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21 Aug Liminal Spaces in Byzantium (and beyond) – A book review by Piril Us MacLennan

Posted at 19:38h in Into the Storyworlds

Liminality. It was during my master’s studies that I first encountered the word when an archaeology student was writing a paper on the liminality of doorways. Curious, I asked what the term meant. She began by explaining that it was, first and foremost, her favorite word.

“It is just so satisfying to say,” she told me. “The way the L, M, and N flow into each other.”

I was already on board with her fascination after this intriguing statement, but she did also give me a quick introduction. She explained that the term derives from the Latin word limēn, threshold. In its modern course of development in the twentieth century, the term had come to refer to transitional or in-between places such as doorways and borders and states such as rites of passage and now countless other moments that existed between established categories, like getting engaged before getting married. For a moment, I found myself fascinated with the concept too as I sat in a classroom of the Byzantine Studies Research Center of Boğaziçi University.

I thought of that conversation often while reading Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium. As the editors of the volume, Buket Kitapçı Bayrı and Myrto Veikou, remind the readers, the concept’s principal architects, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, meant something “very simple and universal” by liminality: “the experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position, either temporally or spatially” (p. 2). It is precisely this simplicity that has made the concept so productive, and I believe, so intriguing for many scholars. Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium very much succeeds in using liminality as a window onto a series of fascinating places, both real and imagined. Rivers populated by crocodiles, remote islands inhabited by saints, city gates lined with ancient statues, fortifications, houses, and monasteries (to name a few) all become sites where contributors enrich our understanding with their takes on liminality. Yet this very versatility raises an obvious question: if everything can be liminal, then what is liminality, really? The editors, for their part, suggest that if the reader is asking that very question, they are already on the right path (p. 8). They define the volume’s main aim as demonstrating alternatives to familiar binary oppositions such as inside and outside, core and periphery, isolation and connectedness, stability and instability, known and unknown. They posit that liminality offers a useful “epistemological tool” for exploring the spaces and experiences that fall between such categories (p. 7). The volume, however, is specifically devoted to what the editors call “the spatial dimension of liminality” and to the question of “whether certain types of spaces accommodate—or even create—liminal situations in the eyes of the people experiencing them” (p. 5).

The volume is composed of three thematic parts and a total of eleven chapters, which I introduce below. While it grew out of a conference titled “Liminal Spaces in Byzantium and Beyond: Perceptions, Performativity and Placemaking,” held at the Swedish Institute of Athens on April 27–29, 2023, it is not limited to conference papers, as additional chapters were included. The resulting chapter variety is remarkably successful: the volume repeatedly draws attention to the richness and complexity of places that occupy liminal positions while also drawing on common themes and topics. Finally, the editors also state that the volume aims “to show connections with our contemporary world so often characterized by constant change, uncertainty, and institutionalized contingency” (p. 7). While the contributors themselves shy away from making direct comparisons for the most part, attentive readers will no doubt find moments that resonate with their own modern experiences of liminality. Below, I have noted down a few such moments that I could not stop thinking about as a way of introducing the contents of the book.

The reader’s journey into liminal spaces begins with Part I, Natural Space as Liminal. Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom’s wonderfully titled chapter, “Encounters in Crocodile Waters: The Nile as a Liminal Riverscape in Monastic Egypt,” is the first one to come. The Nile, Brooks Hedstrom argues, was far more than a vital artery for transport and economic activity, as modern scholarship has often emphasized. Instead, she demonstrates how its unpredictable floods, shifting banks, and lurking crocodiles created zones of physical hardship and gave rise to social and psychological dilemmas, as monks confronted tests of humility, faith, and sexual purity.

