Women and religious life in Byzantium

Alice-Mary TALBOT, Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS 733. Aldershot, Hampshire-Burlington, Vermont, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001, xi + 301 p. -- ISBN 0-86078-873-3 -- 105.95 US$.

This collection brings together eighteen articles by the distinguished Byzantinist Alice-Mary Talbot, published from 1983 through 2000. Her investigative research is a pioneering, historical reconstruction of the religious life of women in the Byzantine empire. Going past ideologically-driven debates that cloud the process of discovery, the A. is an historian whose patient and rigorous work is filling in our picture of Byzantium in areas where our knowledge used to draw a blank. Such reworking of the foundations contributes greatly to historical understanding and to the rethinking of the nature and extent of women's participation in the life of the church.

The first of four sections is "Women and the Religious Life." An introductory article demonstrates that the Byzantines were ambivalent towards women, granting property rights but discriminating in marriage and contract law. Christianity reinforced this ambivalence - defining a woman's place between two stereotypes - the Virgin Mary as virtuous and exemplary mother, and Eve as the sexual temptress.

"Byzantine Women, Saints' Lives and Social Welfare" examines women's philanthropy as individuals and working in orphanages, hospices, hospitals and convents. In social welfare, where the Byzantine church outpaced the state, women had another incentive in addition to Christian concern for salvation -- a socially acceptable alternative to confinement in the home.

The next article studies St. Theodore's letters to iconodule women during the iconoclastic period and demonstrates that, despite hagiographers' contrary claims, women did oppose iconoclasm. Other evidence -- female hymnography and invocations of the Theotokos on seals -- points to an historical irony: with the end of iconoclasm (843 AD) its patriarchal tendency was adopted by the victorious iconodules.

"Women and Mount Athos" investigates abaton, the principle of excluding the opposite sex from monasteries, which was applied with special force on the Greek peninsula. Beyond two outright violations of abaton at Athos, Talbot studies Athonite vitae and typika, which reflect some positive attitudes towards women; and Athonite acts, which record transactions of sale/donation of provisions and property. The resulting description of women's connections with the Holy Mountain is a brilliant achievement, elaborating a relationship as fragile as it was real.