The sixth-century historian Procopius of Caesarea has often been an author of first resort for students of gender in Late Antiquity. His violently misogynistic account of the empress Theodora in Anecdota (Secret History) is a classic recourse for modern historiography (and university survey courses). Yet, as Michael Stewart rightly notes, gendered discourse permeates Procopius’s various experiments in historiography in much more fundamental ways than a focus on “the carnal escapades and political misdeeds of puissant women” suggests (71). In this sense, Stewart’s book is best understood as the product of various central concerns in the wider discipline of gender history: not least, the effects of hegemonic masculinity (always anxious, often in crisis; cf. 25).
Chapter 1 is less a standalone introduction than an overture sounding the book’s central theme: the role of gendered discourse in Procopius’s view of sixth-century Mediterranean politics and—in particular—the late fifth-century “loss” of (and...
University of California Press