ABSTRACT
In the duration, geographical scope and dynamic complexity of Byzantine societyone may find women and children to exemplify every manner of fortune and background, experience and mentality. In the current state of research, all generalization would be premature. The evidence is extensive and not easy to handle. On the textual side, it consists of notices, documents and narratives scattered across centuries, genres, regions and languages. Some of this material is inaccessible and much still untranslated. No one has attempted to assemble it and analyze it. It is hard to imagine what such a study would look like, what it could prove and what methodology it would follow. Historians interested in political and military history have many Byzantine narratives that were written precisely with the goal of informing posterity about those events, yet almost no Byzantine writer set out to inform anyone about the lives of women and children. Handling the evidence becomes methodologically complex, as its textual categories (e.g. hagiography, laws, histories) were implicated in different social practices and differed in audience, rhetoric and ideology.
