Empresses, Queens, and Letters: Finding a ‘Female Voice’ in Late Antiquity?
2019; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-0424.12427
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
ResumoFew texts assigned to the authorship of women survive from antiquity. By and large, this also holds true for the fifth and sixth centuries CE, which, as a historical period, saw the consolidation of Christianity as the dominant religion in the Mediterranean, the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of non-Roman successor kingdoms in its Western territories. Still, these two centuries present a unique moment in the history of female writing. Twenty-six letters composed under the name of female members of imperial or royal dynasties remain from that time. Nineteen of these were written in Latin, while seven are preserved in Greek, of which at least three may be translations from an original Latin composition. The letters originate from both the East and the West of the late Roman Empire, as well as from Ostrogothic Italy and from Merovingian Gaul. They can be divided exactly into one half written under the name of late Roman imperial women and one half attributed to royal women of the mentioned kingdoms. All these letters are ‘political’ in the sense that they either deal with diplomatic negotiations between different political entities or are part of communications between rulers and subjects (for a full list see the Appendix). Very little attention has been paid to the majority of these letters so far.1 Where they have been studied, the approach has usually been individualising and biographical, with the intention of analysing a single letter's content for evidence of a specific woman's personal opinions, relationship to the recipient, feelings, writing style or political power.2 Building on a notable exception to this approach – Andrew Gillett's studies of the letters of Brunhild, mother of the Merovingian king Childebert, and of diplomatic embassies in the post-Roman West more generally3 – this article argues that these twenty-six letters are more productively studied as a corpus. This is despite the difference in language or political contexts from which they originated. What these letters – with one exception – have in common is that they were sent with other letters as part of ‘batches’, following literary and ceremonial conventions of letter-writing that late Roman and the post-Roman ruling elites shared.4 This common format suggests that the late Roman and post-Roman letters considered here can be studied together, but also that they formed part of larger political strategies that went beyond the relationship between a single letter's sender and recipient. Focusing on such relationships only is therefore deeply problematic. The first objective of this article is to identify these larger political strategies. The method adopted in order to do so is, first, to study the letters against their diplomatic and political context by comparing male and female letters within a particular batch of letters and, second, to study the letters against their epistolographic context, comparing the different batches of letters with each other. As soon as we do this, it becomes clear that across the fifth and sixth centuries imperial and royal female letters were composed in dialogue with the male letters they travelled with. The formats in which this dialogue happened differed according to political agendas. As I will show, petitions were usually expressed by matching correspondents by gender or (sometimes fictive) kinship relations, the broadcasting of court unity mixed the voices of male and female members of a court, while government announcement often saw letters from each part of a ruling couple. Despite this variety of purpose and format, however, the overriding aim throughout the period was to gender diplomatic and political processes in order to, conventionally, underscore the masculinity of a ruler, to safeguard him from direct critique and to humanise his rule, but also, more innovatively, to express an emerging idea of male and female co-regency in late antique government. These conclusions from the first part of the article throw doubt on the female authorship of most of these letters, at least if defined in the modern sense of the actual writer as an individual and original source of expression. In the latter part of the article I confirm this impression by analysing the content of the letters in the light of recent research on gender-specific language in ancient and medieval texts. The letters studied here provide a precious opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the gendering of letter-writing in the ancient and medieval world; something that has so far been difficult to achieve because female and male letters arising from the same epistolary occasion so rarely survive together from this period.5 Adopting a linguistic perspective, I show that gender-specific language, rather than giving us insight into a woman's