The Veiling of Women in Byzantium: Liturgy, Hair,

and Identity in a Medieval Rite of Passage

By G a b r i e l R a d l e

Anthropologists assert that “dress is never value free.” 1

The manner in which indi-
viduals cover and adorn their bodies can indicate how a person fits within a partic-
ular social structure. Dress publicly communicates relationship dynamics and, as
such, can carry connotations of control or liberation. In structured and confined
contexts, such as the military, dress distinguishes a clear hierarchy of power and re-
sponsibility. Dress is a key component in a person’s performance of their gender.
Clothing and body ornaments can also serve as visual signifiers of religious belief,
indicating that an individual chooses to follow a set of religious principles and prac-
tices. When religion motivates a person’s dress choice, the dress itself becomes a re-
ligious object, and even a means for embodying one’s faith; for its wearer, dress can
be transformative.2 Underlying such theoretical work is a basic principle, namely,
that dress communicates and contributes to identity.
Nowhere has the link between dress and identity received more theoretical atten-
tion than in recent scholarship dealing with veiling trends among women in Islamic
societies.3 While such work largely treats contemporary issues at the intersection of
religion, politics, dress, and sexuality, it also points to a lacuna in our knowledge
about related topics in the medieval world. In discussions about Islamic female head

This article stems from a contribution I gave to the conference “The Poetics of Christian Performance:
Prayer, Liturgy and Their Environments in East and West,” organized in 2016 by Brouria Bitton-
Ashkelony and Derek Krueger at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. A later draft of the article
was presented to the medieval seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I am grateful
to the organizers and participants at both occasions for providing these opportunities to receive helpful
feedback. Special thanks are due to Teresa Berger, Roland Betancourt, Patrick Geary, Nina Glibetic,
Michael Maas, Vasileios Marinis, Joan Wallach Scott, and the anonymous reviewers of Speculum. Por-
tions of this article were written while I was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Christianity at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. I am
grateful to the benefactors of these institutions for their support. The final version of this article was
submitted on 2 November 2018, shortly after hearing of the death of Robert F. Taft, a force in schol-
arship on Byzantine liturgy and religious history for half a century and one of the first scholars to probe
questions pertaining to women in medieval Byzantine liturgy. I dedicate this small contribution to his
memory.

1
Ann Bridgewood, “Dancing the Jar: Girls’ Dress at Turkish Cypriot Weddings,” in Dress and Eth-
nicity: Change across Space and Time, ed. Joanne B. Eicher (New York, 1995), 29–49, at 48. See also
Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago, 1992).
2
Lynne Hume, The Religious Life of Dress: Global Fashion and Faith (New York, 2003).
3
See, for example, Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford, 1999); Saba
Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005); Joan Wal-
lach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007); Theodore Gabriel and Rabiha Hannan, eds., Is-
lam and the Veil: Theoretical and Regional Contexts (New York, 2011); Elizabeth Buca, The Islamic
Veil: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, 2012); Anna-Mari Almila and David Inglis, eds., The Routledge
International Handbook to Veils and Veiling (London, 2018).

Speculum 94/4 (October 2019). Copyright 2019 by the Medieval Academy of America.
doi: 10.1086/705421, 0038-7134/2019/9404-0004$10.00.
 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1071
covering, one frequently reads the assertion that these dress norms stem directly
from the medieval Byzantine tradition.4 According to this view, medieval Byzantine
women, both married and unmarried, used head coverings as manifestations of per-
sonal modesty, family dignity, and sexual honor. At the same time, others have pro-
posed a contrasting view of medieval Greek female dress, instead positing that veils
served as markers of marital status, more akin to contemporary Orthodox Jewish
practice.5 These variant claims raise awareness of the lack of any comprehensive
study on the social and cultural history of female head covering in the Byzantine
world. They also undermine the potential that Byzantines had their own unique as-
sociations with women’s hair, which may have both corresponded and contrasted
with non-Christian notions.
In this article, I will offer new evidence of a little-known Byzantine liturgical rite
that helps to fill this gap in our knowledge. I will introduce and analyze what I argue
was originally a liturgical rite of passage that accompanied Byzantine female ado-
lescents as they adopted the adult woman’s dress norm of binding up and covering
their hair. I will explore the context of this liturgical service, both social and reli-
gious, and from this glean insight about the relationship between liturgy and iden-
tity in the medieval Byzantine world.

