ABSTRACT
One of the perennial difficulties in understanding Byzantine women lies in differentiating the authorial posturing and rhetorical idealization of our sources from information about what women actually did. The lives of some provincial women can be partially illuminated by legal and fiscal documents such as testaments, sales and donations of property, dispute settlements, taxation assessments and various other written declarations. These texts were written to facilitate potentially contentious transactions like taxation, transfer of property and the establishment of obligations. While they were not intended to be read for pleasure or edification, it is quite inaccurate to think of them as devoid of rhetoric and ideologically driven representation. All of them involved creating representations of provincial society and some of them followed conservative legal forms enshrining ancient attitudes. Most of the texts display an ideology in which women were properly subordinate to men and hidden from public affairs. Yet women were participants in all of the transactions mentioned above and so these texts provide valuable testimony to the public activities of women. The following paper examines a group of documents from the tenth through twelfth centuries, loosely categorized as legal or fiscal, with a view to learning something about both the activities of provincial women and how their representation in these documents reflects attitudes about women’s roles and abilities.
