Byzantine Feminisms in the Age of Justinian: rethinking the paradigm shift

Abstract: The paper proposes a feminist and postcolonial reading of Byzantine history in the Age of Justinian. It focuses on several important Justinian’s New Constitutions, Novellae, and discusses the changes introduced into the Roman society of the VI century. I place particular emphasis on the Christian values implemented in the laws, such as equity between the sexes. Furthermore, the paper analyses laws, which ameliorated the social status of women, both within and beyond the institution of marriage. In the final section, the discussion about byzantine feminisms extends beyond the laws. It opens a wide array of potential research topics, such as feminisms in Christian discourse, aesthetics, or the construction of subjectivities. In conclusion, the paper focuses on the potential of the byzantine feminisms as analytical tools in decolonizing out knowledge about Byzantium.

Biography: Larisa Orlov Vilimonovic is an Assistant Professor of Byzantine history at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She teaches courses in Byzantine cultural and social history. Her theoretical approaches to history of Byzantium, as well as post-Byzantine Balkans combine gender, feminist and post-colonial theory. She is also interested in historical anthropology of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine world.

Larisa was a visiting lecturer at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada): where she held two seminars: “Techne Historike – Deliberations on the Literary Aspects of the Byzantine Public Civic Discourse.” (11^th January 2019) and “Reading and understanding gender stereotyping in Byzantium: A feminist dialogue with Zonaras.” (18^th January 2019).

She is author of the book Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad – Emergence of a Personal History (Amsterdam University Press 2018), and her next projects are the books Archeology of the Byzantine Woman and History of Sexual Violence in Byzantium.