La violencia conyugal en Bizancio

Charis Messis – Anthony Kaldellis,

CONJUGAL VIOLENCE AND THE IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BYZANTINE MARRIAGE

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.