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Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Article in Al-Masaq Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean August 2016

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Spyros P. Panagopoulos
Ionian University
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Al-Masq
Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean

ISSN: 0950-3110 (Print) 1473-348X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/calm20

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Spyros P. Panagopoulos
To cite this article: Spyros P. Panagopoulos (2016) Approaches to the Byzantine Family, AlMasq, 28:2, 211-214
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2016.1198537

Published online: 22 Aug 2016.

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Date: 22 August 2016, At: 05:44

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it is extremely difcult to prove a plausible hypothesis because we do not know the sources
employed by John the Deacon. He was probably inuenced by the terminology used at the
time (191).Can we then be certain that the weight and meaning that Berto ascribes to particular words match the intent of the author? In other words, did John the Deacon retain a
rigour and consistency in his usage that will allow us to attach signicance to the use of
word x versus the use of word y? In this way, we attain the limits of meaning behind this methodology. Berto is wise to be cautious and so should we be.
At the same time, Berto has not been assisted by an edition whose translation is at times
rather awkward and where, it would seem, a nal careful proof-read has missed signicant
grammatical inconsistencies and peccadilloes. The reader would have benetted from the provision of a map of Venetia, an appendix with a list of ofce holders and dates and an updated
Bibliography (only three edited texts post-2001 have been added to the Primary Sources
section). That said, Berto has provided us with an important study that will no doubt be
the prompt for further detailed engagement with the work of John the Deacon.
Christopher Heath
University of Manchester, UK
Christopher.heath@manchester.ac.uk
2016 Christopher Heath
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2016.1198536

Approaches to the Byzantine Family, Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher (Eds.),
Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman studies, 2013, Farnham; London; Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Variorum, 446 pp., $124.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781409411581
The study of the family in Byzantium is one of the most fascinating research subjects in Byzantine Studies. The late professor Angeliki Laiou remarked in 1989 that the study of the Byzantine family is still in its infancy. Several studies have recently made their appearance on
aspects of the Byzantine family, but this volume aims at presenting an overview. In reality,
the papers presented here are the fruit of several sessions that took place at the Medieval Congress in Leeds (20072010). The volume consists of 19 chapters written by international
experts in the eld, which address a variety of approaches to the study of the Byzantine
family, from the late Roman to the late Byzantine Empire. The chapters focus on the
Roman roots of the Byzantine family, the Christianisation of the family, and the nature of
the family in the cultures of the Late Antique West and the Islamic East. The chapters
cover a wide range of themes, from historiography, lead seals and hagiography to art and
archaeology. As we cannot make an extensive presentation of each chapter, we shall try to
give the key points of each one.
The chapters are arranged chronologically from the Late Antiquity to the Late Byzantine
period. The introductory chapter on Greek and Roman families by Harlow-Parkin,
Looking for the Family: The Greek and Roman Background, presents the main trends in
the study of the history of ancient families. Hilners contribution, Family Violence: Punishment and Abuse in the Late Roman Household, focuses on the question of domestic violence
and whether Christianity changed the outlook and behaviours of people in Late Antiquity, and
follows upon increased interest in violence in the ancient world.
Ville Vuolanto, Family Relations and the Socialisation of Children in the Autobiographical
Narratives of Late Antiquity, uses autobiographical texts from the late-fourth to mid-fth

