NEW APPROACHES TO BYZANTINE HISTORY AND CULTURE Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture EDITED BY STAVROULA CONSTANTINOU AND MATI MEYER New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture Series Editors Florin Curta University of Florida FL, USA Leonora Neville University of Wisconsin Madison WI, USA Shaun Tougher Cardiff University Cardiff, UK New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad aca- demic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically innova- tive work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies. The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the inter- disciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies. The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14755 Stavroula Constantinou · Mati Meyer Editors Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture Editors Stavroula Constantinou Mati Meyer University of Cyprus The Open University of Israel Nicosia, Cyprus Ra’anana, Israel New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture ISBN 978-3-319-96037-1 ISBN 978-3-319-96038-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96038-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948720 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Sonia Halliday Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland F oreword Human beings have a large repertoire of emotions. Charles Darwin, in his seminal study, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, discussed suffering and weeping, low spirits, anxi- ety, grief, dejection, and despair, joy, high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion, reflection, meditation, ill-temper, sulkiness, and determi- nation, hatred and anger, disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, help- lessness, patience, and affirmation and negation, surprise, astonishment, fear and horror, and, finally, self-attention, shame, shyness and modesty. The tendency of some modern (and earlier) investigators to reduce this variety to a few basic emotions—sometimes as few as five—has come at the expense of nuance. The object of this latter approach has been to identify emotions that are invariant across different cultures; the subtle distinctions drawn by Darwin in positing so wide a range of sentiments are open to the objection that not all societies carve up the emotional domain in exactly this way, and so his system lies open to the charge that it treats the categories familiar in the English language as transhistorical. But even the so-called basic or elementary emotions turn out to be dif- ferently constituted from one society to another. There is always a cul- tural factor in the constitution of the emotions, even if, at some level, one wishes to affirm that the emotions are not simply and wholly socially constructed and that at some level, they reflect universally shared capaci- ties among human beings—and perhaps even certain animals. Take anger, one of the emotions that is regularly included among the most basic. When Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, affirms that ‘it is impossible v vi FOREWORD to be afraid of and angry with someone at the same time’ (2.3, 1380a33), it is easy to see that his conception of anger and very possibly also of fear must be at least to some extent at odds with modern intui- tions, at least in the English-speaking world, where it would seem that we might very well feel anger precisely at someone who induced fear in us. And in fact, Aristotle’s conception of anger is different from mod- ern definitions; for him, anger is a desire to avenge insults or slights, and so is closely bound up with matters of status and honor. We naturally hesitate to seek revenge against those we fear, and so in practice, we are not angry but more likely to tolerate the offense against our honor as coming from a superior and hence, in some sense, fitting. Not only are individual emotions variously inflected, but the inventory of the emo- tions itself is unstable across cultures. Pity, for example, would surely be included among the fundamental emotions in classical Greece and Rome, to judge by its primary place in ancient lists and discussions of the passions, and yet not only is it never acknowledged as basic by mod- ern investigators, it is often excluded entirely even from more extensive catalogues, such as Darwin’s own (it is mentioned incidentally only three times in the entire work). That human values differ from one society to another is no surprise. The emotions, however, have long been considered to be instinctive and hence invariant across cultures. It is only recently that the history of emotions has emerged as an active field of study. Thanks in part to the extraordinary analysis of the pathê in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, students of classical Greece have by now developed sophisticated analyses of the emotions he and others described and illustrated in action. More recently still, scholars of the Byzantine world have made substantial contribu- tions of their own. For despite great areas of continuity between classi- cal Greece and Byzantium, there were important changes, not least the pervasive role of Christianity in Byzantine society, which brought with it new conceptions of the emotions as well. We may see this, for exam- ple, in the understanding of pity. Aristotle had defined pity as ‘a kind of pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm to a person who does not deserve to encounter it, which one might expect oneself, or one of one’s own, to suffer, and this when it seems near’ (Rhetoric 2.8.2). On this conception, pity involves a moral judgment as to whether another’s suffering is merited; it is not simply an instinctive empathy with anyone who is in trouble. Lactantius, in his Institutiones Divinae, composed in the first decade of the 4th century, argued rather that FOREWORD vii God endowed human beings with pity in order that they might protect each other, even, he adds, when it is possible to evade the law. So con- ceived, Lactantius avers, pity is a virtue. Gregory of Nyssa, in turn, also regarded pity as essential to human society. In his sermon on the fifth beatitude, he cites the famous verse of the Gospel of Matthew, ‘blessed are those who pity, for they shall be pitied’ (5:7), and comments: ‘the obvious meaning of the text summons human beings to be loving and sympathetic to each other because of the unfairness and inequality of human affairs.’ Gregory then offers his own definition of pity as ‘a voluntary [hekousios] pain that arises at the misfortunes of others’ (On the Beatitudes, PG 44.1252.28-30), and he goes on to explain: ‘pity is a loving shared disposition (‘ἀγαπητικὴ συνδιάθεσις’) with those who are suffering under painful circumstances.’ Note that Gregory does not consider whether the misfortunes that elicit pity are deserved or not; in the spirit of the Gospels, Gregory offers a formula for a kind of uni- versal sympathy for our fellow beings. His idea of a shared disposition, moreover, seems to have something in common with modern notions of sympathy, which appeal to a merging of identities; thus Adam Smith, in his fundamental study of the moral sentiments, states that when we pity another person, ‘by the imagination we place ourselves in his situa- tion, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.’ Finally, Gregory asso- ciates pity closely with love or agapê, and describes pity as an ‘intensifica- tion of a loving disposition (‘ἐπίτασιν […] τῆς ἀγαπητικῆς διαθέσεως’) mixed together with a feeling of distress.’ As Gregory observes, since love is the best thing in life, and pity is a magnification of love, then those who experience pity are truly blessed and achieve the height of vir- tue. It is easy to see how far we have come from Aristotle’s rather more aristocratic conception of pity. If the emotions in any given society are subject to the influence of its deepest values and institutions, it should come as no surprise that attitudes toward gender too, and no doubt class as well, should play a crucial role in their determination. And yet, in the history of emotions, this dimension has been largely neglected, and the volume before you is the first focused attempt to examine the emotions of the Byzantine world from this perspective. Sometimes, in the service of maintaining social hierarchies, an emotion will simply be denied to certain groups. An example is the extreme reticence in classical Latin literature to ascribe viii FOREWORD the feeling of shame to slaves, as Robert Kaster has demonstrated.1 So too, women may be said to lack courage and the kind of fear that accompanies it; as Mati Meyer writes in this volume, ‘as it was associ- ated with a courageous person, fear was usually male gendered, and was generally mentioned in connection with military acts or devotional prac- tices.’ Passionate love or erôs was another asymmetrical emotion: men were typically regarded as lovers or erastai, that is, the subjects of erotic attraction, whereas women were imagined as the objects of male passion, that is, as erômenai. Anger too was unevenly distributed between males and females. And yet, just here we see clearly how socially prescribed constraints fail to erase the fact that men and women (of all classes, we may add) equally share the same emotions, despite the efforts of men to repress them in women. The recognition of the parity of emotional competence in women frequently manifests itself as an anxiety, in which women who experience anger or sexual desire to the full degree that men do are caricatured and rendered monstrous, as though they were not genuinely female but some kind of freak or villain. In Sophocles’ Trachiniai, the heroine Dejanira protests, ‘It is not appropriate (kalon) for a sensible woman to be angry’; it is not a lack of capacity that inhibits her but a sense of protocol. So too, although sex may be dangerous to anyone who falls under its sway, women who are possessed by erotic pas- sion are mocked and disparaged as unnatural; Procopius’ account of the debaucheries of Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, may suffice to illustrate the point. The gendering of emotion persists to this day, even among feminist thinkers who wish to affirm the value of the gentler sentiments that women, confined to domestic life, are imagined to represent. Carol Gilligan, in her influential book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,2 found that women evince a stronger sense of caring for others than men do. That this disparity is due to early sociali- zation is highly plausible, but Gilligan’s position has been the subject of considerable controversy, particularly on the part of those who detected in her argument a genetic basis for the differences. As the chapters in the present volume make abundantly clear, Byzantine writers emphasized and sustained such a gendered dimorphism in the ascription of emotions. But, as we have noted, such ideologically informed discriminations are inherently unstable, as gendered identities are muddled and inverted (think of the complex role of the eunuch, explored in Shaun Tougher’s chapter in this volume). In this way, they expose the social pressure that FOREWORD ix is required to maintain them—the work of defining women precisely as emotional, when emotion is conveniently contrasted with reason and self-control, as opposed to the noble fear and righteous rage that is pre- sumed to characterize real men. But it is time to let the texts, and the scholars who have interpreted them, speak for themselves, as they illustrate in rich abundance the mani- fold ways of the sexing of emotions in the Byzantine world. New York, USA David Konstan New York University Notes 1. Robert Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).