Until recently, the study of women in Byzantium has focused on the elite and the lettered, those whose lives can be reconstructed through the study of texts that they wrote or read and through the analysis of churches that they built and monasteries that they founded, furnished and occasionally inhabited. Attempts to paint a fuller portrait, one that takes account of women at all levels of Byzantine society, have been frustrated by the uneven survival of material and written remains. And yet, as Mati Meyer would remind us, images of women are omnipresent in Byzantine painting, both monumental and miniature. For this study, Meyer has assembled an impressive archive of images drawn from manuscripts and church painting. She questions whether the insertion of realistic details into more traditional narratives, including elements of costume, furnishing, and gesture, and the appearance of supplemental figures in those narratives, including midwives, servants, and wet nurses, may open a window onto the world of Byzantine women. This volume constitutes, in the words of the author, a "primary, though not exhaustive, study, that would cover a wide range of topics linked to female performance and serve as a foundation for further in-depth studies of female images and their realia" (5-6). At the center of this study is a single question: can extraordinary details of everyday life, as captured in painting, be used to understand broad cultural patterns?
The volume is divided into three sections that investigate the role, social function, and position of women in Byzantium. The first chapter, "Woman as Childbearer," examines the maternal role of Byzantine women, from the moment of physical conception, to childbirth, to the oversight of young children. The author's interest ranges from discussions of lactation to the representation of women condemned for refusing to nurse their children. Meyer's discussion of childbirth reveals her sustained interest in the topic, and it is one of the strongest sections of the book. Invoking a wide range of texts, she foregrounds the importance of the midwife in Byzantine society. Meyer postulates the critical role of this woman in deciding the "fate of the newborn's life--to let him live or die" (68-69), an interpretation that other scholars may contest. Rare moments of tenderness represented in painting are probed for information on the relations between women and men, mothers and children. The discussion summons numerous texts which help Meyer read images that are occasionally very subtle and, at other times, surprisingly graphic.
The second section of the book focuses on occupational tasks and activities, including those that were respectable (midwives, wet nurses, servants, weavers, and mourners) and those that were disreputable (prostitutes/concubines and dancers/musicians). Here, the author reads elements of costume, scale, and age to assign professions to women in specific narrative scenes, including the Birth of the Virgin, the Dormition, etc. The author bolsters her interpretations by quoting texts from the period--legal, hagiographical, historical--and by summoning, wherever possible, excavated remains that resemble objects illustrated in the paintings. The discussion of images of women who weave or spin is particularly interesting and brings together a number of written sources to help interpret the visual data. A section on dancers and musicians will certainly stimulate further studies on this topic. At the end of the chapter Meyer introduces additional trades, focusing, among others, on a rare image of a woman selling beverages at a fair.
The third section of the book focuses on the spaces occupied by women, such as the women's quarter (gynaikeion), and the frequent representation of women in windows and doors, perhaps signifiers of the liminal status that women held in Byzantine society and indications of their constant and careful negotiation between public and private spaces. Discussions of windows and watching invariably lead to a very interesting, though preliminary, discussion of gossip and female modes of discourse, a topic that could be expanded further. Part of this chapter, which should have been separate, is devoted to the subject of sexual conduct, a topic that departs from the subject of the book and foreshadows a work in progress.
Meyer is very thorough in her analysis of the subjects at hand, many of which have been separately treated in a series of articles that she has published (see bibliography). At times, she makes broad statements that could be better supported, especially for the non-specialist. "The incorporation of anecdotal elements from everyday life into the plethora of images of the infant's bath in Byzantium which, by the mid-fourteenth century, following the propagation of Hesychasm, gave rise to an extensive array of narrative cycles of the Life of the Virgin..." suggests a causal relationship that should be better explained. Similarly, the author sees the simultaneously realistic and rigid gestures of a midwife and her assistant in a painting in a Cappadocian church as "hinting at the dual eternal nature of Christ, human and divine, based on Chalcedonian Orthodoxy" (121). There are small confusions in the volume, which may suggest attention to the overall theme rather than to minor details. The Protaton church is called a monastery (48), the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson is located in Thessaly not in northern Thessalonike (23), a discussion on the church of St. George in Cheliana is illustrated with an image from a church at Pyrgos, Monofatsi (76), a description of the tile decoration of a house in Thessalonike refers, surely, to terracotta roof tiles, not to the thinner ceramic plaques that were used for the internal revetment of sacred buildings (230). There are minor errors in Greek spelling and accentuation throughout the text and footnotes, which is not unusual, unfortunately, for a study of this magnitude.
A generous appendix (310-43) lists the manuscripts that form the basis of the author's evidence, providing codicological and palaeographical descriptions, brief discussions of contents and decoration, names of patrons and/or painters, the place and date of production, and select bibliography. It would have been useful to cross-reference the manuscripts with illustrations in the volume (a separate index with libraries and shelf numbers is found on pp. 394-396). Following are 224 black and white and 22 color images. Any quibbles about the quality of the photos are overshadowed by an understanding of the difficulty that any author would have encountered in obtaining them. Given a book of this size, integration of the images into the text would have been welcome.