A Byzantine Rite for “Binding Up” a Woman’s Head

While scholars have devoted numerous studies to the principal liturgical services
of Byzantium, especially the Divine Liturgy and monastic offices, far less attention
has been paid to those liturgical rites intended to bless specific stages in the life
course of an individual, such as birth, adolescence, marriage, or death. Anthropol-
ogy would define these as “rites of passage,” that is, social rituals that recognize an
individual as passing from one stage of life into a new one, and which imbue the ini-
tiate’s status with meaning.6 Across societies, rites of passage can take many forms
and are not by necessity religious, let alone liturgical, rites. At the same time, within
the Byzantine and other medieval Christian traditions, key transitional moments of

4
See, for example, Daphne Grace, The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Post-
colonial Literature (Chicago, 2004), 219; Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West
in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York, 2004), 131. Assumptions that Islamic veiling culture has a Byzan-
tine Christian origin can be found in other genres of scholarship and were even mentioned at a security
talk given at a NATO conference, published subsequently. See Tsvi Bisk, “The War on Islamism,” in
Lone Actors: An Emerging Security Threat, ed. Aaron Richman and Yair Sharan (Amsterdam, 2015),
132–48, at 139. A more nuanced approach is taken in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: His-
torical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, 1992), esp. 26–28.
5
In her recent tour-de-force study of medieval Salentine culture, Linda Safran writes, “Married
women of all faiths were usually distinguished from the unwed by their hair covering”: Safran, The
Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy (Philadelphia, 2014), 111–12. Cf. Valentino Pace,
“Il Salento medievale in un libro di Linda Safran,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 81 (2015): 215–25,
at 222.
6
The pioneering study is Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris, 1909). See also the later
work of Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest
of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, 1967), 93–111; Turner, The Ritual Process (New
Brunswick, 1969), 94–130; Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, 1997),
94–102.

Speculum 94/4 (October 2019)

1072 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
the life course were often brought into an ecclesial context as liturgical rites offici-
ated by a bishop or priest, whether at home or in churches. While these rites were
often short—sometimes accompanied by a single prayer of blessing—they allowed
for a heightened religious significance of these moments. The texts and gestures pro-
vided a social definition that linked an individual’s life to participation in divine life.
By punctuating key moments of the human life course, the liturgy presented these
transitional events as new opportunities for a person’s spiritual growth and sancti-
fication through the grace of God.
A primary source for such rites is the euchologion (et̓ vοkόγiοm), or euchology, the
prayer book used by bishops and priests for public liturgies and private blessings,
akin to the early medieval Western sacramentary.7 Extant Greek euchologies begin
only from the end of the eighth century, with the pool of surviving prayer books in-
creasing as the centuries move forward. Several of the oldest surviving euchology
manuscripts include a rite that consists of a single blessing for binding up a woman’s
head, Εt̓ vg̀ ̓epì τὸ a
̓ madήrarhai jeuakg̀ m γtmaij̃ a. This peculiar liturgical service
has received little scholarly attention, even though it relates to complex issues that
medievalists have increasingly turned to in their research, including the relationship
between religious ritual and identity, as well as social perceptions of gender in the
premodern Mediterranean.
Before analyzing this rite, I first give its text according to the earliest attested ver-
sion, which is found already in the oldest extant euchology, the eighth-century co-
dex Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barberini gr. 336 (Fig. 1).8
I compare this text with four additional early manuscripts containing the same re-
daction: the tenth-century Italo-Byzantine euchology Saint Petersburg, Rossiyskaya
natsional’naya biblioteka, MS gr. 226;9 the twelfth-century Italo-Byzantine eu-
chology Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS gr. 1970;10 and two Pal-
estinian euchologies from the eleventh century, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, MSS
Sinai Gr. 959 and Sinai NF/ M10.11 In the apparatus, I also note differences found

