Women’s Literature in Byzantium?—The Case of Anna Komnene

Abstract

This chapter examines the general social condition of women in the higher circles of Constantinople in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was the social setting and intellectual climate in which Anna Komnene grew up and wrote. The chapter demonstrates the development of women's education in the eleventh century by looking at three generations of the family of Michael Psellos. With the great exception of Anna Komnene, the educated aristocratic women of the eleventh and twelfth centuries do not present themselves as writers, though certainly as persons who encouraged literature and to whom literature was addressed. When Anna was born on December 2, 1083, the first child of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who had come to power two years earlier through a revolt, and his wife, Irene Doukaina, her father was twenty-six and her mother seventeen. Anna's elaboration on the contrast between her peaceful mother and the barbarian women warriors of antiquity was also of immediate relevance within the 'Alexiad'.

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