Interpersonal Violence in Middle Byzantium

This volume offers the first sustained study of interpersonal violence in Byzantine society from the ninth to the eleventh century. Moving beyond war, rebellion, and state coercion, it examines violence as a social practice embedded in ordinary relations of power: within families, households, neighbourhoods, monasteries, and other communal settings.

Drawing on hagiography, historiography, legal texts, letters, and narrative sources, the book argues that interpersonal violence was closely connected to authority, gender, age, status, kinship, dependency, and spiritual discipline. Through close analysis of physical assault, intimidation, verbal aggression, humiliation, domestic conflict, and coercive care, the book shows how violence could enforce authority while also exposing the unstable boundaries between discipline and abuse, protection and domination, and social order and personal suffering. Byzantine texts are treated as complex narratives through which communities represented, justified, condemned, or contained acts of force.

This book will be valuable to scholars and students of Byzantine history, medieval studies, social and cultural history, hagiography, gender and family studies, and the histories of violence, the body, caregiving, and everyday life. By placing Byzantium within wider discussions of interpersonal violence and power, it offers a new framework for understanding medieval society and the social meanings of violence.