Holy Women of Byzantium class starts this week!

This live four-week course will take place every Tuesday from October 8-October 29, 2024 at 8pm EST. Each session consists of a lecture by Dr. Metrakos followed by a Q&A. Sessions will be posted for later viewing. Register at orthodoxstudies.org/courses

From the mid-fourth century onwards, holy women appeared across the late Roman/early Byzantine Empire from various backgrounds and occupations, from munificent empresses and pious matrons and mothers to consecrated virgins, abbesses, desert ascetics, and reformed harlots. The Byzantines recorded and imparted the extraordinary lives and virtues of these holy women in hagiography, a form of biographical literature that described the saint’s path to holiness and was both pedagogical and proscriptive.

This course explores the lives and legacies of Byzantine holy women from the mid-fourth through fifteenth centuries. A rich variety of interdisciplinary sources including hagiography, iconography, portraiture, architecture, legal codices, letters, encomia, hymnography, and historiography (the writing of history) will inform our understanding of how female sanctity was constructed, communicated, and venerated in the Byzantine period, as well as the impact Byzantine female saints made on the physical and spiritual landscapes of city and society.