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century as sources for the history of the family in Late Antiquity. His material includes, inter
alia, texts by Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella, Libanius and St Gregory of Nyssa. He focuses his
research on three main questions. First, how is the process of childhood socialisation depicted?
Second, how do the authors represent family relationships? And third, how much can be
deduced about childrens actual enculturation process? After having set out the goal of his
research, Vuolanto begins with the schooling (and religious) socialisation of children during
Late Antiquity. The authors mentioned above refer to their paedagogus, magister and Grammaticus. But their education did not compromise their schooling alone; Vuolanto presents the
account by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who as a child was sent to hermits to take advice and to
practise praying. The author here concludes that religious education was not institutionalised
and was mainly the duty of the childs parents, especially the mother. Vuolanto then examines
the motif of violence in schooling and the motif of serious childhood illnesses, which had a
great impact on childrens religious life; Vuolanto seems to assert that illnesses brought children close to religious men in their region. The rest of the chapter covers involvement in the
public space and the relation of children to their parents and other relatives and household
members (e.g. servants and slaves). What Vuolanto wants to offer is a recreation of the childhood experience from a childs point of view.
Fotis Vasileiou, in The Death of the Father in Late Antique Christian Literature, deals
with the inuence of the death of a father on a childs development towards the religious
life. In the absence of the father, the mother undertakes to direct her child towards an ecclesiastical career. The most telling example is found in the Cappadocian monks whose fathers
absence meant that their mothers, mostly, but also their grandmothers, dealt with their childrens and grandchildrens religious education. The death of the father and the absence of a
paternal gure also gave increased freedom of choice to young adults. As Vasileiou characteristically writes, the absence of the father created a sense of relief, euphoria even, as the children
became able to deal with religious matters without interference. On the other hand, the
absence of fathers of lower- and middle-class children was painful as they lost their safety net.
Nathan Howard, in Preserving Family Honour: Gregory of Nyssas Life of Macrina as
Theological Polemic, offers an interesting view of the Life of Macrina by her brother, St
Gregory of Nyssa, placing it in the theological dispute between Gregory and Eunomius,
former bishop of Cyzicus, about the three divine entities in the nature of the Holy Trinity.
The Life can be read as a portrait of an early Christian noble family with ascetic characteristics,
who were devoted to God and monasticism. In the Life, one can see the attempts of members of
a Christian noble family to embrace an angelic life. Charity is the means for the noble families
to reach to an angelic life and become saints. In the Life of Macrina, Gregory shows how his
family present[s] a human analogy for considering the Godhead, a household composed of
multiple members, each one reecting the same essence (102).
After the section on Late Antiquity, comes an overview of the historiography of the Western
family between 400 and 700 by Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow (The Family
in the Late Antique West (AD 400700): A Historiographical Review). The key issues they
deal with are kinship, marriage, children, spiritual kin and the regulation of incest. Brays
essay, The Family in Medieval Islamic Societies, is the comparison between Islamic and
Christian families, and aims to identify some of the general problems of framing families
within the mainstream of Islamic history (131), starting from the term Islamic and its application in relation to specic people, geographical places, cultures and historical periods.
The next three essays by Davies, Brubaker, and Hennessy are the most wide-ranging, covering the period from the fth century to the thirteenth. Eve Davies, in Age, Gender and Status:
A Three-Dimensional Life Course Perspective of the Byzantine Family, examines the connections between age and gender and how these are aligned with family role status in hagiography.

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She examines 42 saints lives composed between the sixth and twelfth centuries. Fifty-ve
main characters are described, of whom 37 are men and 18 women. Davies is also particularly
interested in the age of the saints in the hagiographical texts and the stage of intellectual development associated with each age. So, we have examples where saints exhibit signs of mental
acuity at an early age, or present as puer senex, a term rst used by Alice-Mary Talbot. Davies
presents the Greek term , children who behave like adults, although we have a better
word: , which is found in the Life of St Theodore of Sykeon (seventh century).
Another element of the construction of saintly childhood is education. As Beatrice Caseau
has noted, education was a prerequisite for sainthood, although there are examples of saints
reciting the Holy Scriptures despite being illiterate (such as St Mary of Egypt). The age of
18 is signicant for both male and female saints, as this is the age when men and women
move away from their homeland. Entry into the monastic life by both men and women is
affected by both their age and their family situation. Leslie Brubaker, in Looking at the Byzantine Family, approaches representation of the family thematically rather than chronologically.
She examines family portraits preserved in manuscripts, coins and mosaics, in order to
examine how portraits were used to indicate family lineage, document status and commemorate events, and as a political tool. Manuscripts illuminations preserve depictions not only of
imperial families, but also of the Holy Virgin and the Saviour, as an infant. In the ninth
century, we have a representation of the Holy Family, presenting the role of Christs human
nature as a justication for religious images after Iconoclasm. Brubaker rightly suggests
that, by looking closely at the Byzantine family, we can form a truer picture of how the
family worked in practice, given that hagiographical texts that touch on the family were
written mainly by male monastic elites and urban authors. The third essay in this section,
The Byzantine Child: Picturing Complex Family Dynamics, by Cecily Henessy, discusses
the depiction of children in association with members of their families. She considers imperial
children (e.g. Romanos and Eudocia with their children represented on coins, or Michael VII
Doukas with his brothers depicted on manuscripts), Biblical families (e.g. St Anna with the
Holy Virgin as an infant, or the twins Esau and Jacob), and children shown in donor portraits
along with their parents (as in the donor portraits in the churches of Cappadocia).
Claudia Ludwig, in Social Mobility in Byzantium? Family Ties in the Middle Byzantine
Period, studies the Byzantine family and family ties in the Middle Byzantine period,
relying on prosopographical research conducted over the last 15 years. Using the main prosopographical collections of the Byzantine Empire, i.e. Prosopographie der Palologenzeit, Prosopography of the Byzantine World, and the Prosopographie der mitelbyzantinischen Zeit, she
deals with primary sources, especially historiography and lead seals, which offer data to
help construct prosopographical catalogues. Ludwigs essay clearly shows that prosopography
can be a useful tool for examining family continuities and changes, despite the limitations of
the sources. Simon Ellis, in The Middle Byzantine House and Family: A Reappraisal, relies
on both literary and archaeological material, and studies the Middle Byzantine aristocratic and
middle-class domestic household and family. The archaeological material he uses comes from
Cappadocia, before and after the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia. The most interesting part of
this essay is the examination of early Turkish houses based on the archaeological material from
Central Asia, and the suggestion that they should be seen as the missing link in the development of housing from the ninth to the twelfth century in the Mediterranean.
Stavroula Constantinous Family in the Byzantine Greek Legend of Saint Alexios and
Michel Kaplans La Vie de Thodora de Thessalonique: Un crit familial deal with two hagiographical sources, the Life of Saint Alexios and the Life of Theodora of Thessalonike, which
present the saints families in very different ways. Constantinou deals with the key role play
family members in the hagiographical saints, while Kaplan deals with the special category

