Women in Byzantine Hymnography

Beyond Kassia, the record of women who composed hymnography in Byzantium is real but sparse: a handful of names — Theodosia, Thekla, Palaiologina, and a few others — attached to a small body of hymns, most of it in monastic settings. This file sets Kassia within that wider record, gives what can honestly be said about the other women, and asks why the record is so thin.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A Real but Sparse Record

Kassia is unique in Byzantine hymnography, but she is not quite alone. Alongside her, scholarship has identified a small number of other women who composed liturgical hymns and whose names survive attached to their work. The standard study, by the musicologist Diane Touliatos, counts among the hundreds of known Byzantine hymnographers only a very few women positively identified — Theodosia, Thekla, Kassia, and Palaiologina — with a few further feminine names (such as Gregoris and Martha) attached to hymns in the sources (Touliatos, “Women Composers of Medieval Byzantine Chant,” College Music Symposium; and The Traditional Role of Greek Women in Music from Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire). The number is tiny against the vast, overwhelmingly male and monastic corpus of Byzantine hymnody — but it is not zero, and the fact that any women’s names survive at all is significant, given how thoroughly the tradition’s forms and institutions were shaped by men.

The Named Women

Beyond Kassia, the other identified women hymnographers are known only in fragments, and honesty requires saying how little the sources yield.

  • Theodosia. A hymnographer to whom the tradition attaches liturgical verse; she is one of the four women Touliatos counts as positively identified, though the surviving information about her life is very limited (Touliatos, College Music Symposium). She should not be confused with the several saints named Theodosia; the hymnographer is a distinct and shadowy figure.
  • Thekla. A Byzantine nun and hymnographer credited with a canon to the Theotokos, among the very few canons — the most demanding hymnographic form — attributed to a woman (Touliatos; and the standard catalogues of women hymnographers). Again the biographical record is almost empty; she is essentially a name over a text.
  • Palaiologina. A hymnographer of the later Byzantine period (the name associates her with the Palaiologan era or dynasty), the fourth of Touliatos’s positively identified women; the attribution rests on manuscript ascription, and little else about her is recoverable (Touliatos).
  • Martha and Gregoris. Feminine names attached to hymns in the sources, on the outer edge of what can be documented; “Martha” may be linked to a late-ninth-century abbess, but the identification is uncertain, and these names sit at the boundary between attested hymnographer and mere manuscript notation (Touliatos; the standard accounts).

The pattern is consistent and instructive: in almost every case we have a name over a hymn, with the life behind the name lost or nearly so. This is not peculiar to the women — much of the male hymnographic corpus is likewise anonymous or attached to shadowy figures (see Hymnography within Holy Tradition) — but for the women the thinness is near-total, and Kassia’s comparatively well-documented life stands out all the more sharply against it.

Why Kassia Is the Exception

Kassia’s singularity is worth analyzing, because it illuminates the conditions under which a Byzantine woman’s hymnody could survive under her own name (see Kassia the Hymnographer). Several factors converged. She was of the aristocracy, with the education such a background afforded — she could write, and write well, in both the liturgical and the secular registers (Sherry, Kassia the Nun in Context, Gorgias Press, 2013). She was an abbess with her own monastery, a position of institutional standing from which her compositions could enter use and be preserved. She wrote secular verse as well as hymns, and the epigrams — copied and admired in their own right — helped fix her name in the manuscript tradition in a way that purely liturgical anonymity might not have (Tripolitis, Kassia, Garland, 1992; Silvas, in Byzantine Women, Ashgate, 2006). And her hymns were of a quality — above all the Hymn of Kassiani — that lodged them permanently in the services, where a beloved hymn keeps its author’s name alive. The other women lacked one or more of these advantages, and the result is that their names survive but their persons and, often, their works have all but vanished.

Why the Record Is So Thin

The larger question is why women’s hymnography is so scarce in the first place, and the answer lies in the institutional shape of Byzantine hymnody. The great hymnographic centres were male monasteries — Mar Saba, the Stoudion — and the composition, copying, and liturgical deployment of hymns ran largely through male monastic and clerical channels (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1961; and see The Studite Hymnographers). Women’s monasteries existed and were numerous, and nuns certainly sang the office and doubtless composed for their own use, but their compositions had a narrower path into the received books, which were shaped and transmitted through the male centres. The near-total anonymity of the corpus compounds the problem: as Touliatos and others note, more women hymnographers may well lie hidden among the many anonymous or pseudonymous hymns, undetectable precisely because the tradition did not, as a rule, preserve authorship (Touliatos, College Music Symposium). The thinness of the record is therefore not evidence that women did not compose — it is evidence of the channels through which hymnody was preserved, and of the general Byzantine indifference to authorship that has left so much of the whole corpus nameless.

Reading the Women Rightly

The right posture toward women in Byzantine hymnography is neither to inflate the record nor to erase it. Kassia is a major hymnographer by any measure, received into the Church’s prayer and studied as a serious theological poet; Thekla, Theodosia, and the others are real if shadowy figures whose survival, however fragmentary, matters. To honour them is to read what survives — above all Kassia’s authenticated corpus — with the same care given to the male masters, and to state honestly, per the repository methodology, both what the sources attest and how little that is. The women of Byzantine hymnography are a small but genuine presence in the Church’s song; the record is thin, and this file has tried to give it neither more nor less than its due.

See Also

References

  • Touliatos, Diane. “Women Composers of Medieval Byzantine Chant.” College Music Symposium (symposium.music.org); and The Traditional Role of Greek Women in Music from Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire. (The positively identified women hymnographers — Theodosia, Thekla, Kassia, Palaiologina — and the further names; the reasons for the thin record.)
  • Sherry, Kurt. Kassia the Nun in Context: The Religious Thought of a Ninth-Century Byzantine Monastic. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013. (The conditions of Kassia’s survival; her aristocratic and monastic standing.)
  • Tripolitis, Antonia. Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and Her Work. New York: Garland, 1992. (Kassia’s hymns and epigrams; the manuscript survival of her name.)
  • Silvas, Anna M. “Kassia the Nun c. 810–c. 865: an Appreciation.” In Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200, ed. Lynda Garland. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. (Kassia and the wider context of Byzantine women’s writing.)
  • Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (The male monastic centres of hymnographic production.)