voice, can, at times, be used to unmask men trained in techniques of ventriloquising for women. This is an insight of importance for all scholars of female writing and of female biography of the period. Yet, for historians of late antique and early medieval government, these observations have further consequences. In the cases studied here, the ventriloquising men were those employed to draft letters and speeches at and for the late antique courts. Exploring their identity, education and job descriptions further, I show that their work, including the drafting of female letters, responded and contributed to a specific late antique understanding of male and female companionship within ruling families that can also be observed in ceremony and art. Given that we find such widespread expressions of companionship at both the late Roman and the post-Roman courts, the origins of medieval representations of the queen as ‘consors regni’ (‘partner in reign’) may well lie in this very period.6 The high number of surviving female political letters from this period provides a wealth of data at the disposal of historians trying to assess the role of women at the late antique courts.7 It is hence surprising how little has been made of this material so far as a corpus of evidence. Studies of female writing in antiquity and the Middle Ages sometimes mention some of the letters in passing, although without submitting them to more detailed analysis.8 Scholarship on the transformation of the power and representation of late Roman empresses equally largely neglects these letters, despite being a vibrant field, to which I will return below. A recent review of, specifically, the role of women in diplomatic exchanges between East and West in the fifth and early sixth century also has nothing to say about these letters, focusing instead on the circulation of women themselves through marriage alliances in the ‘pluripolar’ world of late antiquity.9 It is usually through the investigation of individual women that historians have arrived at these texts, and, in consequence, at only some of them, although even this is neither a universal nor sustained approach.10 Three women stand out in the historiography in this regard: Galla Placidia, sister of Western emperor Honorius (d. 450), the Merovingian queen-turned-nun Radegund (d. 587), and the Ostrogothic queen Amalasuentha (d. 534/5). In the first two cases, their letters have been presented as an expression of the respective woman's feelings and ambitions. Placidia's, written soon after she had returned from an unusual marriage with a Visigothic king, are seen as part of her strategies to make a place for herself at the Western imperial court by demonstrably defending Christian orthodoxy.11 Radegund's letters were written to her cousin Amalfrid and his son Artachius who were living in Constantinople, after she had left her husband, King Clothar, and founded a monastery at Poitiers. They were all members of the Thuringian royal family whose territory had been conquered by Clothar in 531, but, while Radegund had been taken captive, Amalfrid had gone into exile in Constantinople. Radegund's letters, which adopted the format of epistolary poems, hence are seen as expressing deep mourning over the loss of her family and homeland and her wish to strengthen ties with her remaining relatives to protect her monastic foundation from outside interference.12 Yet, doubts have also been raised over Radegund's authorship of these letters. In the Middle Ages they were transmitted under the name of the poet, panegyrist and courtier Venantius Fortunatus, a friend of Radegund, and can be seen as very much following the style of this author's other works.13 In that sense, these letters are similar to those of Ostrogothic queen Amalasuentha, which are included in the letter collection of Cassiodorus, a Roman who worked for the Ostrogothic kings in various offices. These letters have attracted attention due to Amalasuentha's unusual form of rule. In October 534, Amalasuentha invited Theodahad, her married cousin, to be proclaimed king alongside her upon the death of her minor son, Ostrogothic king Athalaric.14 Yet, except in very rare cases, Amalasuentha's letters, while studied, are attributed to Cassiodorus in modern scholarship, without problematising or even just acknowledging the alternative that they may have been written by Amalasuentha herself.15 The described different traditions of authorship attribution raise larger questions that transcend these individual women. Should we believe attributions made by late antique or medieval compilers of letter collections even though they may have had particular reasons to transmit a letter under a certain name, either male or female? If not, how can we show that letters were written by men or by women? Perhaps most importantly, if some of the ‘female’ letters can be shown to have been written by men – as particularly the context of Cassiodorus suggests – how far can we then assume that other ‘female’ letters, like those of Galla Placidia or Radegund, were in fact written by the women themselves? And, if they were not written by the women, what was the purpose of ‘gendering’ them in this way? What do they tell us about these women's position at the courts? These questions call for a more holistic and comparative approach than has hitherto been attempted, one that compares male and female letters written on the same occasion on the one hand, and similar occasions of letter writing from across the late antique period on the other. With our evidence, we are in the unique position to do so. Among our twenty-six letters only five have been transmitted without other letters directly associated with them (see Appendix). As we shall see, however, two of these (Galla Placidia to Paulinus of Nola, Pulcheria to the abbess Bassa) may have nonetheless been composed with other letters. Two further letters, those by Radegund, may also have travelled with male letters originally.16 Both letters may have been part of Radegund's mission in 568 to acquire relics from Emperor Justin II (d. 578) and carried by an embassy sent by Sigibert, the Merovingian king of Metz and Radegund's stepson, in whose territory her monastery was situated. Having reached Constantinople, the embassy may have found Amalfrid deceased, which could have prompted substitution of the poem addressed to him with the second of Radegund's letters, to his son Artachius (this letter refers to Amalfrid's death).17 It is fair to say, therefore, that almost all of the letters under study here were originally part of batches of letters. Andrew Gillett has already argued for the importance of considering late Roman imperial and royal letters in context, echoing calls by other scholars of late antique epistolography who see letter-writing as part of a large ‘nexus of communication’ that also included scribes, the public reading of letters, accompanying verbal messages, letters’ further circulation and their collection.18 From this perspective, political letters need to be analysed in the context of the physical reality of the embassies or messengers that carried letters, as this determined the way they were composed and delivered. The evidence suggests that usually late antique embassies or messengers carried several letters, of which only a fraction survive in later collections. According to Gillett, these batches of letters could fulfil a variety of epistolographic or even performative strategies. First, letters could be sent to an addressee considered central to the issue (for example, the emperor) as well as ‘lateral’ individuals considered close to central decision maker(s) (such as members of the imperial household). This ‘lateral’ strategy was to create a network of influence and to project information beyond the central addressee. Second, numerous letters written by different individuals could be addressed to one single, significant addressee to press the same point in a variety of ways, in order to create an effective rhetoric of persuasion through this barrage. Finally, several individuals could write to several other individuals in a form of ‘multiple communication’ that matched correspondents according to common attributes. All these were rhetorical strategies, but they were also meant to have a dramatic effect when messengers read letters aloud to different members of the audience, in this way embodying a variety of viewpoints and emotions. Diplomatic letter batches in particular, Gillett argues, were public affairs, very possibly performed publicly on a ceremonial occasion where all letter addressees came together and often accompanied by further, more substantial verbal messages. All of this suggests that all letters contained in the same batch were also composed on the same occasion. When we now look at batches of letters that contain female imperial or royal letters, we can see that some of these letters fit into these strategies described by Gillett, but that with regard to female communication Gillett's conclusions can also be refined further. There is no example of female letters adopting a ‘lateral’ strategy, that is, where one imperial or royal woman wrote to a range of addressees. This may show that such women rarely sent letters on their own. In turn, we can identify three contexts in which female imperial or royal letters appear alongside those written by men: multiple communication, barrage of letters and, not considered by Gillett, twin communication. A closer analysis of these three epistolographic formats shows that each involved female letters for a different purpose. Most of our female letters were part of multiple communications, during which women corresponded with other women or close relatives. We can assemble five letter batches under this category: in chronological order, the letters of the Western imperial family in 450 (originally written in Latin, but translated into Greek in the 450s),19 Amalasuentha and her co-regent Theodahad's Latin correspondence with Justinian