ABSTRACT
The ideal woman from a Byzantine m an’s point of view has been described earlier through a consideration of speeches and art which survive from the period. That woman, whether m other, wife, sister or daughter, exhibited piety, charity, and love for her family. None of these virtues, however good in themselves, require any intel lectual ability at all. This is where the possibility of another ideo logy must be considered. No woman can conceive of women who embody only the qualities revered by this dom inant ideology. Were other qualities praised, and if so, where? Theorists of ideology be lieve that more than one ideology can exist in a society simultane ously, one of which may mute others because of the power of its practitioners. The ideal woman delineated in the earlier chapter represents one powerful ideology, that which revolved round the em peror first and foremost. Women featured in o ther ideologies too. That of the hard-line monks, exemplified in the twelfth century by Neophytos the Recluse, viewed all women as the deceitful Eve, whose mission in life was to mislead m en away from virtue and into sin by her very nature. This ideology denied power to woman by concentrating on her nature ra ther than on any conscious choices she m ight make.1 It is an equally unsatisfactory area of exploration. Can we find traces of an ideology for women held by women during the Komnenian period? Four pieces of evidence suggest that we can. Two of these are orations, one is a letter and the fourth is the Alexiad, the history/biography of Alexios I Komnenos written by his daughter Anna Komnene.
