Holy Women of Byzantium

From the Early Church, female Christian piety was exemplified by devotion to Christ and care for fellow Christians, generous almsgiving, temperate living, and modest comportment. Prior to the legalization of Christianity, female sanctity was almost entirely reserved for martyrs, but from the mid-fourth century onwards, holy women appeared across the late Roman/early Byzantine Empire from various backgrounds and occupations, from munificent empresses and pious matrons and mothers to consecrated virgins, abbesses, desert ascetics, and reformed harlots. The Byzantines recorded and imparted the extraordinary lives and virtues of these holy women in hagiography, a form of biographical literature that described the saint's path to holiness and was both pedagogical and proscriptive. 

This course explores the lives and legacies of Byzantine holy women from the mid-fourth through fifteenth centuries. A rich variety of interdisciplinary sources including hagiography, iconography, portraiture, architecture, legal codices, letters, encomia, hymnography, and historiography (the writing of history) will inform our understanding of how female sanctity was constructed, communicated, and venerated in the Byzantine period, as well as the impact Byzantine female saints made on the physical and spiritual landscapes of city and society.