I’m currently reading about Byzantine empresses, particularly Irene (empress 775-80), Euphrosyne (820-29) and Theodora (829-42), all of whom were supporters of icons in the great battle over religious rules during this period. Without them, it is suggested, the iconophiles might have won and we’d live in a very different visual world.

When Theodora’s husband, Theophilos, died in 942, she became regent for her two year old son. Criticised by a holy hermit, she responded. “I will rule with a firm hand. You will see.” She is celebrated as a saint for the restoration of icons the following year, marked as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”. (p.2)

Earlier, Ignatios the deacon said of Irene’s behaviour during the council of 787: “Irene was a mere woman, but she possessed both the love of God and firmess of understanding, if it is right to give the name of woman to one who surpassed even men in the piety of her understanding.” (p. 8)

Years ago, when I first encountered Byzantine history, I was fascinated by the number of prominent empresses, quite a contrast to the Arab and Muslim world of its early centuries, when women are almost invisible. The explanation that I came up with then was that Byzantium remained throughout most of its history supremely confident; it was “new Rome”, and it had all that history stretching back, so it could allow lots of “odd” things to happen without feeling threatened by it, not the case with the new upstart empire and religion. Later, when Islam was more confident during what we usually call the early Middle Ages, women became more prominent. Not perhaps an entire explanation, but I think quite a useful one.

I wonder, could you generally say that women do better in confident societies than nervous ones?

I couldn’t find a single useful web page on any of the empresses. On iconoclasm there’s the (biased) Catholic view here, the Orthodox, and a shorter but more balanced outline here.

And some gorgeous pictures here

From: Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, Judith Herrin, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2001. (Now in Waterstone’s Goodge St for £7.)

… on the US election, that:

“Which side of the Red/Blue divide you you’re on is a matter of whether you see government as an insurance scheme or a patronage system. And that, in turn, depends upon whether you believe that people can and should operate according to universalizable moral principles or think that moral obligation supervenes upon sentimental bonds of family, tribe, and community.”

The full post is here.

I find it particularly interesting having had, from living in Thailand, experience of an almost perfect patronage system. A comment piece in the Bangkok Post once explained that there was no such thing in Thailand as “public” land. There was the king’s land, which of course had to be treated with reverence, and “no one’s land”, on which it was perfectly acceptable to dump rubbish, or industrial waste or whatever, even if it was outside your, or someone else’s, door.

Courtesy of Majikthise.

A lovely quote from Pierre Bayle, on whom I have posted elsewhere:

“It is the purest delusion to suppose that because an idea has been handed down from time immemorial to succeeding generations, it may not be entirely false.”

Quoted in A Short History of Western Atheism, J. Thrower, Pemberton Books, 1971, p. 81

I thank The Little Professor for the inspiration for this post; she regularly posts a list of her week’s book purchases and it makes fascinating (and often tempting) reading. Her list this week is here.

I was going to start this last week, but it would have been embarrassingly large. (I went mad with a 3 for 2 offer in Waterstone’s.) This week I was rather more continent.

So here it is:

* Woman in World History: Her Place in the Great Religions, E.M. White, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1924, on which I posted here.

* An English Wife in Berlin, “A private memoir of events, politics and daily life in Germany through the war and the social revolution of 1918”, by Evelyn, Princess Blucher, an English aristocrat married to a German prince – very readable. I’m trying to find out when she died – there’s a Princess Blucher in London just before WWII, but I’m not sure if it is the same one; all information welcome! Constable and Co, London, 1920.

* Alexis, by Marguerite Yourcenar. I found this 20th-century French historical fiction writer through the Women writers group, which has just finished reading The Abyss, as have I – a very interesting exploration of 16th-century Europe.

* The House of Doctor Dee, P. Ackroyd, which I bought and read yesterday after being asked by someone who knows I live in Clerkenwell how close to reality the geography in it was. I’m not entirely an Ackroyd fan – he does get rather too mystical for me, and this is one of his most mystical ones; The Clerkenwell Tales was much better.

* Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, M. Yamani (ed)New York University Press, 1996. (Now remaindered for £4 in Unsworths opposite the British Museum, for anyone interested.) I haven’t had time to look at it yet.

…you might not be surprised to hear. But women’s writing about it in the past has frequently been ignored, even by scholars looking at other aspects of their work.

I’ve just been reading an article on Rose Scott (1847-1925), an early Australian feminist and social reformer. The article by Judith Allen is remarkable for its author’s openness about how her view of her subject had changed over time. Allen writes: “My first work on Scott substantially ignored her writings on masculinity and sexuality. Instead, by splitting the public and the private, I focused on those of her activities generally accepted as giving Scott her importance to the history of feminism”, e.g. suffrage, legal issues, the condition of prisoners. (p. 158)

“The personal is political” has been around a long time, but there still seems to be considerable discomfort in recognising the fact. Of course sometimes past writings were so coded, because that was the way women had to write, that it can be hard to recover the meanings, but that’s not the case with Rose. She wrote about the “animal in man”, which coiled itself around woman, suffocating her spirit. Woman had to endure “the snake”. (Clear enough!)

Allen suggests that while it is easy to dismiss this “ignorant, misguided or cavalier on the question of women’s pleasure”, this ignored the fact that “heterosexuality as men enforced it was central to the oppression of women”(p. 164).

Rose in fact should perhaps be seen as a foremother of Andrea Dworkin, although Feministe pointed me to an article in which she explains she never said “all sex is rape”. Her comments there also on violence within marriage tie with my earlier post on honour killings.

A short biog of Rose can be found here.

From Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges,” Barbara Caine, E.A. Grosz, Marie de Lepervanche (eds), Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, pp. 157-165

An excellent piece in today’s Observer, Death before dishonour, about honour killings in a variety of cultures, and among communities that have brought those cultures to Britain.

I started to count up the number of countries around the world in which such attitudes (if not always carried to these extremes) prevail, but it was so depressing that I had to stop. (When I lived in Thailand I learnt the lovely Thai proverb: “Having a daughter is like having a toilet in your front yard.”)

Then again, looked at the other way, there are quite a number of countries where such attitudes used to prevail but from which they have almost entirely been banished. The Observer makes the point that: “Not so long ago, British women could be locked in mental asylums for getting pregnant out of wedlock; in living memory in the UK, it was preferable to have a daughter who was mad than one who was bad.” (And there were also the horrific Magdalene laundries in Ireland, about which Joni Mitchell wrote.