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Women in Byzantium played an important role, but many details of their lives are subject to debate. Numerous sources (chronicles, legal texts, hagiographic literature) paint a picture of the patriarchal society of Byzantium, in which women had no independent significance and were imprisoned in gynekeya. For a long time, the attention of historians attracted only prominent Byzantine women, mainly Empresses, especially the wife of Emperor Justinian I Theodora, who had a significant influence on the events of the first half of the VI century.

Scientific study of the legal and economic status of women in Byzantium began in the second half of the XIX century and is intensively continuing today. The subjects of study are women in general and related issues of family and property law. The scarcity of surviving sources leads to a variety of assessments of the place of women in Byzantine society. With the development of gender studies in the 1970s, there is a tendency to revise early views that this role was not significant.

Historiography

Sources of information
As J. Grodiedier de Maton, one of the pioneers of modern Byzantine gender studies, noted in 1967, quite little is known about the life of Byzantine women, since our knowledge of Byzantine society in general is small. Byzantine art did not pay much attention to everyday life, secular literature appeared late, and generally Byzantine writers paid more attention to "eternal" or state issues. Women in Byzantium, with the exception of empresses, were not public figures and rarely appeared on the pages of historical chronicles. Thus, the main sources of information on this issue are, first of all, legal texts that allow to trace in certain aspects the role of women throughout Byzantine history. Legislation devoted to women is extensive: according to the calculations of the English researcher J. Buckler, who published a 1929 biography of Anna Comnena, of 242 novels published between 565 and 1204, 56 are devoted to women. Also valuable are religious texts of various genres - sermons, lives of saints, among which there were many women, as well as gravestone speeches.

Hagiographic literature, despite its general ascetic attitude and propaganda of sexual abstinence, belonged to the mass genre and therefore, along with the writings of the life path of the saints and their religious experience, it contains stories on various topics of interest to the Byzantine layman. Such topics included women's daily lives. Researchers vary in their assessment of the attitudes towards women expressed in this type of literature. Thus, according to K. Galatariot, in a misogynistic and patriarchal Byzantine society, religious ideals denied women not only sexuality, but also gender. On the other hand, he analyzed the main hagiographic scenes for the period from the V to the XII century A. P. Cachan, who noted that the Byzantine