7
For examples of early Western sacramentaries, see, for example, Henry A. Wilson, The Gelasian
Sacramentary: Liber sacramentorum Romanae ecclesiae (Oxford, 1894); The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy
and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Rob Meens (Cambridge, UK, 2004).
See also the discussion in Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thir-
teenth Century (Collegeville, MN, 1998), 27– 55.
8
The most recent critical edition of this manuscript is Евхологий Барберини гр. 336: Издание,
предисловие и примечания, ed. Stefano Parenti and Elena Velkovska (Omsk, 2011). An earlier edition
with Italian translation is Stefano Parenti and Elena Velkovska, L’eucologio Barberini gr. 336:
Seconda edizione riveduta con traduzione in lingua italiana (Rome, 2000).
9
This manuscript represents a parochial euchology copied in southern Italy. See André Jacob,
“L’euchologe de Porphyre Uspenski, cod. Leningr. gr. 226 (Xe siècle),” Le Muséon 78 (1965): 173–
214; as well as the doctoral dissertation of Pavlos Koumarianos, Il Codice 226 della Biblioteca di
San Pietroburgo: L’eucologio bizantino di Porfyrio Uspensky (PhD diss., Pontifical Oriental Institute,
Rome, 1996). The prayer is found on fols. 97v–98r.
10
This euchology was copied in the Patir monastery of Rossano, on which see André Jacob,
“L’euchologe de Sainte-Marie du Patir et ses sources,” in Atti del Congresso internazionale su S. Nilo
di Rossano (28 sett.–1 ott. 1986) (Rossano, 1989), 75–118. The prayer is found on fol. 164r–v.
11
For Sinai Gr. 959, see Aleksei Dmitrievsky, Описание литургических рукописей, хранящихся в
библиотеках православнаго востока, vol. 2 (Kiev, 1901), 57. For the dating of Sinai NF/M10, see
Stefano Parenti, “La preghiera della cattedra nell’eucologio Barberini gr. 336,” Bollettino della Badia

Speculum 94/4 (October 2019)

 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1073
in a later redaction of the prayer, as attested in the famous eleventh-century manuscript
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Coislin 213, the oldest surviving eu-
chology copied in the city of Constantinople.12
Εu̓ xh̀ εi̓ ς τὸ a̓ nadήjajvai γunaĩ ka.13
̔ Ο heὸς14 ὁ ̓em pqοuήτaiς kakήraς jaì pqοjgqύnaς τὸm uxτirlὸm τg̃ ς γmώreώς rοt
ἔrerhai15 ̓ep᾽e̓ rvάτxm γemex̃ m pã rim τοiς̃ ἔhmerim, ὁ lg̀ hέkxm τimà τx̃ m ̓ej τx̃ m veiqx̃ m
rοt pepkarlέmxm a ̓ mhqώpxm ἄlοiqοm τg̃ ς rxτgqίaς,16 ὁ dià 17 τοt̃ rjeύοtς τg̃ ς ̓ejkογg̃ ς
rοt Paύkοt τοt̃ a ̓ pοrτόkοt ̓emτeikάlemος pάmτa ei̓ ς dοnοkογίam pοieim̃ g ̔ lã ς τg̀ m rήm,
jaì mόlοtς ̓ejhέlemος di᾽ at̓ τοt̃ τοiς̃ a ̓ mdqάrim τοiς̃ ̓em pίrτei pοkiτetralέmοiς ὁ lοίxς
dè jaì τaiς̃ γtmainίm,18 ἵma οi̔ lè m ἄmdqeς a ̓ jaτajakύpτxς τg̀ m jeuakg̀ m19 pqοruέqxrίm
rοi aἶmοm jaì dόnam τxͅ ̃ a20
̔ γίxͅ ὀ mόlaτί rοt, ai̔ dè τgͅ ̃ pίrτei rοt jahxpkirlέmai
γtmaij̃ eς jaτajejaktllέmai τg̀ m jeuakg̀ m21 leτà aἴdοtς jaì rxuqοrύmgς jοrlx̃ rim
̔eatτà ς ̓em ἔqγοiς a ̓ γahοiς̃ , jaì ὕlmοtς22 jaì pqοretvà ς23 pqοrάγxrim τgͅ ̃ dόngͅ rοt

at̓ τός, dέrpοτa τx̃ m a ̔ pάmτxm,24 et̓ kόγgrοm τg̀ m dούkgm rοt τaύτgm jaì jόrlgrοm

