ABSTRACT

As the Byzantine novels of the Komnenian age are imitations of ancient novels, their authors reorganise the conventional material of the genre according to the expectations of a new, medieval readership. So in order to study women in these twelfth-century texts it is necessary to start with a survey of the image of women and the role given to them in the novels of late antiquity. Only then is it possible to evaluate the specificity of the picture conveyed by the Byzantine authors.