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beauty. In reality, of course, not every woman lived as sheltered from the public as this; some women or girls even had to work outside their home.

      Church services represented one exception to the rule of women’s seclusion at home.¹¹⁷ Pious women would go to church on a daily basis. Michael Psellus (1018–ca. 1076) says of his young daughter Styliane, who died before the age of marriage: “She was more eager than all others going to the temple [for vespers], spontaneously racing there as though in flight. She revealed her reverence for God by standing without leaning and by paying close attention to the hymns. She chanted the psalms at vespers that she had learned all by herself and memorized the Davidic sayings immediately upon hearing them. She sang along with the choir.”¹¹⁸ This text, of course, represents a different time than that of Romanos, and it presents a highly idealized image of the young girl. Nevertheless it does give us a glimpse into a Byzantine world where a maiden went to church in the evening and sang the hymns together with the choir. Other sources describe women’s participation in vigils and nocturnal processions.¹¹⁹ Inside churches a partial “seclusion” was provided by the fact that women and girls were physically separated from the male participants.

      The marriage was usually arranged by the parents, who might even have betrothed their daughter to an older boy (or man) from an early age. Alternatively, they might have pledged her to a monastery. The wedding constituted a major threshold for a girl. It took her from maidenhood to womanhood. Society expected a married woman to be faithful to her husband and dedicated to family life. Above all, she should bear children and rear them. Women who found themselves unable to become pregnant often made intense efforts—prayers, visits to holy shrines or holy men, anointing themselves with holy oils, and so on—in order to remedy their condition.

      Most married women did get pregnant. Some families would then engage a wet nurse, but the majority of mothers nursed their own babies for two to three years. More than their Greco-Roman ancestors, the Byzantines expected a mother to nurse her own babies and be a part of her children’s education and upbringing.¹²⁰ There seems to have been a growing ideological focus on the maternal role, a feature we shall also encounter in Romanos’s characterization of Mary.

      In connection with death rituals, women played a vital part. It was a female duty to wash the corpse, to follow the funeral procession, and to lament the dead. Women would tear open their clothes and loosen their hair, scream, and ululate.¹²¹ How a woman herself was expected to die is a question I shall leave unanswered since Romanos does not follow the Virgin Mary that far.

      Romanos’s Virgin Mary was cast in a dynamic correlation to the ideals of female life and the social world in which real women lived. Throughout this book I demonstrate how this relationship works, and argue that the poet construes her neither as a simple reflection of Constantinopolitan ladies nor as a negation of the same.

       Marian Doctrine and Devotion

      In the summer of 431, Emperor Theodosius II summoned clergy to a council in the Church of St. Mary in the city of Ephesus. Among the disputes that he asked them to resolve was the conflict over the term “Theotokos” (i.e., “She who gave birth to God”). Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople (ca. 381–451) had forbidden his congregations in the capital to use this epithet for the Virgin Mary. His ruling met with great hostility among believers, not only in Constantinople, but even in Alexandria. Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444) led the fervent opposition to Nestorius. He argued that humanity and divinity are actually brought together and integrated in Christ’s person; divinity is not something Christ acquired during his life, but it was there from the very beginning when “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Hence Mary did give birth to divinity in a certain sense. The council treated this issue with great severity, and eventually it concluded that the title “Theotokos” was acceptable to the official church in the Roman Empire.

      Instead of solving the issue all together, however, the Council of Ephesus fueled new Christological debates that led to additional councils. The most fateful one gathered in Chalcedon just outside Constantinople twenty years later. This council and its doctrine would alienate a large portion of the Christian Church within the Roman Empire. A substantial opposition believed that the clear distinction that the council made between the human and divine natures in Christ jeopardized the unity of Christ’s person. It was precisely to this unity that Cyril had appealed for his defense of the Theotokos title.

      Neither Ephesus nor Chalcedon has direct relevance for Romanos, but the two councils had opened up conflicts that had a devastating effect on the feeling of concord in the empire. Thus Emperor Anastasius I, who ruled when Romanos first arrived in Constantinople, wanted to abandon Chalcedon. Chalcedon also elevated the dignity of Constantinople’s bishop, and it contributed to a general centralization of power in Constantinople, which was not popular in all the provinces. The consequence was that Constantinople’s hold on Alexandria and Antioch weakened. A hundred years after the assemblies, Emperor Justinian strove desperately to solve the pressing issue in order to create unity in the imperial church. The powerful empress Theodora sided with the anti-Chalcedonians, while the emperor took a more indecisive stand, for he wanted peace with Chalcedon-friendly Rome. As the emperor and empress were well aware, this was not merely a dogmatic question for the educated theologians but an issue as fundamental to the empire as the military wars they were fighting both with the Sasanians in the east and the Ostrogoths in the west. The church of Constantinople had been raised to the rank of patriarchate, and its ecclesiastical authority matched the political authority of the emperor. Was Constantinople able to keep a disintegrating church unity together?

      The emperor summoned a new council in the summer of 553. This time Constantinople itself was chosen as the location. The council took a Christological position often termed “neo-Chalcedonian,” which hoped to reunite the parties and end the conflict. Without abandoning the Chalcedonian distinction, the council in the imperial city tried to revive the language of unity in Christ’s person from the Cyrillian tradition and Ephesus. This Second Council of Constantinople embraced the paradoxical—and by now traditional—phrase “Theotokos,” which implies that God is born from a human. More controversial was the fact that the representatives also approved the so-called theopaschite formula, “one of the Trinity suffered on the cross.” God died.¹²² Adherents to the Cyrillian side favored such language because it did not make a clear distinction between a human nature connected to suffering and the divine nature that is beyond suffering. It is impossible to state that only the human aspect of Christ died; nor can we say that Mary gave birth only to his humanity, for Christ cannot be separated into two distinct entities.

      When the human and divine aspects are seen as interwoven, the human mother gets more clearly interlaced into the weave. Hence neo-Chalcedonianism served to integrate the Virgin more firmly into the divine economy. And as we shall see, with his On Mary at the Cross, Romanos displays a Virgin Mother who gets woven into the neo-Chalcedonian fabric of redemption as a distinct sacred persona. The council Fathers in Constantinople also sanctioned the Marian epithet “Ever-Virgin.”¹²³ Since Mary gave birth to Christ, this epithet also has a paradoxical ambiguity to it. While God goes through the bloody transformation of human birth and death, the human mother does not transform but stays a virgin. In a linguistic atmosphere where human and divine properties intermingle radically, Romanos seeks to present a plausible version of the Virgin Mary.

      Modern historiography has often seen the conciliar decrees of Ephesus as a Mariological turning point. Such a notion ascribes a bit too much importance to an ecclesiastical meeting, and attests rather to our need for historical milestones in the chaotic past. Church councils did not create devotion to the Virgin. In general, councils served to negotiate between existing devotional practices rather than invent new ones. Their judgments may prove useful to us, however, since they give indications of the discourse climate. These meetings defined what language was proper for Christian believers.

      The Christian interest in the Virgin did not emerge in the fifth century, and the Theotokos title clearly existed prior to the Ephesus council. Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–73) had written hymns with a developed awareness of Mary’s important role a century earlier. We have evidence that both individual and liturgical prayers were addressed to Mary in the latter part of the fourth

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