Conjugal Violence and The Ideological Construction of Byzantine Marriage
Conjugal Violence and The Ideological Construction of Byzantine Marriage

Summary/Abstract: This article offers the first exploration of the role of conjugal violence in Byzantium, considering its use (and sometimes approval) as a mechanism for enforcing normative social roles as well as its representation in literary texts that seek to recuperate a damaged social order or subvert an illegitimate one. We focus on the norms encoded in Byzantine law and then offer a preliminary but wide-ranging survey of episodes from hagiography and historiography which illustrate how the Byzantines thought about this issue. The paper includes both physical and psychological forms of violence, and does not neglect the rarer cases of victimization of the man by his spouses. The Byzantine conception of such violence was malecentric and women were subject to it as “naturally” inferior beings, but there were times when they could inflict it too.

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