Searching for Women on Mt. Athos: Insights from the Archives of the Holy Mountain

In contrast to their western medievalist counterparts, scholars of Byzantine studies are at a disadvantage with regard to surviving primary source materials. One cannot but regard with envy the documents available to her colleagues in the Academy who research the lands of western Europe: to mention...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSpeculum Vol. 87; no. 4; p. 995
Main Author Talbot, Alice-Mary
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Medieval Academy of America 01.10.2012
Subjects
Archives & records
Byzantine civilization
European history
Women
Europe
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Summary:In contrast to their western medievalist counterparts, scholars of Byzantine studies are at a disadvantage with regard to surviving primary source materials. One cannot but regard with envy the documents available to her colleagues in the Academy who research the lands of western Europe: to mention a few random examples, the three thousand coroner's inquests analyzed by Barbara Hanawalt and used to inform her remarkably detailed picture of peasant life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, the local customs accounts for the port of Exeter that enabled Maryanne Kowaleski to reconstruct the trading operations of this coastal town, the extraordinary cartularies and other documents from the county of Champagne so ably edited and explicated by Theodore Evergates. Here, Talbot examines some types of information on women that people can glean from the Athonite archives on such matters as their legal status, property rights, dowry, and right of inheritance.
ISSN:0038-7134
2040-8072
DOI:10.1017/S0038713412003132