To make sense of these experiences, Brooks Hedstrom turns to Victor Turner’s understanding of liminality as a state of “simplification, even elimination, of social structure … a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs” (p. 18).Within the unpredictable environment of the Nile, she argues, the rigid hierarchies and routines of monastic life were temporarily suspended, requiring monks to adapt to the circumstances at hand rather than rely on established social structures. Those who successfully navigated these trials emerged as spiritual exemplars. The Nile thus appears as a threshold space in which spiritual transformation takes place. And for those wondering about the crocodiles promised in the title: they typically appear at the boundary between land and water, precisely where liminality is most visible. Monastic stories depict holy men taming or overcoming them, turning these dangerous creatures into markers of spiritual authority and triumph. The chapter includes an image of the Nile during inundation (Figure 1.1, p. 18, here Figure 1) as well as crocodiles that I did not include here.

The next chapter, “Desert Islands: Aspects of the Byzantine Perception of Liminal Space” by Charis Messis, takes us to the islands in Middle Byzantine hagiography. Messis writes that desert islands of hagiography are places where “the real world and imaginary projections meet” and where “social values are tested and where the marvelous and the unusual take over” (p. 39). To the saints, while the islands offer an escape from society’s expectations, they are also the places where they ultimately fulfill those expectations. Hunters, pirates, and other intruders repeatedly arrive from the outside world, disrupting isolation and revealing holiness. It is through these encounters that the saints’ stories become known and their sanctity is established. Today, many of us travel to islands like the ones Byzantine saints once sought out as places of solitude. We too are looking for a break from society’s expectations and our responsibilities. Islands continue to offer the promise of stepping outside ordinary life, even if only for a week or two. Yet, like the saints of these stories, we are eventually drawn back into the world we sought to leave behind. And, much like the saints whose holiness became known through encounters with outsiders, we recount our experiences to the very people from which we briefly escaped, albeit with more pictures and Instagram posts and fewer miracles. Liminality of islands, on the other hand, does not change that much. When read together, Brooks Hedstrom’s Nile and Messis’ desert islands reveal a common observation. In both chapters, liminality does not represent an escape from social values, like it does to us, but rather creates the conditions in which those values are most intensely scrutinized and ultimately reaffirmed. As Turner suggested, liminal spaces temporarily suspend ordinary social structures to test the cultural ideals that underpin them, a point that both authors demonstrate with clarity.

In the third chapter, Christoph Kilger, Max Kusserow, and Luca Zavagno take us to the large islands of the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. In line with the editors’ aim of challenging binary oppositions, the authors demonstrate through archaeological evidence, material culture, and network analysis that insular regions could simultaneously function as nodes of connectivity and as sites of distinctive local identities. To explain this liminal stage, they promote the concept of islandness, which understands islands as products of the reciprocal relationship between insular space and social structures. They underline that islandness captures “the essence of island living, the attributes that make an island what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, without which it loses its identity” (pp. 56–57). From a Byzantinist’s perspective, it is fascinating to compare the large islands of the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, it is equally interesting that despite the forces of globalization, which increasingly make places around the world resemble one another, many islands continue to retain a strong sense of islandness. Whether this islandness, shaped by islands’ liminal position between connectivity and isolation, will persist, or whether islands will gradually become extensions of mainland culture and lose their identity, however, remains to be seen.

Livia Bevilacqua’s chapter, “Myths Transformed: Perceptions of Ancient Sculpture in Byzantine Liminal Spaces,” constitutes the fourth chapter of the volume and opens Part II, Social Space as Liminal: Public and Private. Bevilacqua begins with a quote drawn from Tolkien’s Myths Transformed in which Tolkien writes, “It is now clear to me that in any case the Mythology must actually be a ‘Mannish’ affair” (p. 81). Tolkien’s beautifully written reflection on the continual reshaping of inherited myth provides an apt point of departure for a chapter concerned with how Byzantine society reinterpreted and repurposed the material remains of antiquity, specifically sculptures which were related to myths. Bevilacqua argues that while such sculptures occupied transitional physical spaces such as city gates, they simultaneously bridged temporal and cultural worlds and mediated between the classical past and the Byzantine present. Notably, the author acknowledges the challenges that her chapter entails, including fragmentary evidence about what the Byzantines thought of these sculptures, questions of intentionality in use, and the instability of meaning across time.