greca di Grottaferrata, 3rd ser., 8 (2011): 149–68, at 158 n. 40. A slightly later Sinaitic text that
conserves the older redaction is Sinai Gr. 962 (fols. 74r–75v), from the turn of the eleventh to twelfth
centuries. Images for Sinai Gr. 959 and Sinai Gr. 962 are now accessible online through digitized micro-
film reproductions at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/manuscripts-in-st
-catherines-monastery-mount-sinai/ (last accessed 3 June 2019).
12
See P. Kalaitzidis, “Il pqerbύτeqος Στqaτήγiος e le due note bibliografiche del codice Paris Coislin
213,” Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, 3rd ser., 5 (2008): 179–84. On two separate occa-
sions, Miguel Arranz published the text of this prayer based primarily on the later redaction as found in
the manuscript Grottaferrata, Monastero Esarchico di Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, MS G.b. I, which
he ascribed incorrectly to eleventh-century Constantinople. See Arranz, “Les sacrements de l’ancien
Euchologe constantinopolitain (9): IVe partie; L’‘illumination’ de la nuit de Pâques,” Orientalia
Christiana Periodica 55 (1989): 22–62, at 57; Arranz, L’eucologio costantinopolitano agli inizi del
secolo XI: Hagiasmatikon e archieratikon (rituale e pontificale) con l’aggiunta del leitourgikon (messale)
(Rome, 1996), 305. The manuscript was subsequently dated to the thirteenth century. See Stefano
Parenti and Elena Velkovska, “A Thirteenth Century Manuscript of the Constantinopolitan Euchology:
Grottaferrata G.b. I, alias of Cardinal Bessarion,” Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, 3rd ser.,
4 (2007): 175–96. As Arranz notes, however, the version of Grottaferrata G.b. I is virtually identical to
that in Coislin 213. For an English translation based on Arranz’s edition, see Jane Baun, “Coming of Age
in Byzantium: Agency and Authority in Rites of Passage from Infancy to Adulthood,” in Authority in
Byzantium, ed. Pamela Armstrong (Farnham, UK, 2003), 113–35, at 132. The work of both Arranz
and Baun on this prayer is discussed below.
13
Εt̓ vg̀ . . . γtmaij̃ a: Vat. gr. 1970 adds τg̀ m jeuakήm; Sinai NF/M10 adds τg̀ m jeuakg̀ m at̓ τg̃ ς;
Coislin 213 Εt̓ vg̀ ̓epì τὸ a ̓ madήrarhai jeuakg̀ m γtmaij ̃ a.
14
̔ Ο heὸς: Coislin 213̔ Ο heὸς ὁ heὸς g ̔ lx̃ m.
15
ἔrerhai: Barberini gr. 336 omits.
16
τimà . . . rxτgqίaς: Coislin 213 τimà τx̃ m t̔ pὸ rοt̃ pepkarlέmxm a ̓ mhqώpxm a̓ lοiqeim̃ τg̃ ς rg̃ ς
rxτgqίaς.
17
ὁ dià : Coislin 213 ὁ mόlοtς ̓ejhέlemος dià .
18
a ̓ pοrτόkοt . . . γtmainίm: Coislin 213 a ̓ pοrτόkοt rοt τοiς̃ τe ̓em pίrτei pοkiτetοlέmοiς a
̓ mdqάri jaì
τaiς̃ γtmainίm.
19
lè m . . . jeuakg̀ m: Coislin 213 lè m a ̓ jakύpτxͅ τgͅ ̃ jeuakgͅ ̃ .
20
rοi aἶmοm jaì dόnam: Coislin 213 aἴmerim jaì dοnοkογίam.
21
τgͅ ̃ pίrτei . . . τg̀ m jeuakg̀ m: Coislin 213 jejaktlέmgͅ τgͅ ̃ jeuakgͅ ̃ .
22
ὕlmοtς: RNB gr. 226 ὕlmοiς.
23
jaì pqοretvà ς: Coislin 213 omits; RNG gr. 226 jaì pqοretvaiς̃ .
24
dέrpοτa τx̃ m a ̔ pάmτxm: Coislin 213 omits.

