Women in the Byzantine Empire

The situation of women in the Byzantine Empire is a subject of scientific research that encompasses all available information about women, their environments, their networks, their legal status, etc., in the Byzantine Empire.

This field of study experiences debates within it on various important questions. For a long time, the attention of historians was attracted only by individual prominent Byzantine women, mainly the Empress, especially the wife of Emperor Justinian I Theodora, who had a significant influence on the events of the first half of the 6th century. Numerous sources (chronicles, legal texts, hagiographic literature) however paint a picture of the Byzantine patriarchal society in which women in general did not have independent significance and upper class women were imprisoned in a gynaeceum.

The scientific study of the legal and economic status of women in the Byzantine Empire began in the second half of the 19th century and is currently intensively ongoing. The subject of study is both women in general and related issues of family and property law. The scarcity of surviving sources leads to diverse assessments of the place of women in Byzantine society. With the development of gender studies in the 1970s, there is a tendency to revise early views, according to which this role was not significant. The historian Ioli Kalavrezou provides a more positive description of the lives of Byzantine women.^[1] Several authors today assume that Byzantine women enjoyed significantly more privileges in comparison to women in Western Europe and the Islamic world.