Byzantine Bodies : Gender and Sexuality in the Christian East

Reconstructs how bodies were experienced and mobilised within Byzantine culture.

This book examines how gender, sexuality and embodiment were conceptualised and represented in Byzantine culture. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, it explores the body as a site where moral value, social hierarchy and theological meaning were negotiated. The volume brings together studies of historiography, rhetoric, visual culture, hagiography and monastic discourse, addressing figures of differing status, from imperial rulers to saints and eunuchs. Its chapters illuminate how Byzantine society understood the body as malleable, legible and embedded within Christian moral and cosmological frameworks. Rather than treating gender and sexuality primarily as questions of identity, the volume shows how bodies operated within specific social, religious and textual contexts. Taken together, the essays offer a nuanced account of how desire, beauty, asceticism and authority were articulated through embodied forms, and invite a reconsideration of how modern scholarship approaches gender and sexuality in Byzantium.