Stratis Papaioannou

Byzantine Religious Culture

Twenty-five articles in art history, social history, literature, epigraphy, numismatics and sigillography pay tribute to Alice-Mary Talbot in a coherent volume related to her abiding interest in the study of Byzantine religious practices in their social context.

Anna Komnene’s Will

In the present paper, the author presents a Byzantine text authored by a woman in the hopes of exploring the ways in which a female writer negotiates or challenges the androcentric premises that drive the medium in which she expresses herself. The author in question is Anna Komnene, the Byzantine princess, author, and patroness. Anna is known mostly for her Alexiad , a sophisticated history of the career of Annas father, Alexius. This writing of a Byzantine woman aims at honoring a scholar who has contributed so much to our knowledge and understanding of the religious culture of Byzantium in general and of the lives and minds of Byzantine women in particular. It is somewhere among her various personae - the Christian Monastic, the aristocrat, the daughter and wife, the woman, intellectual, author - that we are bound to discover and, simultaneously, fail to recover Annas own will. Keywords: Alexiad ; Anna Komnene; Byzantine text; testament; will