Bestos of all the best

he be leic,

me go,

go, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, Wiser than

Men, Gender in Byzantium. than men, gender and Byzantine.

Anna Komina was unique.

No other woman in the Byzantine period wrote a work with the scale and intellectual ambition

of her Alexiad, and no other Byzantine woman played such a significant

role in the interpretation of pagan philosophical literature.

Yet Anna was also one example of a familiar type, the aristocratic woman close to or at the center of the

circles of political power in Constantinople.

The historical chronicles, we have recently discussed, are full of information about royal women like Eileen, Theodora, Zoe, and Udochia, to the point where whole books have been devoted to the subject of Byzantine emphasis.

Such historical reports can be combined with hagiographical accounts of holy women, with

writings in which male Byzantine authors talk about women from their own families and information about the life and reading habits of nuns in female monasteries.

As a result, there is plenty of material for learning about the situation of women in this culture and the extent to which they could aspire to intellectual pursuits.

Anna's own writings are already revealing in this respect.

We already know about her early efforts to gain an education

and the way she carefully curated her persona as a female author. Occasionally she

refers to this quite explicitly. In one passage of her Alexiad, she shies away from

detailing a heretical movement writing, modesty prevents me as the beautiful saffo, says somewhere,

...