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Edinburgh Byzantine Studies

Byzantine BodiesGender and Sexuality in the Christian East

Edited by Larisa Orlov Vilimonović and Shaun Tougher

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

Reconstructs how bodies were experienced and mobilised within Byzantine culture

  • Brings together leading and emerging international scholars working on gender and sexuality in Byzantium
  • Explores bodies across textual, visual and ritual contexts
  • Engages with contemporary gender and queer theory while grounding analysis in Byzantine sources
  • Includes case studies from hagiography, historiography, art and monastic culture
  • Offers new perspectives on eunuchs, masculinity, and femininity in Byzantium

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.

Reviews

Attending especially to marginal bodies in the medieval Christian East, these essays read gender and desire in materiality and doing, grounding abstractions of construction and performance.
Marked by profound theoretical awareness, this is a refreshing and pleasantly provocative volume on Byzantine embodiment as a cultural force – a valuable contribution to not only gender studies, but Byzantine Studies at large.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Byzantine Bodies: Gender, Desire and the Making of Meaning
Larisa Orlov Vilimonović and Shaun Tougher

Part I: Deconstructing Paradigms, Contextualizing Bodies

1. Gender Trouble in Byzantium: Uncovering Queer Bodies in the Christian East
Larisa Orlov Vilimonović, Jakov Đorđević
2. Sanctifying Women’s Choices: Rethinking Byzantine Female Saints’ Freedom
Ashley Purpura
3. Eunuchs of War and Imperial Eunuchs in Byzantium: New Cases and Perspectives on Gender, Trisexuation, and State Power (6th–7th c.)
Georges Jablonski-Sideris

Part II: Bodies between Text, Image, and Gender Performance

4. Jesus Christ: Perfect Man?
Liz James
5. Rosy Cheek, Wrinkled Brow Body, Age and Gender in Byzantine Art
Mati Meyer and Lora Webb
6. Visions of Political Power, Ceremony, and Gender: The Case of Irene of Athens
Tiffany VanWinkoop
7. A Tale of Two Basils: The Physical History of the ‘Macedonian Dynasty
Shaun Tougher
8. Bohemond’s Biceps: Male Beauty and the Female Gaze in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene
Margaret Mullett

Part III: Bodies between Erotic Imagination and Rhetorical Ambiguity

9. Theophylaktos Simokattes and the Eroto-Rhetorical Figuration of the Male Body
Steven D. Smith
10. An Undisciplined Masculine Body of Pleasure and Desire in a Letter of Theodoros Daphnopates
Mark Masterson
11. Ambiguity of Temptation: Body and Desire in the Life of and Martyrdom of St. Eugenia from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes
Larisa Orlov Vilimonović
12. Monk and the Erotic Gaze in the Byzantine East: The Case of the Chapel of St. George at the Hilandar Monastery
Jakov Đorđević

About the contributors

Larisa Orlov Vilimonović

Larisa Orlov Vilimonović is Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Belgrade.She holds a PhD in Byzantine History from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, embodiment and emotons in Byzantine culture. She is the author of Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad: Emergence of a Personal History (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

Shaun Tougher

Shaun Tougher is Professor of Late Roman and Byzantine History at Cardiff University. He has a BA from Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD from the University of St Andrews. He works especially on dynastic history (primarily the Constantinian and Macedonian dynasties) and on gender and society (notably eunuchs, but also imperial women and questions of masculinity). His publications include The Reign of Leo VI (886-912) (Leiden, 1997), Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh, 2007), The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London and New York, 2008), and The Roman Castrati: Eunuchs in the Roman Empire (London and New York, 2021).

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