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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.1 (2004) 17-39



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Gender and the End of Empire

Guy Halsall
University of York
York, United Kingdom


The problem of the "Fall of the Roman Empire" continues to excite debate among historians and archaeologists, fifteen centuries after Odoacer deposed the usurper Romulus in 476. Similarly, there is an ever-growing corpus of work on women's history and, to some extent more recently, gender in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. 1 The challenge of bringing these two burgeoning areas of research together has, however, on the whole been avoided. 2

The challenge brings a number of problems in its train. The first can be summed up in a hypothetical response to the contribution of women's history envisaged by Joan Scott: "[M]y understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by the knowledge that women participated in it." 3 Scott's point, of course, is that women's history is not the same as gender history. In most work on gender and the transformation of the Roman world, we become aware of the role of women, but our understanding of that transformation is not much altered by this knowledge, possibly because the issue of whether the analysis concerns women's history between around 300 and 800 or the history of gender in that period is usually unresolved. 4 Furthermore, although some work has studied the ways in which the end of the Roman Empire might have affected the status of women or the construction of gendered identities, there has been little or no attempt to give the negotiation and renegotiation of masculinity or femininity an active role in this dramatic, large-scale political process.

A related problem is the loss of geographical and chronological focus consequent upon the introduction of the "transformation of the Roman world" as the dominant way of conceiving the history of this period. 5 The major European Science Foundation project of this name took the whole period between the fourth century and the ninth as its range. 6 The rationale for this, one suspects, was a desire to demonstrate long-term continuity [End Page 17] as opposed to the catastrophic change beloved of earlier generations of historians and archaeologists. Substituting the transformation of the Roman world for the fall of the Roman Empire permits, moreover, a move away from high-level political and institutional history and into broader historical issues. Yet in spite of these laudable motives, this shift has not produced the analytical way forward that has often been claimed. In fact, chronologically and geographically, it poses more problems.

Taking chronological parameters half a millennium apart or more inevitably makes change appear imperceptible. 7 To paraphrase Julia Smith's learned and elegantly expressed overview, did women experience the transformation of the Roman world? On that scale, no. If it did take five hundred years to transform the Roman world, then the pace of change must have been so slow and gradual that no one lifetime would have seen very much transformation at all.

The loss of focus and direction represented by the "transformation of the Roman world" approach also presents problems geographically. With the experiences of all of Europe across half a millennium thrown together into the same pot, one is left with either unhelpful comparisons (my understanding of the transformation of the Roman world is not changed by the knowledge either that ninth-century southern Italy was not very like sixth-century northern France, or that it shared some extremely general similarities) or a retreat into eternal diversity, which then tends to become an explanation in itself. 8 Julia Smith has argued that writing a more gendered history of the period from around 300 to 800 involves abandoning "empire-wide grand narratives" in favor of "a point of view . . . that is domestic and . . . often fragmented." 9 She is surely right to stress the diversity of late antique constructions of gender and to say that this should not be masked by universalizing political histories, but it may be possible to appreciate this...

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