As an example, she includes an 1842 engraving of the Gate of Persecution at Ephesos (Figure 4.1, p. 83, here Figure 2) set within an invented Romantic landscape, complete with grazing goats and oriental figures among the ruins. In reality, the gate was and still is part of the fortified Byzantine ramparts and was flanked by two bastions. The same Romantic imagination also saw its sculpted frieze stripped away entirely and carried off to a British collection, where it was valued only as ancient art severed from its Byzantine context. This methodological self-awareness, I would argue, must remain an important backdrop for many of the chapters that follow while we read the volume. Whether the Byzantines themselves perceived these spaces as liminal in the way we do, however, is a question to which I shall return in the concluding remarks.

Next, Nikolas Bakirtzis and Myrto Veikou turn to the liminal experiences of Byzantine fortifications in their chapter “Liminal Experiences of Byzantine Fortifications.” The chapter begins at the fortifications of Thessalonike. As readers encounter the inscriptions carved into walls and towers, they are introduced to the people for whom they were built, the ways they were perceived, and the messages they conveyed. Throughout the chapter, drawing on an impressive range of evidence including inscriptions, spolia, military treatises, religious imagery, and literary ekphraseis, the authors demonstrate that Byzantine fortifications were far more than military boundaries separating the inside from the outside. While the walls defended cities physically, they also communicated ideas about protection, authority, beauty, and divine care. In doing so, the chapter reminds us that liminality is never merely about occupying a boundary; it is about the meanings that societies invest in those boundaries.

The next three chapters bring the Byzantine world unexpectedly close to our own. From the gateways of Byzantine monasteries to the carefully controlled corridors of elite houses, they explore spaces and experiences that are at once historically specific and immediately familiar.

Lale Özgenel’s chapter “Visiting Late Antique Elite Houses: On Rituals, Routes, and Courtyards Through the Lens of Liminality” and Inge Uytterhoeven’s chapter “Crossing Private Liminal Spaces: Thresholds and Passageways in the ‘Urban Mansion’ of Sagalassos and Contemporaneous Urban Elite Houses in Late Antique Western Anatolia” both explore elite houses that were simultaneously places of residence and work for their elite owners who had civic roles. In Uytterhoeven’s words:

As areas combining residential functions with activities of a more public character, late antique elite houses were frequently accessed by visitors who did not reside within the physical boundaries of the house but, as “outsiders” entering the domestic “inside” world of their hosts, formed a separate class of users of the house. (p. 146)

Both Özgenel and Uytterhoeven highlight the sequence of transitional spaces such as gates, thresholds, corridors, passageways, and courtyards through which visitors gradually moved from the public world of the city into varying degrees of social, physical, and even sensual integration within the elite host’s domestic sphere.

Reading these chapters, I was reminded of visiting home offices and private practices as a child. As a young visitor with little social standing, I entered the homes of figures whom I regarded with considerable respect. What fascinated me most were the spaces that remained inevitably inaccessible to me: the private rooms glimpsed through half-open doors, the separate zones used by specific visitors, and the ease with which some guests and staff crossed thresholds that remained closed to others. Looking back, I realize that, from my own liminal position as a child, I was instinctively fascinated by the house’s liminal spaces, its corridors, thresholds, and doors, and by the spatial hierarchies that, as Özgenel and Uytterhoeven demonstrate, Late Antique houses carefully orchestrated.

Next up is Maréva U’s chapter, which is titled “Existential and Spatial Liminality in Byzantine Monasteries: Insights from the Enclosure Wall and Its Gateways.” True to the title, the author begins with the monk’s very mode of existence, arguing that monastic life itself constitutes a liminal state of being. From the liminal period of novitiate following acceptance into the community, monks gradually leave behind their secular identities, existing in a suspended state of transition in their physical lives as they move towards union with God. Maréva U then argues that “the monastic complex emerged as a liminal space par excellence. It represented a world within the world, and a passage between earth and heaven—a place of encounter with God” (p. 175). To explore this spatial dimension, she focuses on two distinctive features of monastic complexes: the enclosure wall and its gateways, which functioned as liminal zones where exclusion and welcome, interdiction and charity, punishment and forgiveness all unfolded at the same threshold.

