:Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900

Abstract

The early medieval period has been the locus of lively scholarly debates in recent years over issues fundamental to an understanding of how what we know as “Europe,” “Christianity,” and “the Islamic World” came to be—issues like the nature of identity and of political power. This very useful book situates the impact of gender within the context of the latest scholarship on these larger debates. The authors of these sixteen essays, covering Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, and “Germanic” societies, are more interested in what gender can tell us about the early Middle Ages than what the early Middle Ages can tell us about gender. They do not offer new theoretical paradigms, but they do break new ground in our understanding of the period in question. One important theme to emerge from this book, although not singled out in coeditor Julia M. H. Smith's fine introduction, is the interaction between gender and ethnicity. Many groups in this period were concerned with their ethnic (for want of a better word) identities. Walter Pohl, in “Gender and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages,” uses stories of Amazons and pseudo-bearded women to examine the ways late antique writers explained difference. By equating fighting women with the Amazons of Greek myth, authors made them a separate ethnic group, casting women who were too strong and aggressive as pagan and “other.” Mary Harlow shows how late Roman ideas of the relation between dress and masculinity changed as they began to adopt “barbarian” styles like leggings. Shaun Tougher's article on the court eunuch points out that while in the late Roman period eunuchs tended to be ethnic outsiders, by the ninth century many Byzantine eunuchs were native, indicating a severing of the link between foreignness and emasculation. Julia Bray's comprehensive overview of Abbasid social structures connects the foreign slave origins of several of the mothers of Abbasid rulers to a new concept of the family in which maternal lineage was no longer as important as it had been. Bonnie Effros challenges traditional methods of determining the ethnicity of burials from the brooches found in women's graves, arguing that this assumes women were passive transmitters of fixed identities, although she does not prescribe a different methodology (which presumably would have to entail radically redefining what we understand by “ethnicity” in the early medieval context, a redefinition scholars have already begun to undertake).