Such a sweeping study is not without hazards, as the author readily admits in her epilogue to the volume (298-309). The points that she raises in this self-critical section of the book are important and warrant further discussion. The visual evidence derives primarily from manuscripts commissioned by men and used in church services or in private devotions. In the absence of female agency how can a gendered gaze interpret such imagery and its significance? Within the large number of manuscripts discussed, does the inclusion of realia in an illustrated book commissioned for a woman (for example, the Homilies of James of Kokkinobaphos) differ substantially from those included in illuminated manuscripts intended for a male audience? Within monumental paintings intended for monastic viewers, are images of women engaged in everyday activities more frequent than those of men? And, if not, how can one justify examining realistic representations of women and not those of their male counterparts? Many scenes of the Nativity beginning in the Middle Byzantine period include images of shepherds rendered in "realistic" clothing and holding crooks. Do these also reflect broader cultural patterns?
So, too, is the context of the images critical. In village settings, where paintings were used as devotional tools by both men and women, are women inserted with greater frequency into traditional narrative sequences? Scenes of the Baptism in many Cretan churches, for example, include male fishermen among those gathered on the banks of the Jordan. The majority of sinners represented in the scenes of the damned from the Last Judgment are men. Their sins represent social infractions related to agriculture and labor. What would a gendered reading of sins selected for representation reveal about the lives of men and women in the village, if anything? Is it possible that the inclusion of realia in narrative sequences says something more about class than about gender? How does one read images that decorated tombs such as the catacombs included in this study? Is imagery intended primarily for the dead different from that intended for the living? The images need to be read with a more discerning eye toward the communities that beheld them.
The chronological range of the materials included in the volume is vast, ranging from the fourth century through the fall of the Empire. Seeing homogeneity in what might be perceived as stock illustrations, the author rejects any effort to situate images within narrower chronological bands. But does such an approach help us to understand cultural developments in Byzantium, whether focused on women, the elite, or society as a whole? Are there periods in which images of women involved in mundane activities are more commonly included in narrative scenes? Are details of everyday life, for example, more frequent during and after the Comnenian period? And, if so, does this phenomenon reflect changes in the status of real women or does it provide further evidence for a broader cultural movement that is also witnessed in the unprecedented engagement with realism in high-style prose of the twelfth century? Such questions are almost impossible to pose when one is confronted with a body of evidence as broad and undifferentiated as that presented in the volume.
The author rejects a regional approach, foregrounding manuscripts created in Constantinople and including "monumental art [that] is mostly provincial--Serbian, Bulgarian, Coptic, Greek, etc.--[which] nevertheless shows strong links to the art of the capital, in spite of the Latin occupation in part of the Byzantine territory and the Venetian rule of Crete" (299). Art of the city is placed together with art of the countryside. Images viewed by the monk on a daily basis are grouped together with those seen by farmers on Sundays. The dangers in assuming that all Orthodox viewers saw and/or interpreted aspects of realism in the same manner are obvious. In grouping provincial monuments with metropolitan ones, the author adopts a hierarchical model that largely ignores artistic innovations that emerged on the fringes of the Empire (in locations such as Crete) and in regions outside the strict control of the imperial and patriarchal courts. In monumental painting, at least, it is the small churches of the provinces that show the greatest number of realistic "intrusions" into otherwise canonical narrative sequences.
Throughout the study Meyer traces models, whether ancient or early Byzantine, espousing an approach to Byzantine manuscript studies most often associated with the work of Kurt Weitzmann (300). In one case, she says "Byzantine art perpetuates the iconographic formula of Attic vase painting" (267); in another, the bands holding back the hair of female servant are seen as "an artistic throwback to the portrayal of angels" (135); in others, details of gesture and composition rely on Classical, Hellenistic, or late antique models (68, 75, 109, 265). If details of narrative are based on earlier models, how can they also represent the realities of contemporary civilization? The underlying tension between artistic model and artistic innovation runs throughout the volume. How might women's reality be imagined in Byzantium if this culture were seen to be medieval rather than post-Classical?
Despite these critiques, which are informed by the questions that the author raises in her epilogue, this volume offers much to think about, in terms of the abundant material that is placed before the reader and in the questions raised concerning the use of works of art to reconstruct social realities in the Middle Ages. Meyer's epilogue raises valid concerns about the approach taken in the volume, concerns that should generate discussion. The author's self-critique does not diminish her contribution in assembling and interpreting a large corpus of images, but helps the reader to understand the difficulties in undertaking a project of such monumental scope. The inclusion of such an epilogue, which represents an unusual moment of intellectual introspection, is, to my mind, both daring and generous.
Aside from raising critical questions of methodology, the author has provided a wealth of new material to consider and has rescued a number of women (and their images) from obscurity. Even in a post-feminist world, the subject of Byzantine women continues to draw the attention of individuals who aim to shine scholarly light on what many continue to regard as an invisible part of the population. Whether one agrees with Meyer's conclusions about cultural patterns in Byzantium, the questions she raises are interesting ones. And for that we should be extremely grateful.