Theodosian Empresses

Theodosian Empresses sets a series of compelling women on the stage of history and offers new insights into the eastern court in the fifth century.

From facing wild beasts in the arena to governing the Roman Empire, Christian women--as preachers and philosophers, martyrs and empresses, virgins and mothers--influenced the shape of the church in its formative centuries. This book provides in a single volume a nearly complete compendium of extant evidence about Christian women in the second through fifth centuries. It highlights the social and theological contributions they made to shaping early Christian beliefs and practices, integrating their influence into the history of the patristic church and showing how their achievements can be edifying for contemporary Christians.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction. A Forgotten Empress -- 1 The "Most Noble" Princess: 379-395 -- 2 Orphan Princess in Stilicho's Shadow: 395-408 -- 3 Held Hostage by the Goths: 408-412 -- 4 Queen of the Visigoths: 411-416 -- 5 Wife and Mother in Ravenna: 416-424 -- 6 Empress of the Romans: 424-437 -- 7 The Empress Mother and Her Children: 438-455 -- Epilogue. The Fall of the Western Empire: 455-476 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.

For the first time a noted historian of Christianity explores the full story of the emergence and development of the Marian cult in the early Christian centuries. The means by which Mary, mother of Jesus, came to prominence have long remained strangely overlooked despite, or perhaps because of, her centrality in Christian devotion. Gathering together fresh information from often neglected sources, including early liturgical texts and Dormition and Assumption apocrypha, Stephen Shoemaker reveals that Marian devotion played a far more vital role in the development of early Christian belief and practice than has been previously recognized, finding evidence that dates back to the latter half of the second century. Through extensive research, the author is able to provide a fascinating background to the hitherto inexplicable "explosion" of Marian devotion that historians and theologians have pondered for decades, offering a wide-ranging study that challenges many conventional beliefs surrounding the subject of Mary, Mother of God.

Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.

Published in 1994: The period surveyed in this anthology extends from the eve of Christianity's triumph, in the third century, to the new age of expansion in the fifteenth century, an age marked by the advent of printing pressed, the European discovery of the Caribbean islands, which Columbus called the Indies, the relentless stripping of medieval altars by Church reformists, and perhaps a diminution of female autonomy.

In Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima, Alyssa Gabbay examines episodes in pre-modern Islamic history in which individuals or societies recognized descent from both men and women. Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, features prominently in this study, for her example constituted a striking precedent for acknowledging bilateral descent in both Sunni and Shi'i societies, with all of its ramifications for female inheritance, succession and identity. Covering a broad geographical and chronological swath, Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam presents alternative perspectives to patriarchal narratives, and breaks new ground in its focus upon how people conceived of family structures and bloodlines. In so doing, it builds upon a tradition of studies seeking to dispel monolithic understandings of Islam and Gender.

The role of the Byzantine emperor has been exhaustively analyzed; the place of the Byzantine empress -- often perceived as an appendate to male imperial power -- is more problematic. Elizabeth James begins her study with Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, and ends with Eirene, the only woman to rule as an "emperor" in Byzantium. More than simply a biography of each empress in the period between the fourth and eighth centuries, this book analyzes the nature of female imperial power during that time. What rights and responsibilities, what access to power, if any, did the office of empress carry?