Reading this chapter, I could not help but draw parallels with modern institutional life. Modern institutions, too, demand the adoption of new identities, signaled even by the titles that precede or follow our names, obedience to established hierarchies, and the persistent expectation that, with enough dedication, we will eventually “make it.” With or without enclosure walls, there are rules governing who may enter, how resources are distributed, and the ever-present possibility of exclusion. Perhaps the monastic experience is more exceptional in its spiritual purpose, yet the experience of existing in a prolonged state of becoming is certainly familiar. Again, while the modes of our existence may change, similarities to our modern lives continue.

I will, however, leave the existential reflections behind but keep the liminal ones close as we move to Part III of the volume, “Liminality Through Movement.” Following the richness of the earlier chapters, this section likewise explores a striking variety of liminal spaces, ranging from transhumance routes and spiritual lighthouses to bridges between worlds.

Transhumance is the practice of moving livestock between seasonal pastures, typically from lowland winter grounds to highland summer grounds and back again. In his chapter “Athonite Transhumance Routes Between the Ninth and the Sixteenth Centuries: A Network of Liminal Ecosystems, Spaces, and Interactions,” Guillaume Bidaut focuses on the role of the monasteries of Mount Athos in shaping the transhumance practice in its region across six centuries, arguing for what he calls functional liminality (p. 195). The status of any given pasture had to be constantly renegotiated: who was allowed to use it, in what ways, and under whose authority. Based on a close reading of monastic archives from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, he traces how Mount Athos transformed from a regional periphery grazed by others into an economic center managing pastoral networks across the entire Balkans.

For the chapter on transhumance, I am afraid that my personal life experience fell short when it came to drawing connections with the modern world. Indeed, transhumance was a word I encountered for the first time while reading this volume. Yet I must conclude that functional liminality is a concept deserving of more serious consideration. Liminality is not merely a stage of being or a spatial condition; it also serves concrete social functions directly related to power structures, whether in elite houses, monasteries, or pastures, as the contributors to the volume very well demonstrate.

Next in the volume is Veronica della Dora’s chapter, “Marking the Limēn: Lighthouses and Beacons as Spiritual Metaphors.” Della Dora reminds us that, at the height of its expansion, the Byzantine Empire was, quite literally, surrounded by the sea. While the sea enabled transportation, trade, and military ventures, it was also a place of danger. As Della Dora observes, “For the Byzantines, the sea was, after all, the last leftover of the giant flood; it was confused primordial matter, an extreme and unforgiving form of wilderness (Gen. 1:2)” (p. 218). Positioned at the edge of the water, beacons and lighthouses guided ships physically, but they also illuminated paths of a different kind. Beginning with the ancient navigatio vitae metaphor, the journey of life as a voyage at sea, the author traces how Christian writers transformed lighthouses and beacons into symbols that connected earth and heaven, humanity and divinity, and life and death.

he final chapter, “Perceptions of Bridges as Liminal Spaces in Byzantium,” is by Galina Fingarova. Drawing on a wide range of architectural features, visual elements in artistic representations, and textual motifs in which bridges play a prominent role, Fingarova argues that “Byzantines possessed a clear, complex, and well-developed understanding of liminality in ritual, geopolitical, and spatial terms, in line with their worldview, well before these concepts and terms were codified by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner” (p. 253). This comment brings me back to the methodological question raised earlier in this blog post. Did the Byzantines themselves perceive these spaces as “liminal” in a way comparable to our modern analytical understanding, or does liminality emerge through the interpretive framework that contemporary scholarship brings to the evidence? It is my opinion that the volume demonstrates that reading Byzantine practices through the lens of liminality reveals patterns and structures deeply embedded in literature, architecture, ritual practice, and social life, even if the Byzantines themselves never articulated them in precisely those terms.

And as an ending note, when I first heard the word “liminality” years ago, I was fascinated by it but without really knowing why. Having finished this volume, I now understand why it has proven to be such a compelling concept. It encourages us to look at familiar binaries, as the editors emphasize, and notice the richness of what lies between them, which is often forgotten. In that respect, Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium succeeds admirably.