Speculum 94/4 (October 2019)

Fig. 1. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barberini gr. 336, fol. 252r. See
the online edition for a color version of this image.
 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1075
τg̀ m at̓ τg̃ ς jeuakg̀ m jόrlοm τὸm ̓em rοì et̓ άqerτοm jaì ̓eqάrliοm, et̓ rvglοrύmgm τe
25 26

jaì τilg̀ m jaì et̓ pqέpeiam,27 ὅpxς jaτà τà ς ̓emτοkάς rοt pοkiτetralέmg28 jaì τà lέkg
pqὸς rxuqοmirlὸm paidaγxγοt̃ ra, τύvgͅ τx̃ m ai̓ xmίxm rοt a ̓ γahx̃ m rt̀ m τgͅ ̃ a
̓ madgmούrgͅ
at̓ τήm.29 Ἐm Χqirτxͅ ̃ Ἰgrοt̃ τxͅ ̃ Κtqίxͅ g̔ lx̃ m leh᾽ οt̔ ̃ rοì dόna rt̀ m τxͅ ̃ pamaγίxͅ jaì a
̓ γahxͅ ̃
jaì fxοpοixͅ ̃ rοt pmeύlaτi mt̃ m jaì a ̓ eί.

[Prayer for binding up (the head of) a woman.

O God, you who have spoken through the prophets and proclaimed that in the final gen-
erations the light of your knowledge will be for all nations, you who desire that no human
created by your hands remain devoid of salvation, you who through the apostle Paul, your
elected instrument, ordered us to do everything for your glory, and through him you insti-
tuted laws for men and women who live in the faith, namely that men offer praise and glory
to your holy name with an uncovered head, while women, fully armed in your faith, cov-
ering the head, adorn themselves in good works and bring hymns and prayers to your glory
with modesty and sobriety; you, O master of all things, bless this your servant and adorn
her head with an ornament that is acceptable and pleasing to you, with gracefulness, as
well as honor and decorum, so that conducting herself according to your commandments
and educating the members (of her body) toward self-control, she may attain your eternal
benefits together with the one who binds her (head) up. In Jesus Christ our Lord, with
whom to you belongs glory together with the most holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now
and ever (and unto the ages of ages).]

The manuscript evidence does not provide any indication concerning the partic-
ulars of the performance of this rite, such as the occasion and circumstance for
which it is intended. The manuscripts simply include the title and text of the prayer
(et̓ vή). This convention is typical among the earliest sacramentaries of both East
and West. This service book was primarily intended to provide a bishop or priest
with the words to pronounce during a religious service, leaving us to hypothesize
about the ritual aspects that are taken for granted by the scribes and users of these
books. Although no scholar has attempted a detailed study of the rite, the few who
have noted it have proposed different theories as to its origin and meaning.
The seventeenth-century Dominican Jacques Goar (d. 1653) was the first to pub-
lish a version of it, based on the twelfth-century manuscript Barberini gr. 329.30 He
translated the prayer as an oratio ad velandum et exornandum mulieris caput, that
is, a prayer for veiling and ornamenting a woman’s head. Goar placed the prayer
between his transcriptions of postbaptismal rites of tonsure and texts of the mar-
riage service. Thus, since Goar’s publication, the few scholars who have treated the
prayer have generally done so only as an appendage to their studies of either bap-
tism or marriage, even if, as I will argue, the rite was not originally linked to either
of these services. Already in the seventeenth century, readers of Goar associated

25
jόrlοm: Barberini gr. 336 omits.
26
jόrlοm . . . et̓ άqerτοm: Coislin 213 jόrlxͅ τxͅ ̃ rοì et̓ aqέrτxͅ .
27
jaì ̓eqάrliοm . . . et̓ pqέpeiam Coislin 213 omits.
28
pοkiτetralέmg: Coislin 213 pοqetοlέmg.
29
rt̀ m . . . at̓ τήm: Coislin 213 omits.
30
Jacques Goar, Euchologion sive rituale graecorum (Paris, 1642), 379. In the more widely dissem-
inated edition (Venice, 1730), 309.

