Masculinity in Byzantium: Dr Maroula Perisanidi on her new book

The inspiration for this book stemmed from my ongoing interest in clerics. My first monograph, Clerical Continence in Twelfth-Century England and Byzantium: Property, Family, and Purity (Routledge, 2018) focused on clerical sexuality, but for the second one, I wanted to move beyond this and explore other key markers of masculinity, particularly clerical violence and learning.

Given that clerical masculinity is a well-established topic among Western medievalists, I was curious to see if this concept could be applied in a Byzantine context. I explored this in the second part of the book, which focuses on clerical hunting and fighting—actually the first area of research I undertook.

As I delved deeper into this topic, I realised that learning was employed as a masculinising strategy (as I think was also the case in the West), but not only by religious men. Unlike their Western counterparts, Byzantine clerics and monks were not the most educated individuals in society: learning (both secular and religious) could help anyone assert their masculinity. This insight led me to develop the first part of the book, where I introduce the concept of scholarly masculinity to emphasise the impact that education, learning, and learned performance had on one’s gender in Byzantium.

While writing this book, I was particularly struck by how much heavy lifting animals did in narratives that performed gender work. They weren’t merely background figures. They often took on central roles and had unique associations for the two key groups I focused on. For instance, scholars intertwined animals with writing, through the author-as-bird and the author-as-hunter metaphors. They could also imagine themselves as the antithesis of animals, through the fascinating contrast between logos, meaning reason/speech, and alogon, meaning both "horse" and "that which is without reason or speech." 

Overall, I found animals very helpful in my quest to understand gender in Byzantium, so I also made it a point to take them seriously. I thoroughly enjoyed every opportunity I had to emphasise animal agency, to investigate the traces that animals left on humans and their history, and to consider their bodies as significant in their own right. So while animals may not be in the title of this book, you might be surprised to find quite a lot of them in it!

The last chapter I wrote was the one about Gregorios Antiochos, and it really got me thinking about bodies and how gender intersects with other markers of identity, especially disability. Antiochos was a man who experienced chronic illness, resulting to a weak body at a time when society prized heroic, strong, able-bodied men. Yet, he managed to use the prevailing gender discourses to interpret his disability through in a positive way. He redefined his frail, chronically ill body as the ideal scholar's body. He didn’t need big, strong muscles to study. He describes his fixed eyes, his experience of pain, his curved back becoming one with his study furniture (he is ‘fastened to the lectern and sewn to the chair’). All this allows him to immerse himself in reading and writing, to understand the world, and ultimately to be the scholar he aspired to be.

So disability is something I believe we should all understand more deeply and it’s indeed the topic of the monograph I’m currently writing. In it feature some familiar figures, including Michael Psellos (on whom more below), whose name hints at his non-standard voice, possibly a lisp or a stutter. 

I’d like to draw attention to some of the positive aspects of masculinity explored in this book. Byzantine masculine ideals were not rigid, but negotiable. People found ways to navigate and sometimes subtly resist the constraints of patriarchy. Their strategies weren’t always ‘radical’. While some fundamentally challenged the system, others simply carved out more personal freedom within it. But there was room to “man-oeuvre”.

For example, Michael Psellos, one of the most important intellectuals of the eleventh century, masculinised himself through education and used this intellectual capital to freely express emotions and dispositions which were considered "feminine". He writes in one of his letters: ‘I do have, with regard to learning, perhaps a more masculine disposition, yet with regard to nature I am feminine’.

The second part of this statement has been discussed with reference to non-binary readings of Psellos’ identity (Betancourt, 2020), and as I show elsewhere Psellos did indeed have a complicated relationship with cisness (with Ilya Maude, forthcoming). But what I emphasise in this book, is how the first part of this statement is also important and a conscious part of Psellos’ strategy to create a liveable gender for himself. In using education to masculinise himself, Psellos participated in and helped cultivate a community of scholars who could reject hegemonic masculine ideals. This allowed him more personal freedom in terms of his gender expression and a stake in shifting the boundaries of what it meant to be masculine in his society.

A different example of resisting gender imperatives can be found in the stories of warrior ex-clerics and monks. Unlike their Western counterparts, Byzantine religious men didn’t combine ecclesiastical and military activities but transitioned more clearly between them. A cleric who engaged in combat, even in self-defence during war, risked deposition. Many religious men who desired a more warlike life abandoned their previous positions, a choice that Byzantine historians recount without condemnation. These shifts have implications for gender. Those who left the Church to become warriors embraced the hegemonic ideal of military masculinity, but also demonstrated that it was possible to forsake strict religious vows and entirely change one's gender performance. 

These Byzantine stories remind us that there are both subtle and more drastic ways in which we can negotiate the gender imperatives of our time.