HST2103 Byzantine Intersectionality: Gender, Race and Power in the Medieval Mediterranean, c.500-1300

Aims/Description: How did race and gender appear before modernity? How similar were they to how race and gender appear to us today? And can the tools of intersectionality, an approach developed by the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw that thinks of different kinds of identities as deeply intertwined in structuring our lives, help us understand the medieval world? These questions sit at the heart of this module, which will guide you through the Byzantine world, the survivor of the Roman empire in the East, stretching from the Balkans to Syria, but with a particular focus on the manifold ways in which this world and its power hierarchies were structured by complex ideas about gender and race. From castrated men, or eunichs, sleeping at the foot of the emperor's bed, to saints assigned female at birth who decided to spend their lives as men in male monasteries, this course will ask us to reconsider the assumptions we make about gender and race today, by tracing both how far they have come from the medieval period, and how far they have deviated from it. It will both start and conclude with some bigger historiographical questions: does the existence of race and gender in the past, the realities of racial and sexual hierarchy, offer us an origins story or an opportunity for liberation today?

Restrictions on availability: Students must have taken at least 40 credits of HST Level 1 modules

Staff Contact: IVANOVA MIRELA

Teaching Methods: Lectures, Seminars, Tutorials, Independent Study

Assessment: Formal Exam, Course work

Information on the department responsible for this unit (History):

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Teaching methods and assessment displayed on this page are indicative for 2025-26.