Goddess Worship...and the Female Gender

This paper analyzes how the figure of the Virgin Mary came to be adopted as model for rulership and civic pride in the Middle Ages, and how today this can help to identify and articulate what female leadership means. Having dealt with the early medieval definition of Mary as principal intercessor for humankind and Queen of Heaven, I am interested in understanding something of a paradox: How Mary, the paradigm for modesty, became a symbol of political power? In Late Antiquity, Mary was the protector of Constantinople and Rome.

The Survival and Rhetoric of Aphrodite in Byzantine Art

Scholars of Byzantium have acknowledged the widespread practice of associating the emperor with the great religious feasts of the liturgical calendar. This practice, attested by ample textual and visual evidence, formulated ideas about the nature of Byzantine imperial power and its relationship to the divine. Empresses too are linked with religious feasts in Byzantine texts and images, although much less frequently than emperors.

A Hellenistic inscription from Treskavec, published in the 1930s, tells us about a woman who, alarmed by Ephesian Artemis, freed slave Helena and her son Perister with the heirs (female) at the locality of Kolobaise. A preserved inscription built into the dome of the Treskavec church testifies to the existence of a temple to Ephesian Artemis, which was originally located in Kolobaise, which is assumed to represent an ancient city on the site of the medieval monastery of Treskavec.

The goal of the paper is to examine different ways in which, through visual representations and patristic rhetoric, the Mother of God came to be a mirror of women within Late Antique Christianity. The images of Mary from the fourth and fifth centuries indeed display a certain disparity: the Mother of God can be represented as robed in a rich patristic gown, elsewhere as a widow with a heavy maphorion, or as a simple young woman.