Cherchez la femme. Female Characters in Late Byzantine Literature

The project offers a fresh analysis of female characters in late Byzantine literature, achieved through the trans-generic examination of literary texts, combining corpus analysis with narratology. By studying both ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ genres, the project moves beyond traditional modes of analysis, which have focused on extracting historical facts from these texts. It aims instead to understand how Byzantine literature represented women, through the critical analysis of individual female characters, the narrative structures in which they are embedded, and the gendered textual dynamics which determine their presentation. The analysis of a corpus of key texts will be enriched by comparison with relevant material culture. As well as enriching the study of Byzantium, this project also contributes to the rapidly developing field of historical narratology, by adding to the narrative theory on characters and characterization in pre-modern literatures.

The main output of the project will be a monograph offering the first complex narratological analysis of female characters in the late Byzantine literature. Further a series scholarly papers will be published, and a conference on characters and characterization in Byzantine literature will be organized.