This account has been a remarkably static image of Medieval Roman gender. I have culled information from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and amalgamated it into a common meatloaf. This is regrettable because Byzantine culture and society were not unchanging or monolithic. We know that many aspects of Medieval Roman society and culture changed. I just lack sufficient certainty about changes in gender for me to make unambiguous statements about them. Here I will outline some changes that have been posited along with my reasons for scepticism. The uncertainty does not arise from any inherent unknowability of the historical problems, but from lack of fundamental research.

Alexander Kazhdan and others suggested a major shift in Byzantine culture from glorifying civilian virtues and civilian leadership up through the eleventh century to glorifying military aristocracy in the twelfth. This has become generally accepted in the field and I basically think it happened. There is no doubt that there were many administrative and governmental changes in the eleventh century, and the depictions of emperors changed along with desires for what emperors should do.

It is natural to think of this shift in culture as also entailing changes in ideas about how to perform gender properly. It may have, but I think the evidence is less straightforward than it may seem at first sight. Eleventh-century cultural change was concurrent with a change in the style in which histories were written. Histories became more classicizing, and this entailed more concern with moral action of the key figures and more deliberation about what events meant and discursive elaboration of the characters. Histories shifted from relatively brief statements that such an emperor attacked so and so and who won, to long accounts of what happened that could include speeches debating the best course of action, descriptions of how the generals arranged their camps, how the troops were deployed, who led which division, and how everyone behaved on the field.

The discursive classicizing histories seem to use the details to craft a moral story of heroism and good and bad masculine behaviour. I am sceptical about how much more real information they provide about military history than the earlier bare-bones texts.