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1076 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
the prayer with bridal veiling,31 an assumption likewise asserted into the twentieth
century by the early Byzantinist Aleksei Dmitrievsky.32
In 1989, however, the late Jesuit liturgiologist Miguel Arranz examined the prayer
in one of his many studies on Byzantine baptism and suggested it does not concern
veils for brides, or for nuns, for that matter.33 Instead, he noted that some manuscripts
place this text immediately after a rite for a man’s first shave.34 In Arranz’s view, the
prayer represents the text of a rite de maturité, that is, the female version of a rite of
passage into adulthood. In 2003, Jane Baun took up Arranz’s interpretation and in-
cluded it in a chapter that surveys various liturgical services related to coming of age
in Byzantium.35 In line with growing trends aimed at sifting liturgical sources for
evidence of social and cultural history,36 Baun began to probe the potential context
of this rite. Yet by her own admission, much remains elusive, and recent contribu-
tions on Byzantine adolescence have not dealt with the topic further.37 Who exactly
officiated and who underwent this rite? Was it indeed related to adolescence, or did
the Byzantines use it for other occasions, such as marriage or the profession of nuns?
How common was it? Where and when did it circulate? How does it relate to other
evidence for women’s dress at that time and place? Only a more comprehensive

31
For example, four decades later, Heinrich Christoph von Hochenau (d. 1719) presumed the prayer
was associated with customs of bridal veiling and thus published its Latin translation in a book ded-
icated to marriage: Heinrich Christoph von Hochenau, De benedictione nuptiarum commentatio
(Altdorf, 1685), 221.
32
In his collection of euchology manuscripts, Dmitrievsky noted three additional medieval sources
containing this prayer, Sinai Gr. 959, Sinai Gr. 962, and Coislin 213. See Dmitrievsky, Описание
литургических рукописей, 57, 65, 999. The index of his volume places the prayer within the block
of nuptial rites.
33
Arranz, “Les sacrements,” 22–62, at 57–58, 61.
34
Arranz, 54–57. We might add that the pairing of this prayer with that for a man’s first shave also
appears in manuscripts not considered by Arranz, such as the unedited twelfth-century euchology BnF
gr. 392, fols. 123v–125r.
35
Baun, “Coming of Age in Byzantium,” 131–34.
36
Specifically for the Byzantine religious world, this trend was anticipated in 1989 by Eve Levin,
“The Trebnik as a Source for Social History,” in Studies of Medieval South Slavic Manuscripts: Pro-
ceedings of the 3rd International Hilandar Conference Held from March 28 to 30, 1989, ed. Pavle Ivic ́
(Belgrade, 1995), 189–93. See also Robert Taft, Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines
Saw It (Berkeley, 2006). More recently, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has funded a project entitled
“Daily Life and Religion: Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History,” Project Number
P28219-G25. Initial insights from this project are found in Claudia Rapp et al., “Byzantine Prayer
Books as Sources for Social History and Daily Life,” in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik
67 (2017): 173–211. On this trend among scholars of the medieval West, see Miri Rubin, “Liturgy’s
Present: How Historians are Animating a ‘New’ History of Liturgy,” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s:
Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan
Spinks (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 29–35.
37
The elusiveness of this rite is likewise affirmed by Despoina Ariantzi, who summarizes Baun’s dis-
cussion: Ariantzi, “Terminologische und sozialhistorische Untersuchungen zur Adoleszenz in Byzanz
(6.–11. Jahrhundert: Teil I; Theorien, Konzepte, narrative Quellen),” Jahrbuch der österreichischen
Byzantinistik 63 (2013): 1–31, at 8–9. Ariantzi’s recent edited volume on Byzantine adolescence makes
only a brief mention of the existence of the rite in the introduction, while no chapter in the volume—
including those dealing with dress—incorporate the evidence of this rite. See Despoina Ariantzi, ed.,
Coming of Age in Byzantium: Adolescence and Society (Berlin, 2018).

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1077
analysis and contextualization of the liturgical manuscripts can yield answers to
such questions.

Manuscript Sources

In order to properly situate the text of the rite alongside relevant other sources, we
must first establish where and when it was used. While it is difficult to assign a pre-
cise date of composition for liturgical texts, the prayer appears to be part of an early
layer of Byzantine liturgical practice that goes back prior to the oldest manuscripts.
The text is found already in the oldest euchology, the aforementioned Barberini
gr. 336, copied in the Calabrian periphery of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate
in the late eighth century (after October 787) and based partially on a prototype from
the imperial capital. The same service is found in other codices copied in both south-
ern Italy and Palestine, and it appears in the oldest surviving euchology written at
Constantinople itself, Coislin 213, copied in the year 1027 for the priest Strategios,
chaplain of the patriarchal oratories (et̓ jτήqia).38 In the following table, I list the
earliest euchology manuscripts that I have consulted for this study, which are the
oldest known extant texts of this liturgical book, most of which remain unedited.39

Table 1
Oldest Greek Euchology Manuscripts
Contains Hair
Manuscript Date Provenance Binding Rite?

