Historiography and Gender in the Eastern Roman Empire

Historiography and Gender in the Eastern Roman Empire: An Interview with Leonora Neville

By Aleksandar Anđelović

March 2025 – I talked to Leonora Neville about the East Roman Empire – its history, its people, and the way we study it today. We discussed why she prefers ‘East Rome’ over ‘Byzantium,’ what medieval Romans thought about their own past, and how gender shaped their society. Find out why these questions matter and how they change the way we see the medieval world!

About Leonora Neville

A Professor in Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Leonora Neville is a historian specializing in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the society and culture of the East Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) from the ninth to twelfth centuries. Her research explores the late antique and classical influences on medieval eastern Mediterranean cultures. She is particularly interested in gender dynamics, civic religion, the religious dimensions of political culture and the shaping of historical memory and historiography. Some of her main publications are Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford University Press, 2016), Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Byzantine Gender (ARC Humanities Press, 2019).

The Interview

Aleksandar Anđelović: To start with, what brought you to the study of the East Roman Empire and, more specifically, to its middle period? Why not the medieval West or some other area, what caught your attention in exactly East Rome?

Leonora Neville: I was drawn to later Roman history precisely through the puzzle of why it was called “Byzantine.” The first semester of my first year of college, I took a Roman history class that ended in the fifth century. In the final lecture the professor said that the eastern part of the Empire didn’t fall until the fifteenth century but that it was called “Byzantine” for reasons he did not understand. He was not admitting ignorance so much as pointing out that this was a significant point of confusion in our conceptions of the past. That same year I was studying intensively the philosophy, history, and literature of “Western civilization” from ancient Greece to the twentieth century. While I had a wonderful time reading all the amazing texts, the fundamental plot line of that intellectual program seemed somehow illogical. In September the center of “Western civilization” was in ancient Greece, but by May it was in Boston, and Greece was on the edge of the Orient. Examining “Byzantine” history seem to be a way to dig at these issues. Then I read Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, and knew that these are the people I wanted to study.

AA: Readers will notice that we aren’t referring to ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’ but rather to ‘East Rome’ and ‘Roman’. In ‘Byzantinists’ circles you are known as one of the main advocates of emphasizing the Roman identity of the medieval empire we study and of abandoning the ‘Byzantine’ rubric. This seems not to be only a matter of terminology but is rather significant for both how ‘Byzantinists’ approach e.g. East Roman historiography and for how ‘Byzantine’ Studies are seen and integrated in wider academic circles. Especially in the light of Anthony Kaldellis’ recent The Case for East Roman Studies (ARC Humanities Press, 2024), this still seems to be a burning issue when it comes to studying medieval Romans. Could you tell us more about your views on this?

LN: My views on this issue are wrapped up with the answers I’ve developed for the questions which first brought me to the field. I think scholars have preferred to talk about “Byzantium” because having a Roman empire alive and kicking in the twelfth century disrupts a number of historical paradigms that have been important to the western academy for the past few centuries. Denying, or tacitly ignoring, the East Roman Empire as such, is easier than dealing with the disruption it causes. My long answer to this question is forthcoming in a little book I’ve just completed entitled Sailing Away from Byzantium toward East Roman History. My short answer is that thinking of the East Roman state as a real continuation of the west Roman state, populated by real Romans, has significant intellectual consequences, including: 1) there was not ethnic continuity between the ancient Greeks in the modern Greeks, 2) the advent of Christianity was not the definitional fulcrum of human existence separating a pagan ancient world from a Christian medieval world, 3) human experience does not fit into an ancient/medieval dichotomy 4) the western Renaissance did not recover a Greek antiquity that had been kept in formaldehyde untouched since the Second Sophistic. A lot of scholars see this critique as taking on old ideas they do not endorse, and therefore that using “Byzantine” is just an anodyne scholarly convention. That is, they think since they are not working to uphold a grand narrative of Western civilization, it doesn’t matter that the terminology of “Byzantium” was created in service of that narrative. I think that by using the terminology of East Rome, and more importantly conceptualizing this society as East Rome, that we can show the disruptive, creative power of our field.

To take just one example, every time we maintain that the same people were Greeks in the fifth century BCE, Romans in the tenth century CE, and then Greeks again in the twentieth, we are disputing theories of human difference based on race. East Roman history is fundamentally antiracist, whereas “Byzantine” history is a fig leaf that allows scholars to believe that people who were “really” Greeks merely mistakenly believed that they were Romans for several centuries. The old statement: “the Byzantines thought they were Romans,” implies that the scholar knows they were really something else, either Greeks, Slavs, Armenians, Georgians, Syrians or some other recognizable category in modern national and ethnic history. Saying they were Romans implies that they were not Greeks.

AA: This change is not only about writing ‘(East) Roman’ instead of ‘Byzantine’ in publications but also entails structural changes such as the very name of the field as well as changing names of departments, which are all massive steps. Still, it is very unlikely that a student or early career researcher would go against the wind and produce a study about ‘Rome’ if they know that their work would be easily recognized if they talk about ‘Byzantium’ simply because it’s a traditional term, albeit, as you explained, a wrong one. In other words, the change of the ‘Byzantine’ paradigm must come ‘from above.’ How do you see this switch from ‘Byzantium’ to ‘East Rome’ taking place step by step?

