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Description
Byzantine princess Anna Komnene is known for writing history and plotting to become empress by murdering her brother. This book explains how Anna broke her culture's rules for women's behavior by writing history, her efforts to be acceptable, and how her writing nonetheless fired the story of her bloodthirsty ambition.
So deeply ingrained is the narrative of Anna's treason that, although it hangs by the slenderest thread, no Byzantinist until now has dared to challenge it. In her courageous revisionist history, Leonora Neville finally does so. A princess who presumed to write military history, Anna has long remained a baffling, anomalous figure. It is only now that her valour, as well as her vulnerability, comes into clear focus.
In this novel gendered account of Anna Komnene's Alexiad, Leonora Neville presents the Byzantine princess in a completely new light. Analyzing the tensions inherent in being a female historian, she disentangles the author from centuries of condemnation. A brilliant, convincing reconsideration that returns Anna to her great originality.
Anna Komnene is known as a historian of the first Crusade and as a fawning admirer of her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Leonora Neville's brilliant study exposes the gendered logic of Anna's narrative and for the first time gives us a true sense of the historian and her craft.
Leonora Neville's highly readable book gives us a new Anna for the twenty-first century, and dissects why we have misunderstood her for so long. A major contribution to the history of gender and scholarly reception as well as to that of Byzantium, Neville shows just how much we thought was true is nothing of the sort. The already lively field of Byzantine studies is set to become more so.
Neville's gendered reading of Anna's work has indeed been long overdue.
Leonora Neville is the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author most recently of Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium.
So deeply ingrained is the narrative of Anna's treason that, although it hangs by the slenderest thread, no Byzantinist until now has dared to challenge it. In her courageous revisionist history, Leonora Neville finally does so. A princess who presumed to write military history, Anna has long remained a baffling, anomalous figure. It is only now that her valour, as well as her vulnerability, comes into clear focus.
In this novel gendered account of Anna Komnene's Alexiad, Leonora Neville presents the Byzantine princess in a completely new light. Analyzing the tensions inherent in being a female historian, she disentangles the author from centuries of condemnation. A brilliant, convincing reconsideration that returns Anna to her great originality.
Anna Komnene is known as a historian of the first Crusade and as a fawning admirer of her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Leonora Neville's brilliant study exposes the gendered logic of Anna's narrative and for the first time gives us a true sense of the historian and her craft.
Leonora Neville's highly readable book gives us a new Anna for the twenty-first century, and dissects why we have misunderstood her for so long. A major contribution to the history of gender and scholarly reception as well as to that of Byzantium, Neville shows just how much we thought was true is nothing of the sort. The already lively field of Byzantine studies is set to become more so.
Neville's gendered reading of Anna's work has indeed been long overdue.
Leonora Neville is the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author most recently of Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium.