ISBN: 184384351X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs. Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and custom in Western Europe, seeking to demystify and demythologize castration. Its subjects includearchaeological studies of eunuchs; historical accounts of castration in trials of combat; the mutilation of political rivals in medieval Wales; Anglo-Saxon and Frisian legal and literary examples of castration as punishment; castration as comedy in the Old French fabliaux; the prohibition against genital mutilation in hagiography; and early-modern anxieties about punitive castration enacted on the Elizabethan stage. The introduction reflects on these topics in the context of arguably the most well-known victim of castration in the middle ages, Abelard. LARISSA TRACY is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University. Contributors: Larissa Tracy, Kathryn Reusch, Shaun Tougher, Jack Collins, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Jay Paul Gates, Charlene M. Eska, Mary A. Valante, Anthony Adams, Mary E. Leech, Jed Chandler, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Robert L.A. Clark, Karin Sellberg, LenaWånggren
Author: Michael Bentley Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134970242 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1004
Book Description
The Companion to Historiography is an original analysis of the moods and trends in historical writing throughout its phases of development and explores the assumptions and procedures that have formed the creation of historical perspectives. Contributed by a distinguished panel of academics, each essay conveys in direct, jargon-free language a genuinely international, wide-angled view of the ideas, traditions and institutions that lie behind the contemporary urgency of world history.
Author: Lynda Garland Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317072340 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Gender was a key social indicator in Byzantine society, as in many others. While studies of gender in the western medieval period have appeared regularly in the past decade, similar studies of Byzantium have lagged behind. Masculine and feminine roles were not always as clearly defined as in the West, while eunuchs made up a 'third gender' in the imperial court. Social status indicators were also in a state of flux, as much linked to patronage networks as to wealth, as the Empire came under a series of external and internal pressures. This fluidity applied equally in ecclesiastical and secular spheres. The present collection of essays uncovers gender roles in the imperial family, in monastic institutions of both genders, in the Orthodox church, and in the nascent cult of Mary in the east. It puts the spotlight on flashpoints over a millennium of Byzantine rule, from Constantine the Great to Irene and the Palaiologoi, and covers a wide geographical range, from Byzantine Italy to Syria. The introduction frames the following nine chapters against recent scholarship and considers methodological issues in the study of gender and Byzantine society. Together these essays portray a surprising range of male and female experience in various Byzantine social institutions - whether religious, military, or imperial -- over the course of more than a millennium. The collection offers a provocative contrast to recent studies based on western medieval scholarship. Common themes that bind the collection into a coherent whole include specifically Byzantine expectations of gender among the social elite; the fluidity of social and sexual identities for Byzantine men and women within the church; and the specific challenges that strong individuals posed to the traditional limitations of gender within a hierarchical society dominated by Christian orthodoxy.
Author: Chris Wickham Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 014190853X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 548
Book Description
The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement. From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.
Author: Shaun Tougher Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135235716 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India. The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were powerful political players – such as Chrysaphius who plotted to assassinate Attila the Hun – and others were prominent figures in Orthodoxy as bishops and monks. Furthermore, there is offered an analysis of how society thought about eunuchs, especially their gender identity - were they perceived as men, women, or a third sex? The broad survey of the political and social position of eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is placed in the context of the history of the eunuch in general. An appendix listing key eunuchs of the Byzantine Empire describing their careers is included, and the text is fully illustrated.
Author: Maroula Perisanidi
Author: Maroula Perisanidi
Author: Almut Höfert
Author: Lynda Garland
Author: 
Author: Larissa Tracy
Author: Michael Bentley
Author: Lynda Garland
Author: Chris Wickham
Author: Leslie Brubaker
Author: Shaun Tougher