Barberini gr. 336 late 8th c. Southern Italy (Calabria) Yes

Sinai NF/MG53 8th/9th c. Palestine No
Sinai gr. 957 early 10th c. Palestine No
RNB gr. 226 10th c. Southern Italy (Calabria) Yes
Vat. gr. 1833 10th c. Southern Italy No
RGB gr. 27 (Sev. 474) 10th c. Palestine No
Grottaferrata Gb IV 10th c. Southern Italy No
Grottaferrata Gb X 10th c. Southern Italy No
Grottaferrata Gb VII late 10th/early 11th c. Southern Italy No
Coislin 213 an. 1027 Constantinople Yes
Sinai gr. 958 11th c. Palestine No
Sinai NF/M10 11th c. Palestine Yes
Sinai gr. 959 11th c. Palestine Yes
Messina gr. 160 11th c. Southern Italy No
Grottaferrata Zd II 11th c. Southern Italy No

38
See Kalaitzidis, “Il pqerbύτeqος Στqaτήγiος.”
39
For an edition of the oldest extant euchology, see the above-cited work, Parenti and Velkovska,
Евхологий Барберини гр. 336. The manuscript Coislin 213 was included in the apparatus of Arranz’s
edition of Grottaferrata Gb I, which that author mistakenly dated to the eleventh century. For the edi-
tion, see Arranz, L’eucologio costantinopolitano. On the dating, see above, n. 12. For an edition of
Grottaferrata Gb VII, see Gaetano Passarelli, L’eucologio Cryptense Cb VII, Αmάkejτa Βkaτάdxm
36 (Thessaloniki, 1982).

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1078 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
Among these fifteen codices copied prior to the twelfth century, the rite is found in
five manuscripts, that is, precisely one-third of the sample.40 This is a relatively high
occurrence, considering the fragmented nature of some of these manuscripts. It is
worth pointing out that in the above sample, a liturgical rite as universal as the Eu-
charist is only found in ten manuscripts (two-thirds), while the widely celebrated rite
of marriage emerges in only nine euchologies (60 percent) of the same sample. Given
the early scholarly suggestion that the prayer was intended for marriage, it is also
worth underscoring that in the entire corpus of early sources, the prayer does not
appear once among texts of marriage, neither those of the church wedding service,
nor among the domestic nuptial prayers that are included in some manuscripts. The
“head-binding” prayer also appears across a broad geographic spectrum, including
Constantinople, southern Italy, and the Byzantine East, and thus likely was dissem-
inated from an influential liturgical center. It is possible that the rite spread from the
patriarchal church of the capital, given that it appears in the oldest euchology copied
at that city. The fact that it is missing from some of the earliest euchologies repre-
sentative of Palestinian liturgical practice would seem to further this theory.41
The appearance of this rite in the eighth-century Calabrian euchology Barberini
gr. 336 is significant. Scholars of Byzantine liturgy have conducted extensive textual
comparisons between this manuscript and the Coislin euchology of Constantinople.
Their analysis reveals that the Calabrian recension of the Byzantine rite cultivated
the liturgical heritage of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate to which it belonged,
all the while also maintaining and redacting liturgical traditions from the Middle
East that were likely first brought to southern Italy by immigrating hellenophone
refugees.42 Generally speaking, those rites that are contained in both the Barberini
euchology and the later Coislin euchology represent an early stratum of the Con-
stantinopolitan liturgical tradition, a theory substantiated by noneuchology sources,
including monastic typika (rule books), hagiographical accounts, and eyewitness
descriptions.