Piril Us MacLennan has obtained a doctorate from Ghent University with the thesis Making Narratives of an Empire’s Unmaking: A Critical Spatialization of Byzantine Historiography of the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries (2026). She holds a Master’s degree in Byzantine History from Bogazici University. Her research focuses on Byzantine history writing of eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her main research interests are construction of spaces, places and landscapes of historial narratives with analytical tools and concepts derived from narratology, ecocriticism and memory studies, as well as anecdotes in Byzantine historiography.

25 Jun Pernilla Myrne wins 2026 Rettig Prize

Posted at 11:09h in Into the Storyworlds

Pernilla Myrne, Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Gothenburg and a friend of our programme has been awarded 2026 Rettig prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Vitterhetsakademin) for her outstanding research in Arabic language and literary studies, particularly regarding women’s perspectives in medieval Arabic literature. The prize has been awarded annually since 1956 to outstanding or promising researchers within the Academy’s field of activity, with current monetary prize of 250,000 SEK. Myrne’s research addresses women’s position in Arab tradition, from eloquence to sexuality, and her international and national collaborations are of great significance, among other things, for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural medieval studies in Sweden. To mark this joyous occasion, Ingela Nilsson conducted a short interview with Pernilla.

I. N.: Congratulations on the prize! We’re so pleased that the work of a scholar who works on medieval Arabic is awarded. How does it feel, as sports journalists always say?

P. M.: Winning the award was absolutely amazing! I was completely taken by surprise, but once I had had a chance to let it sink in, I was really happy. It’s not often that your research gets recognized outside your own circle.

I. N.: Why should anyone but Vitterhetsakademin care about medieval women in the Arabic world?

P. M.: All history is, of course, worthy of attention, but perhaps especially that which has been somewhat overlooked. Women were not taught to read and write to the same extent as men and were therefore often excluded from the contexts most commonly depicted in literature. At the same time, women played an important role in oral culture and contributed to society’s cultural development in ways that do not really find a place in written history.

I. N.: What are you working on right now?

P. M.: I have started writing a book on medieval Islamic manuals on sexuality; there are actually several of them. I believe they can tell us a great deal about the view of sexuality in the societies in which they were written and read. They show that opposing attitudes could exist in parallel. Some, for example, are tolerant of or even positive towards homosexual relationships, whilst others condemn all sexual activity outside marriage.

I. N.: The question we all think but don’t dare to ask: what will you do with the money?

P. M.: This money really feels like a bonus, and I don’t want it to go to just anything. It’s going to support my research in some way, but I haven’t decided exactly how yet. Ideally, it would be something enjoyable, like a research trip. But I might need to take a few months’ leave of absence to finish writing my book; now I have the opportunity to do so.

Images: Vitterhetsakademin; Photo: Erik Cronberg

08 Jun New Collaborative Research Centre in Literary Studies at Freiburg University

Posted at 13:17h in Uncategorized

Retracing Connections is happy to announce that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio ‘Historical and Transcultural Narratology’ at the University of Freiburg. Within this project, researchers are investigating narratives and narrative practices in various historical and cultural contexts. The spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Centre is the RC Advisory Board Member Prof. Dr Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg.

A new historical-transcultural narrative theory

People have always told stories. Across all eras and cultures, narratives have played a vital role in social cohesion. The new TRR Historical and Transcultural Narratology examines pre-modern narratives – that is, those from antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period – drawn from various cultural contexts. The TRR will test and further develop methods from the digital humanities in order to anchor comparative narrative research more firmly in the digital realm. For its research, the TRR utilises digital and AI-based methods, ranging from prompt engineering to more advanced AI architectures. The researchers’ aim is to develop a new historical-transcultural narrative theory that overcomes the narrow focus of current narrative theories on Western and modern or postmodern traditions. This new narrative theory is intended to encompass diverse historical narrative formats and functions from various cultural contexts. In doing so, the researchers will open up new avenues for comparative, interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies on a global scale.