and Theodora in 534, Theodahad and his wife Gudelina's Latin correspondence with the same imperial couple in 535, possibly Radegund's letter to Amalfrid and Artachius, and the letters from the Merovingian court at Metz to the Eastern court between 585 and 593 (all Merovingian letters were also written in Latin).20 It is useful to begin with these last-mentioned letters, as they have been identified as a form of ‘multiple communication’ already by Gillett, whose analysis I largely follow here. The context of the letters was the hostage-taking of King Childebert's nephew Athanagild by emperor Maurice (r. 582–602), after a failed coup in 584 by his father and Childebert's brother-in-law, Visigothic prince Ermengild, to take power in Spain with the help of the Eastern empire. The Eastern court subsequently used Athanagild to exert pressure on Childebert to resume campaigning against the Lombards in Italy in support of the empire.21 Following these events, Childebert sent two embassies to Constantinople that carried altogether at least thirteen letters, including five from his mother Brunhild, Athanagild's grandmother. The aim was, at least partly, to ease a petition to allow for Athanagild's return to Gaul. In both cases, the letters had been written with the intention of creating a common ground between the two courts through pointing at shared family roles and corresponding emotions and duties.22 In the first letter batch, most were ‘letters of credence’, simply introducing the ambassadors, drawing attention to the gifts and verbal messages that they carried and asking the recipient to petition the emperor. This is also true for Brunhild's letters in this batch, to Constantina, the emperor's wife, and Anastasia, her mother. It is notable, however, that Brunhild was chosen as correspondent with these imperial women, as if emphasising her equal status at Childebert's court to the Augustae in Constantinople. In this batch, Brunhild's letter to her grandson Athanagild stands out as different, also from Childebert's own brief letter to Athanagild which only intimates that he would raise the issue of his circumstances (vestris condicionibus; ep. 28) with the emperor verbally. Brunhild's letter to Athanagild (ep. 27) is remarkable for its personal emotional expression, also conveyed by the use of the first person singular. The letter expresses the hope to establish a physical bond with Athanagild through his gaze onto the letter, and thereby also to resurrect Brunhild's lost child, Ingund, Athanagild's mother who had died on the way to Constantinople. Since Athanagild cannot have been more than two years of age at the time, the letter was clearly meant to be read and possibly heard not by him, but by a wider audience, invited to partake in Brunhild's grandmotherly and maternal feelings. Two letters in the second four-letter batch, which more directly addresses the issue of Athanagild's hostage in Constantinople, represent an intricate idea of parallel family relationships, where Brunhild wrote to Constantina as mother to mother, and Childebert wrote to Theodosius (the emperor's son) as an heir to an heir, with Athanagild also built into the concept of inheritance. Both letters invite the addressee to imagine the respective maternal and filial emotions of the writer as well as the feelings of the orphaned Athanagild, although Brunhild's letter again is more passionate than her son's, dwelling on the experience of losing a child. Since Theodosius was also an infant, Gillett cautions us that, once again, we must assume this, and possibly all the letters, were meant to be read by a wider circle at court or even declaimed. In both batches of letters, then, Brunhild's were clearly gendered with respect to addressees and content, but, given the likely rituals of their delivery, we can be sure that this was part of a communicative strategy intent on exploiting the dramatic effect of these varied, but ultimately artificial viewpoints. It is not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that, even though we do not have his or her name, all the letters were drafted for signature by the same person whose very job it was to create variety in a single batch of letters. I will return to this point below. The other extant female letters perhaps carried by a royal embassy from Metz to Constantinople, Radegund's epistolary poems to Amalfrid and Artachius, are not easily comparable to Brunhild's due to their format. They are much longer and written in elegiac couplet, switching between the tone of classical epic passionately expressing grief over the destruction of a homeland and the voice of female love elegy bewailing the absence of this lost realm's hero, Amalfrid. Nonetheless, some emotions expressed in the letter to Amalfrid are not dissimilar to those articulated by Brunhild. For example, Radegund, again in the first person singular, evokes the same mental image of a letter – the letter from Amalfrid she longs for but that does not arrive – transmitting