Donald M. Nicol's The Byzantine Lady, Ten Portraits 1250-1500 is a meticulous scholarly work from an author who has written a number of major works about the late Byzantine period. Following the model of Charles Diehl's Figures Byzantines and Dimitri Obolensky's Six Byzantine Portraits, Prof. Nicol gives us sketches of ten aristocratic Byzantine women of the later 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. All were descended from or married into the aristocratic families of the Palaiologi, Cantacuzeni or Komneni. Two were from the West, the rest were from the East. One married Murad II, the Turkish Sultan and became the stepmother of Mehmed II, the Conqueror.
Professor Nicol's selection reflects both his own interests, the political history of later Byzantium, and the very real limitations that our sources place on the study of women. Aristocratic women are worthy of note and leave traces for us to follow. We should not be surprised to find that all but one of these women was a pawn in the elaborate familial dynastic struggles and alliances that characterize this period. More surprising is the degree of political initiative and independence that these women exhibited and the levels of education and culture that several managed to achieve. The latter is especially apparent in his richly detailed sketches of Eirene-Eulogia Choumnaina Palaiologina and Anna Notaras Palaiologina. Prof. Nicol's sketches are gracefully written and thoroughly researched, using a wide range of historical, literary, epistolary and artistic sources. When and if the Cambridge University Press makes these sketches available in a format that students would consider affordable, they will be an excellent addition to reading lists for courses on women in the later Middle Ages.
Scholars interested in the study of gender and the structure of gender in this period will find that these sketches provide an excellent introduction to both the primary and secondary biographical literature on these aristocratic women. For western medievalists who do not read Greek sources, however, I have one serious concern about these materials. Prof. Nicol's vignettes reflect the opinions of his Byzantine sources, all of whom are men, the opinions of later scholars who wrote about these women and the author's own personal assumptions about women. Though the book is carefully annotated, it is often very difficult to sort out these three levels of historical commentary. For example, regarding Yolanda of Montferrat, on page 51 the author tells us that "she tried all manner of feminine wiles upon him (her husband the emperor), now bursting into hysterical tears, now threatening suicide, now tempting him with her coquetry and then refusing him her bed, until the Emperor could bear her tantrums no longer." This does not sound like the words of a scholar writing in 1994. It sounds much more like a translation of the 14th century Byzantine historian, Nikephoras Gregoras who was known for his dislike of Westerners. It is very difficult to separate what I suspect are translated exerpts from the author's own personal opinions. Almost all Byzantine authors make stock assumptions about powerful women, assumptions that we still see today enshrined, even in the New York Times, in conservative commentary about the First Lady. While anecdotes like the one above certainly enliven a text, they should be subject to analysis.
On another level, a serious scholar of gender might complain that this work lacks theoretical structure. The author shows us that these women were better educated and far more politically active than one might expect, and that many of them were very spiritual. He considers that most of them were the "victims" of arranged, often loveless, marriages. He notes that all of them were very conscious of their own place and that of their family lineage in Byzantine society. Yet the selected format does not lend itself to much comparative discussion. One of the author's most tantalizing theoretical observations is suggested on page 49 of his sketch of Yolanda of Monferrat. The author says, "Her husband, who at first adored her, found her increasingly difficult to understand. No doubt she became outwardly byzantinised. She had no urge to return to the land of her birth. But mentally and culturally she remained a westerner with a different view of the way the world was run." Now, this is an interesting theoretical observation that suggests that the mentalite of western aristocratic women was different from that of eastern women. What does the author mean by these statements? Later we get hints about what these "mental and cultural" differences might be. Yolanda tried to introduce the western appanage system in order to assure that her sons would all have an inheritance. She didn't agree with her husband's desire to marry their five year old daughter to the aged Serbian ruler, Stephen Milutin. She carried out an open, bitter campaign of propaganda against her husband. Should we assume from this that Yolanda understood and wished to apply the appanage system as a way of bringing "western culture" to the Byzantine empire, that marriages between elderly men and very young children were unacceptable in the West, and that women in the West were accustomed to slandering their husbands, while women in the East were not? Prof. Nicol's suggestion that by the 14th century there were very basic differences between aristocratic women in the East and West is tantalizing, and, I suspect, correct, but he does not develop his argument in a systematic way.
I find that I am falling into the inevitable reviewer's trap. Delighted with the richness of what Prof. Nichol has written, I am criticizing the book he did not write, rather than the one he did write. This collection of biographies will be an important resource for scholars who are interested in theoretical or comparative gender issues in the later Middle Ages.