“The Collaborative Research Centre promises a fundamental re-examination of storytelling in the past from a comparative perspective,” says spokesperson von Contzen. “The participating researchers come from 16 different disciplines, including Egyptology, Korean Studies, Theology, Classical Studies and Slavic Studies. We are exploring questions such as how people in past cultures told stories, in what contexts, for what purposes, and what their stories were like.”

The research findings are intended to facilitate a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural comparison of storytelling from a global perspective and to offer a fundamentally new insight into the origins, diversity and functions of narrative forms. Researchers from the consortium of the Universities of Freiburg, Bochum and Bonn will work closely with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg and the Bonn Centre for Digital Humanities.

We warmly congradulate Eva and her team and are looking forward to future collaborations!
You can read the full announcement here.

08 Jun Gynaecological Knowledge in Translation: Interview with Micaela Brembilla and Larisa Ficulle Santini

Posted at 12:44h in Into the Storyworlds

This spring, we have had the honor of hosting Larisa Ficulle Santini from the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a Retracing Connections guest researcher at Uppsala University. Larisa has been looking into translational aspects of her ongoing project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”. She has had a chance to collaborate with the UU recent doctoral graduate in Latin, Micaela Brembilla. We have also co-organized a seminar with the Uppsala University Centre for Medical Humanities, where Larisa’s and Micaela’s work has been commented by contemporary medical and phytopharmacological researchers and practitioners, Matts Olovsson and Sonny Larsson. Ingela Nilsson has asked Larisa and Micaela to introduce the connections between their topics and their relevance for today’s audiences.

I. N: You both work on texts that are in some sense medical, even if they sometimes transfer knowledge that is not scientific in the traditional sense. Do you think that texts like these were transmitted and translated in ways that are different from narrative texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages? If so, in what way?

M. B: I think that the practical and technical manuals of Late Antiquity have a particular transmission history due to their didactical nature. I can bring as an example the text I know best, Mustio’s Gynaecia, which is a practical handbook for the education of sixth century North African midwives. The most educational sections – like those on delivery featuring explicative drawings – on the one hand present a variety of additional material from one manuscript to the other, as if people using it wanted to complete the information with their own knowledge. On the other hand, they have often been separated from the Gynaecia, and integrated in other gynaecological texts during the Middle Ages, with no reference whatsoever to the author Mustio. Even though this is not what usually happens with the transmission of more prestigious authors – or, at least, this is what we believe – I think that transmission and use of narrative cores and themes is not that different from what we see in this type of texts.

L. F. S: Micaela is certainly right in emphasising the didactical and practical scope of these texts as the element to take into account in their transmission and translation. Another case in point is that of the Byzantine/eastern Roman physician Paul of Aegina (seventh century). Paul’s Pragmateia, a medical compendium written in Greek, contained several sections on gynaecology and obstetrics and enjoyed considerable success in both Syriac and Arabic medical traditions (especially from the nineth century onwards.) His gynaecological and obstetrical expertise was especially praised – up to the point that he was known in Arabic as “Paul the obstetrician”. What emerges from the translation process is far from being a literal translation, as we would say now, but more an adaptation. Certain sections are translated, others omitted, new information integrated. In other words, medical texts, in light of their practical nature, would be considered as more porous and prone to be integrated and modified, sometimes with other sources, sometimes with first-hand knowledge, within the translation process, depending on what the person who was translating would consider right, relevant, worthy of being transmitted, and what not. For those who are interested, the place to start for the fascinating subject of the Oriental tradition of Paul of Aegina is P. E. Pormann’s monograph (The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia, Leiden–Boston 2004).

I. N: The division between (male) medicine and (female) practice seems to be present both in the past and the present. Why is that? What could one do to change it?