the sender's physical presence (‘the letter may have painted (your) face and the image carries the man who his location holds back’) and through this a connection to her dead family, immediate and distant (Amalfrid's father, relatives, ancestors).23 Furthermore, if Radegund's letters, as suggested above, travelled with a larger, not surviving royal letter batch, it is not impossible to imagine that this batch, like the one carrying Brunhild's letters, carefully reconstructed pre-existing multiple relationships between the two courts to support the embassy's business. At that moment in time, the family relationship between Radegund and Amalfrid was probably the strongest and most precious connection the court at Metz had to Constantinople, as later that between Brunhild and Athanagild would be, and both were bound to be exploited to give the respective embassy access to a larger imperial audience. This would also explain why the letter to Amalfrid was quickly substituted with that to Artachius (an individual who, while related to her, Radegund cannot have known personally and who, again, may have been a child) when his death became known in Gaul. It should also not surprise us that Radegund's letters did not make mention of the embassy's business, be this the relic petition or any other diplomatic issue. As we have just seen, neither did the first letter batch sent by Childebert regarding Athanagild's hostage address his situation or any other purpose of writing beyond making contact with a lost family member. Rather, the letters were used to set the scene for the development of understanding, while diplomatic details – which could also be multi-purpose – were exchanged verbally or in subsequent correspondence. Whatever other diplomatic purpose Radegund's letters had, their explicit drawing on celebrated models of classical literature such as, most obviously, Virgil's Aeneid (Rome's epic foundation myth) and Ovid's Letters of the Heroides (epistolary poems written in the voice of mythical women) was certainly meant to convey an image of immense learning and tradition prevailing in post-Roman Gaul that the imperial court was expected to relate to.24 There is no need to assume that the court at Metz invented such diplomatic strategies; rather, as Gillett reminds us, they drew on models this court expected its Byzantine counterpart to be familiar with and hence on models the Merovingians had inherited or copied from the late Roman world. In fact, at least the letters regarding the Athanagild issue can be compared with the letters the Western imperial family sent to the Eastern imperial family in February 450. The occasion for this correspondence was the deposition of Bishop Flavian of Constantinople at the second council of Ephesus in 449 over a contested definition of the nature of Christ, on instigation of Bishop Dioscorus of Alexandria and against the doctrinal position of Leo, bishop of Rome.25 Leo sought help from Western emperor Valentinian III, his wife Licinia Eudoxia and his mother Galla Placidia when they visited St Peter in the Vatican the day after they had entered Rome in early 450. They were to lobby Eastern emperor Theodosius II, Valentinian's cousin and Eudoxia's father, to overturn the decisions of the council, to reinstate Flavian and to hold a new council to settle the doctrinal questions in Italy (Flavian in the meantime had died, but this seems not to have been known in Rome yet). Accordingly, Valentinian, Eudoxia and Placidia each wrote a letter to Theodosius on 22 February 450. Placidia also wrote to Theodosius's sister, Pulcheria. This letter is usually dated to 22 February too and thought to have arisen from the same occasion, because Placidia refers to the scene at St Peter, although, in fact, it is not dated. According to Hagith Sivan, the female letters within this correspondence, by Eudoxia and Placidia, show ‘the vigor of imperial women’, who saw an ‘opportunity … to demonstrate their own commitment to orthodoxy’ in a way that was ‘novel’ and ‘likely inspired by the (authoritative) Galla Placidia’.26 Reading the letters together with the male letters and with the comparative epistolographical context in mind, Placidia's leading input is, however, debatable, at least for the batch of letters addressed to emperor Theodosius. Similar to the Merovingian batches, senders and recipients in this imperial batch of letters were matched according to, in some cases artificial, household positions. Emperor Valentinian and empress Eudoxia write to their ‘father’, emperor Theodosius (ep. 2), while Placidia writes as ‘mother’ to her ‘son’ Theodosius (ep. 3), and to her ‘daughter’ Pulcheria (ep. 14), even though the latter were really her nephew and niece. While this invoking of family relationships was meant to create commonality between the two courts, the male and female letters again express different aspects of this unity. The female letters differ from Valentinian's (and Leo's) letter in that they add more detail to the emperor's