ABSTRACT
If we move from the external world of activities to the internal world of beliefs, are women any m ore visible as women? The discovery of the facts of people’s material condition provides the bare bones of historical analysis: clothing them requires an understanding of ideology, the system of beliefs and practices by which people make sense of the world in which they live. Ideology is particularly import ant when studying women because all societies have ideas about how m en and women should behave in relation to each other. It is pre scriptive rather than descripdve, concerned with what people should be and do ra ther than what they are. It is impossible to give a full treatm ent of wom en’s power in Byzantium without scrutinizing the assumptions people held about women and what they should be. It is in relation to issues such as ideology that the analytic tag ‘patriarchal’ could be employed. However, the problems regarding the use of patriarchy as a historical analytic tool have already been discussed. Instead, the enquiry in this chapter examines how much power the dom inant Byzantine ideology allowed women to exercise and in what spheres.