L. F. S: For me, this is above all a question of authoritative knowledge, a concept developed by the anthropologist of birth and reproduction Brigitte Jordan and that is helping me a lot thinking about my own work. By this I mean: who holds the knowledge that counts socially and institutionally – not necessarily as the most accurate or correct, but the one that is recognised as legitimate. In patriarchal societies, men have historically held more authority than women, and in that sense, the issue is not simply a division between “male medicine” and “female practice”, but between different kinds of knowledge and unequal access to authority. In the past, this was of course closely tied to education. Literacy and advanced study were largely reserved for men, especially elite men, while women were mostly excluded from formal scholarly training. Today, at least in much of the Western world, the situation has changed significantly, and women are present in medicine in ways that would have been unimaginable in antiquity. Yet we face another problem: for a long time, the body that medicine studied and treated as the norm was overwhelmingly male – more specifically, male, white and able-bodied. This is one of the reasons why gender medicine has become so important. It reminds us that what counts as medical knowledge is never neutral.

M. B: I am not sure that the point is to eliminate such division. I think that the problem is that this division, in the past but also when it is detected in our times, is often rigid and judged qualitatively by society, with male, scientific and standardised knowledge recognised as more important and valid than the female, practical and oral one.

The concept of authoritative knowledge underlined by Larisa helps us address the question from a more refined angle than just the dichotomy of male and female. What these medical manuals do, in their process of defining the fundamental expertise for their contemporary midwives, is to crystallise the knowledge that they considered correct, raising themselves and their text as the authorities in the field. The process is very explicit in those passages where Mustio, in the Gynaecia for example, openly refuses and condemns other popular practices, saying that we don’t do this anymore, and presenting his own treatment and interpretation as the correct one. Among these practices, one can also identify things that women were doing, and that are now disregarded as old, ignorant and superstitious.

I. N: What does it mean to be a midwife? Are there similarities between the historical situations you study and the way we see the profession today?

M. B: I don’t think I am knowledgeable enough to answer this question from a contemporary perspective. What I would like to underline is that it is clear from Antiquity and beyond that the role of midwives is a unique and special one. They are present at one of the most traumatic experiences of life, both for the mother and the baby, and they engage with life and death. The process of childbirth is ultimately transcendental and therefore midwives’ role in it remains mysterious. Brigitte Jordan, the anthropologist already mentioned by Larisa, analyses the dichotomy “modern obstetrics vs traditional obstetrics”, i.e. a scientific and hospitalised approach vs a traditional and home-based one; she argues how this dichotomy is present in various degrees in our societies, and how does it affect the perception of childbirth and delivery.

Western civilisation has the tendency to consider traditional obstetrics as something obsolete in need to be integrated and ultimately surpassed. In a way, we can say that we see the same tendency in action in the special environment of 6th century Africa Romana, as we witness the attempt of male physicians to standardise and normalise the scientific knowledge of midwifery and gynaecology. In doing so, they for sure want to give better access to education to contemporary midwives, but they also contribute in distancing these women, and themselves, from the traditional practices transmitted outside the scientific literature.

L. F. S: I am not a midwife myself – I guess it would be better to ask them directly! My impression is that what it means to be a midwife depends very much on where one is a midwife. For example, when it comes to childbirth, we know that it can be organised in very different ways, depending especially on how medicalised birth is. Even within Europe today, the role of the midwife varies considerably. In some contexts, the birthing person depends primarily on an obstetrician; in others – especially where home-births are a common practice – the midwife is the central figure.

As a historian working on reproduction and fertility in Byzantium, I have the impression that the history of midwifery in Byzantium is still largely unwritten. We have a handful of studies, and many relevant sources still remain to be identified and analysed. For the moment, the most striking similarity I can see between past and present concerns the midwife’s position in relation to the male physician. I am thinking above all to the work of Aetius of Amida. In Book 16 of his medical compendium, when midwives appear, they are the ones who engage directly with the woman’s body through internal manual interventions. The male physician, by contrast, more often observes, diagnoses, and interprets. He is also the one associated with surgical procedures, whereas the midwife is usually not. I find this distinction – and its echoes in some contemporary situations – particularly revealing. It suggests not only a division of labour, but also a division in the access to the female body.

