Leslie Brubaker

The Gender of Money: Byzantine Empresses on Coins (324–802)

Coins played different roles in the ancient and medieval worlds from those that they play in the economy today. In the late antique and early Byzantine world ‐ that is, roughly between 300 and 800 ‐ there were in a sense two currencies: gold coins and base metal (copper) coins. Both were minted and distributed by the state, but the gold solidi (in Latin) or nomismata (in Greek), introduced in 309, were by the end of the fifth century in practice used above all for the payment of tax and for major transactions such as land sales, while the copper coins (nummi, replaced in 498 by folles) were broadly the currency of market transactions. 1

The Age of Justinian

Sex and Gender in the Age of Justinian Sex and gender are not the same. Sex is biologically determined: except in extremely unusual circumstances, humans are born male or female. Gender is historically determined and relies on social practices that change across time and geographical location: codes of behavior that are culturally specific teach women and men to act in ways “appropriate” to their sex. That is why it is sometimes said that a woman is “acting like a man” or that a man is “acting like a woman”: they are behaving in ways that are believed, at the time, to be more suitable to the opposite sex. Masculinity and femininity are not, however, universal qualities shared by all cultures but are understood in different ways by different groups, and this understanding changes over time. Procopius - a sixth-century historian closely associated with Justinian and his general Belisarius - provides a good example of how gender roles were understood in the Age of Justinian when, in his History of the Wars , he describes the “manly valor” of Amazon women on the battlefield. In Procopius’s mind, men rather than women were the appropriate warriors: women who fought well must, by definition, exhibit male traits and be described in masculine terms. This gender “transgression” troubled Procopius sufficiently that he took pains to explain it away, arguing that “there never was a race of women endowed with the qualities of men and … human nature did not depart from its established norm.”

Parallel Universes: Byzantine art history in 1990 and 1991

AbstractArt history, like many disciplines in the so-called humanities, has engaged in a bout of re-definition over the past decade. Studies of the art of Byzantium have not been immune to this wave of revision and re-assessment. Though it must be said that Byzantine has been affected less than Roman or, especially, nineteenth-century art history, the discipline is nonetheless in a state of transition, and this fact deserves greater recognition than it has received. Byzantinists have, I think, a tendency to compartmentalise scholarship by authors (or occasionally universities) without examining the paradigmatic shifts in the discipline as a whole. Studies that provide such essentially historiographical overviews are normally confined within the limits of a book review or to the preface of a monographic study. In both cases, the scope is necessarily limited by the content. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies has not included book reviews in the past, and my goal here is not primarily to write an extended re...