We are about to have lunch. You have to bring your food and beverage of choice because we are not actually in the same place. But the book you are about to read is modelled on those long, wonderful lunches when you can get a friend who is deep in the study of something to open up and tell you what is most important to know about her field. This is my favourite way to approach a new subject. I have no trouble tracking down the big definitive handbooks in the library, but often those books are just more collections of small specific studies that do not really tell you what the animating questions and keys to understanding are. When you can get a friend to stop worrying that the footnote, caveat, and nuance police are going to pop up from behind the salad bar and just tell you what he thinks, you can get a personal take on the entire field that gives you a frame of reference for approaching the articles and books that experts love producing.

This book is my lunchtime explanation of what I think would be most helpful for you to know about Byzantine gender so that you can study it further, compare it to your own field, add it to your lectures, or just enjoy a deeper understanding of the world. It deals with Byzantine performance of gender roles, ideas about what was normal for men and women, and how those ideas and performances affected the ways Byzantine people thought they ought to behave and interact with each other. It is based on several decades of studying Byzantine gender both from the perspective of a social historian, trying to figure out how the dead humans actually got along with one another, and from that of a cultural historian looking at elite texts with tools developed by scholars of literature.

I’m telling you what I think, not what I suppose a consensus opinion among scholars would be. Not enough people study Byzantine gender for there to be much consensus. At the same time, I do not expect anything I say here to be particularly controversial. I have focused on the topics where I have something useful to say, but occasionally you will find me offering a question without an answer.