Women in Imperial Antioch

In this study about the role of Antiochian imperial women I aim at investigating the interrelationship between law and society and at analysing the way social changes lead to birth of new laws, in the period marked by a gradual replacement inside the Mediterranean world: law was a dynamical institution that had the potential to pervade every aspect of public and private life. Any investigation of society of Late Antiquity has to use legal documents: there were interactions between Greek east and the Roman west, secular and ecclesiastical, Christian and non-Christian, and finally male and female. It is rare to have detailed information about a specific woman in every place and at any time, except sometimes among urban elite, for instance pagan and Christian aristocrats in late-fourth-century Antioch or mid-fifth-century Constantinople. Since works written by women for public circulation are very rare, we are trying to interrogate the writings and artefacts of men for a partial information since it came through a filter. One of the most important constatations of my study is the invalidity of an exclusive approaches to gender studies: Late antique Antioch mosaics, as supports of images, for example, were active agents in the construction of gender identities, because identities and visual culture are associated in a dialectical form through social praxis or practice.