At the same time, sources such as Byzantine prayer books, the euchologia, show that the midwife remained present at important moments in the lives of both mother and child even after birth: for example, at naming rituals or the churching of the infant. It is also striking that the midwife, like the woman who has given birth, can appear as the recipient of prayers of purification after childbirth. By virtue of her close involvement in birth, she too was considered to have crossed a threshold that required ritual reintegration. That closeness matters. I imagine that something comparable may still be found in contexts where childbirth is less heavily medicalised and where midwives continue to play a central role.

I. N: Last but not least: why should we study these issues and their traditions?

L. F. S: This is perhaps the hardest question: the risk of giving an obvious or banal answer is around the corner. Rather than trying to offer a universal response, I can only give a personal one. As someone with a womb, working on the history of reproduction has felt like a call – perhaps even a responsibility, though a welcome one. For centuries, the history that was written and studied was overwhelmingly the history of elite men: kings, wars, political institutions. Later, social history broadened that perspective, and feminist scholarship pushed us to ask different questions and to look at different experiences. The history of reproduction – and also of non-reproduction – is part of that shift.

Even though most of our surviving sources were written by men, studying these materials allows us to come closer to the realities of historical women: women who struggled with infertility, women who became pregnant, who died in childbirth. Women who tried not to conceive or sought to terminate a pregnancy; women who lived with menstrual pain or irregularity. In other words, people whose lives were profoundly shaped by the presence of a uterus and by the biological and social meanings attached to it. For me, trying to recover these histories means recognising how deeply questions of reproduction have shaped human lives across time, even in periods when the room for agency, choice, and control was, generally speaking, more limited than it is today.

M. B: I would like to try and answer this question from a more specific point of view. Why should we study the issue of male and female division of knowledge? Traditional obstetrics, to adopt Jordan’s terminology, does not seem to be in relationship anymore with modern obstetrics, but our society seems to still apply a qualitative judgement to the dichotomy “male doctor vs female midwife”, even if midwives in our Western civilisation have access to high level education at universities and do not usually practice traditional obstetrics.

It is fundamental to try to understand the history and the origin of the bias towards female knowledge, and towards knowledgeable females, in order to approach it and fight it in our society. However, It is difficult to trace female agency and presence in such a male dominated area as ancient medicine. The traditional structure of these disciplines was shaped by male physicians mostly writing and talking to other males, and the analysis of sources can give us very little results if one is looking for female traces. Gynaecology and midwifery, however, for their very nature, may offer little cracks in the male facade of medicine, and give us the opportunity to detect also the female side of this discipline.

Micaela Brembilla graduated in Latin Linguistics at Università Statale di Milano in 2020, under the supervision of Paola Francesca Moretti. She defended her PhD thesis, entitled Prolegomena to a New Critical Edition of Mustio’s Gynaecia at Uppsala University in December 2025. She is currently working on the production of the critical edition, while deepening her research on female participation in Late Antique medical environment, women’s medical education and midwives’ folkloric and practical knowledge.

Larisa Ficulle Santini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Principal Investigator of the FWF-ESPRIT Project “Fertility Control in Byzantium: Women’s Reproductive Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire”.

11 May Classical, Medieval, Oriental: Disciplinary Ideologies – Retracing Connections online research dialogue

Posted at 12:35h in Other

The Swedish Institute at Athens & the Retracing Connections Research Programme, invite you to the sixth Retracing Connections online research dialogue.
Join us with Aileen Das (University of Michigan), N. İpek Hüner (Boğaziçi University) and Ingela Nilsson (Uppsala University) for an online discussion about
Classical, Medieval, Oriental: Disciplinary Ideologies.

The Dialogue takes place online via Zoom on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, at 18.00 (Athens).
Sign up here!

Despite the ever-increasing focus on interdisciplinarity, there are certain boundaries that seem more than difficult than others to cross. Classical philologist may turn to postclassical texts, but they often do it from the same classicist position, without taking the later context fully into account. Arabic-Greek relations are discussed from whatever position the scholar in question take: as reception/translation of one or the other, but rarely as a relational situation of equal importance for both fields. Medieval Studies tend to indicate the European West – rarely the so-called Orient, and most often not even Byzantium. What does this situation mean for the understanding of the material we study? And what does it do to us as scholars?