LN: The change to our conceptualization of the subject is more important than changing the names of organizations. If we need to have “Byzantine” in the titles of our conferences, and in the subtitles to our books, that’s fine. Nearly all the time we talk to each other in specialist journals and in specialist conferences where we all know what we are talking about. So once we get in the door of the “Byzantine Studies Conference” we can switch to talking about east Rome. The matter of organizational change varies tremendously by geography and the structures of academic support in different countries. In some European universities, funding is tied to departments that study specific things, and so changing the name of the field risks real economic disruption. In my country there are no “Byzantine Studies” departments and the funding goes to whoever seems to be doing the most exciting and interesting research. I definitely want scholars to use whatever words they need to secure their next paycheck.

AA: One of your major interests is historiography, exemplified in your seminal work Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Everyone interested in East Rome knows how many histories and chronicles medieval Romans produced. Why was this so and what does it tell us about these people’s attitude towards the past? As you have shown in your work on historiography, ‘Byzantine’ historical writing is a continuation of Roman traditions, rather than a separate ‘medieval’ phenomenon. Can the switch to ‘East Rome’ rubric also help us grasp this unbroken tradition in historiography?

LN: In part the perception that East Romans wrote a lot of histories may be due to the way later scholars and societies prized knowledge of the past. That is, a disproportionate number of histories may have been saved, recopied, and published in the early modern period.

Another factor may be that different kinds of histories had different functions. Large-scale sweeping histories that went from Creation to the author’s “now” grounded and placed that author’s community in the cosmic history of divine creation. Small-scale histories that focused on individual rulers functioned as political commentary and exhortations to correct ethical behavior. Writing history of the past is an effective way of commenting on a political present. I think historical writing was popular genre because of its flexibility to accomplish different cultural and political tasks.

Historical writing is one of the subjects that can be better understood by considering the classical and medieval phases of the Roman polity together. Our field would do a lot better if all the people trained in Plutarch and Polybius also read Leo the Deacon and Anna Komnene.

AA: Another research focus of yours is gender in East Rome, with your Byzantine Gender (ARC Humanities Press, 2019) as a great contribution to the study of gender in ‘Byzantium.’ In the podcast Byzantium & Friends, you and the host Anthony Kaldellis agreed that, in modern scholarship, the study of gender in history is to a large extent the study of women in history. Six years later, would you say that this changed? And why does it matter to study gender in history, what does it reveal to us?

LN: Even then studies of masculinity were not uncommon, but you would also have people saying they needed to “add a gender” to a study by which they meant “talk about women.” Each year there are fewer active scholars who would make that conflation. I think it is essential to be aware of gender when studying any aspect of East Roman history, particularly the texts, because authors used conformity, or nonconformity, with gender ideals to praise or censure actors in their texts. Authors themselves seem to have massaged their own gender presentation so as to provoke particular feelings and attitudes among their intended audience. If scholars are not paying attention to this aspect of personhood, they will misconstrue the texts they study.

AA: Speaking of women in history, another groundbreaking study of yours is Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford University Press, 2016). In wider audience and in modern adaptations of ‘Byzantine’ history (either through mass media or by selling jewelry and perfumes), ‘Byzantine’ society is seen as decadent and exotic and its women in power therefore as lustful and merciless plotters hungry for power. Who were actually the women of East Rome and what was their agency? Would abandoning the ‘Byzantium’ rubric help us here too maybe?

LN: The issue of the power-lusting Byzantine empress is fascinating because it feeds off of both the androcentrism of East Roman society, and the somewhat different misogyny of our society. I’m still not quite sure why our contemporaries are so desirous of interpreting East Roman women as ruthlessly plotting to seize power while lounging decadently in silk underwear. It is striking to me how convinced people are that this was truly what “Byzantine” women were like, even though this is an obvious caricature rather than anything like a real person. I routinely get hate mail from people who are incensed that I argue that Anna Komnene may have enjoyed a life as an intellectual and historian, and might have not wanted to murder her brother. The idea that she possibly could have enjoyed administration before her father’s death, and then enjoyed being a historian afterward, appears just unthinkable, even though to my mind, this is the story that makes her look like a recognizable human person. In part, I put this down to our continued lack of paradigms of authoritative women who are not power-hungry. Any ambition in women still seems to be coded as negative trait of women who desire an inappropriate amount of power, because women are still expected to be deferential to male authority. So our contemporaries still have trouble imagining that Anna may have been ambitious to be a historian – although her book is manifestly ambitious. Since the category of “Byzantine princess” is so tightly tied to fundamentally misogynistic stereotypes, I think calling Anna a Roman historian is a big step forward.

AA: Do you have any book recommendations for the readership of this magazine that could help them familiarize with the East Roman Empire and its historiography and gender?

LN: The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium, 2024 edited by Mati Meyer and Charēs Messēs, takes a huge step forward in our understanding of East Roman gender. I would call it a must read. Stratis Papioannou’s The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, 2021, is a great introduction to East Roman literary culture. A great new monograph is Gabriel Radle, Marriage in Byzantium: Christian Liturgical Rites from Betrothal to Consummation. Cambridge University Press, 2024. And of course, I have to recommend my: Sailing Away from Byzantium toward East Roman History. Cambridge University Press, 2025, which should be out in a few months.