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of hagiographical texts that praise family members as saints. Shaun Tougher, the co-editor of
this volume, in Imperial Families: The Case of the Macedonians (8671056), considers
imperial families and their characteristics, especially the Macedonian dynasty (8671056).
An interesting aspect of this chapter is that Tougher deals with imperial siblings of the Macedonian dynasty (i.e. Leo VI and Alexander, Basil II and Constantine VIII, Zoe and Theodora)
and the relations between family members in these families. Nadia Maria El Cheikh, in An
Abbasid Caliphal Family, deals with the Islamic family during the Abbsid period, and
especially with the family of the Abbsid caliph. Dirk Krausmlers essay, Byzantine Monastic Communities: Alternative Families, deals with an interesting aspect of the history of
Byzantine history. He examines, using hagiography and monastic rules, how monastic communities functioned as families during the Middle Byzantine period. While other essays in
this collection explore situations where monastic life was somehow a rejection of normal
family life, Krausmler points out how family could serve as a model for ascetic life. The
last two chapters focus on Late Byzantine families. Leonora Nevilles Families, Politics, and
Memories of Rome in the Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios examines another
imperial family, the Komnenoi, while Fotini Kondyli, in Changes in the Structure of the
Late Byzantine Family and Society, uses monastic archives along with the results from a
survey on Lesvos and Lemnos to reconstruct family structures and changes in those islands.
The present volume is very valuable for the study of the Byzantine family. The papers
combine careful analysis of sources (both textual and archaeological) with current scholarly
knowledge. Textual sources are the most analysed, with hagiographical sources featuring
heavily (Vuolanto, Vasileiou, Howard, Constantinou, Kaplan). Archaeological material is
the least represented (Ellis, Kondyli), and essays on iconographic sources (mainly art historical) are also limited (Brubaker, Hennessy). Geographically, the area covered is even more
restricted: there are no contributions dealing with families in areas such as Sicily (under Byzantine occupation until the ninth century), the Balkans outside of Greece, or Cyprus. The book is
well produced and well edited. Each chapter is followed by extensive primary and secondary
bibliographies. This volume will become an important resource for students and scholars of
the Byzantine family, and a standard reference point for any future explorations of Byzantine
and medieval families.
Spyros P. Panagopoulos
Department of History, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece
spyrpan1@gmail.com
2016 Spyros P. Panagopoulos
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2016.1198537

The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and
the Early Middle Ages, Hendrick W. Dey, 2015, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, xiv + 291 pp., 65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781107069183
This tightly focussed, clearly argued and richly illustrated book should make a lasting contribution to the study of Late Antique urbanism across the former heartlands (and coasts) of the
Roman Empire, in east and west. The author demonstrates convincingly that there were considerable continuities in the organisation and use of public space in post-Roman cities. Rather
than urban decay and decline, or even the currently more fashionable transformation,
Dey shows that civic space continued in large part to function as a stage for the display of