Callum Hendleman

This project aims to offer the first systematic analysis of the role and place of women within the literary culture of the late Byzantine Empire (1204-1453). By bringing together a wide-ranging corpus of texts, each of which attests to the manifold ways in which Byzantine women engaged with literary and manuscript culture – as authors, epistolographers, addressees of letters and epigrams, dedicatees in poetical and ethopoetical texts, and scribes – this project will both highlight the considerable contribution of women to the production of literature and explore the motivations which underpinned these activities. These findings will then be set against a broader medieval context, in order to examine the hitherto unanswered question as to why so few female-authored Byzantine texts survive in comparison to the abundance which were produced in the literary cultures of the Latinate west.