request and, particularly in Placidia's letter, more drama and emotion. Valentinian's letter is a brief and sober request for a council in Italy to resolve the ‘rivalry’ (φιλονεικία) within the Church over which the Roman bishop, whom he does not name, should preside due to his ancient primacy. While Valentinian mentions the visit to St Peter, it is from Galla that we learn the specifics. In her letter to Theodosius (ep. 3), she describes how Leo, whom she names, after the service pleaded with the imperial family in tears, surrounded by a ‘multitude’ of bishops who had come from ‘innumerable’ Italian cities. She also uses much stronger words to refer to the ecclesiastical dispute: ἁψιμαχία, which implies violent scuffles, and the ‘hate’ (μῖσος) of ‘one man’, whom she does not name, but who intimidated Flavian, who she names, with a military presence at Ephesus. Her plea to the emperor is for the reinstatement of Flavian, who should be judged by the Roman bishop. Leo's authority and primacy she links to the ‘keys of heaven’ and to Rome's dominance of the earth, as well as, more precisely, the council of Nicaea's decision on Rome as the see of appeal for ecclesiastical disputes (a confusion with the council of Serdica, where this decision had actually been taken, which we also find in one of Leo's previous letters).27 Eudoxia's letter (ep. 4), in turn, is a little more subdued, although she, like Placidia, but unlike Valentinian, finds very deferential adjectives to describe both St Peter (ἀγιωτάτου) and Leo (μακαριώτατος), whom she also names. From her letter we learn of a new feature of the council of Ephesus: that Flavian had been expelled due to the hostility of ‘the bishop of Alexandria’ (Dioscorus, probably the ‘one man’ Placidia mentions). None of the letters makes reference to each other or that of Leo (ep. 1) which will have headed the batch. This confirms the impression that they were meant to be delivered and read together, each contributing an aspect of the same story and new information. From this we should not conclude, however, that Valentinian was less interested in the matter than his womenfolk. His moderate letter would have been read first (after Leo's), to set the scene, while the women's letters filled in the gory details, the names (one by one), and the outrage. In view of these three letters dramatically ‘unfolding’ the imperial request, but also due to some detail (in particular the error over the council of Nicaea), it is again likely that the letters were written by the same individual who drew on information received from Leo. Placidia's letter to Pulcheria (ep. 14), usually believed to have been sent on the same occasion, somewhat differs from the letters just discussed. While it also describes the scene at St Peter and Leo's tearful appeal, Placidia seems to sharply rebuke her Eastern relatives.28 She begins the letter emphasising ‘our’ (the Western imperial family's?) cause to protect religion and ‘order’ (τάξις), only to lament the fact that at Ephesus, where by the will of ‘someone’ ‘something nasty’ was done to the Bishop of Constantinople, ‘no one’ had guarded order (τάξις), which can only be taken as a veiled attack at Theodosius. This comparison between the moral stature of the Western and the Eastern imperial family continued throughout the letter: Galla expressed the hope that Pulcheria (‘your philanthropy’) should now achieve unity (συμπνεῦσαι) with the catholic faith, ‘as we (the Western imperial family) have always done’ (ὅπερ ἁεί μεθ’ἡμῶν πεποίηκε), so that the ‘case of the bishop (Flavian)’ be referred to the apostolic see, with further references to the ‘keys of heaven’ and Rome's global dominance. The difference in tone of this letter from the others discussed above is remarkable. Neither Leo nor the Western imperial family probably knew that Pulcheria was actually not living at the main palace at the time.29 If this letter was really part of the same batch as the others, they would have expected that it was read or performed together with them. It therefore may have been meant to press the other letters’ points even further, to underscore the unity within the Western imperial family and publicise the (assumed) disunity over Flavian's treatment at the Eastern court, in order to shame their relatives into action. The letter's tone may also have been motivated by the wish to divert open criticism of the emperor via his sister, in a communication from the older augusta of the West to the younger augusta of the East, who it was safer to rebuke. Still, the real addressee of Placidia's letter may have been Theodosius, who was expected to listen to or at least see this letter too. It should be noted that there are some very distinctive stylistic features in this letter, for example the flowery and somewhat cumbersome beginning, and the labelling of Leo as ‘papas’, which was not the title customarily used for the Bishop of Rome in Rome at the time.30 Perhaps this implies a different composer from that
Referência(s)