40
This table does not include manuscripts dated as eleventh or twelfth century.
41
In addition to those manuscripts included in the table, we can also note the absence of this rite in
the important twelfth-century Palestinian euchology, Sinai gr. 973. Future studies of Palestinian Geor-
gian, Syriac, and Arabic euchologies will hopefully shed more light on the adoption of this rite in the
Middle East.
42
The most updated study of the redactional history of the Barberini euchology can be found in
Parenti and Velkovska, Евхологий Барберини гр. 336, 27–65. A less expansive summary of some of
the methodological points can be found in English in Stefano Parenti, “Towards a Regional History
of the Byzantine Euchology of the Sacraments,” Ecclesia Orans 27 (2010): 109–21. The Barberini
euchology’s tendency to combine the Constantinopolitan tradition with local prayers (of Eastern ori-
gin) was highlighted in the doctoral dissertation of André Jacob. His methodological approach to Italo-
Byzantine euchologies was formative for the work of later liturgiologists, including Robert Taft and
Miguel Arranz. See André Jacob, “Histoire du formulaire grec de la liturgie de saint Jean Chrysostome”
(PhD diss., Université catholique de Louvain, 1968). See also his published article, Jacob, “La tradition
manuscrite de la liturgie de Saint Jean Chrysostome (VIIIe–XIIe siècles),” in Eucharisties d’Orient et
d’Occident, ed. Bernard Botte, Lex Orandi 47 (Paris, 1970), 107–38. For a bibliography on late antique
hellenophone immigration into southern Italy and its liturgical impact there, see Gabriel Radle, “The Li-
turgical Ties between Egypt and Southern Italy: A Preliminary Investigation,” in Rύnayiς kavοlikή:
Beiträge zu Gottesdienst und Geschichte der fünf altkirchlichen Patriarchate für Heinzgerd Brakmann
zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Diliana Atanassova and Tinatin Chronz (Münster, 2014), 617–32.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1079
While it is risky to speak with certainty about an original provenance for our
“head-binding” rite, the fact that it appears in both the Barberini euchology and
the Coislin euchology is noteworthy, as it increases the likelihood that Calabria
adopted the prayer from the Constantinopolitan tradition, thus suggesting an early
use of this rite at the capital before the Barberini euchology was copied. Regardless
of the rite’s birthplace, the earliest euchologies indicate that the rite had spread to
diverse regions by the end of the first millennium. Furthermore, the earliest eucholo-
gies that contain this prayer were produced for both aristocratic circles as well as
provincial parishes. Therefore, our rite for binding up a woman’s head was not a
marginal rite of a single region or class of the Byzantine world, but rather one with
which many Byzantines were familiar.
It should be noted that, unlike other rites of passage, this service does not seem to
have assumed a major place within formal court ceremonial of the late first millen-
nium. The famous tenth-century manual of Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos,
the Book of Ceremonies (De ceremoniis), contains intricate instructions for proto-
col surrounding sacramental rites of the individual members of the imperial family,
such as the rite of marriage or the first cutting of a child’s hair.43 While a euchology
presents texts and instructions for a given rite’s officiant—which in the palatine
context would typically be the patriarch—the Book of Ceremonies provides extra-
liturgical indications, such as the order of processions to and from the chapel, the
accompanying acclamations, and the order of the celebratory banquets. The lack
of any indication for a ritual binding of a woman’s hair in the De ceremoniis should
caution us from presuming that it was celebrated throughout the imperial court when
this manual was composed. At the same time, we cannot argue this point ex silentio,
especially since the rite may have taken place within a private context.
We should also note that this rite dramatically fell in use over time. In contrast
to the prayer’s appearance in some of the earliest extant euchologies, a large per-
centage of later Byzantine manuscripts do not contain it. Among the twenty-eight
euchology manuscripts dated from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries consulted
for this study, I could locate the prayer in only four sources, that is, only 14 percent.
Among late Byzantine euchologies, the prayer is even rarer. For example, the man-
uscript collection of the Ivan Dujč ev Center in Sofia contains nineteen euchologies
and miscellanies dated between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of
which were likely copied in the region between Constantinople and Thessaloniki.44
Yet only one of these books includes the rite for female head binding.45 Furthermore,
the rite was never incorporated into the early Greek printed editions of the euchology

43
See Constantine Porphyrogennetos, The Book of Ceremonies, ed. Ann Moffatt and Maxeme Tall
(Canberra, 2012), 196–202, 207–16, 379–80, 620–22.
44
See Dorotei Getov, A Catalogue of Greek Liturgical Manuscripts in the “Ivan Dujč ev Centre for
Slavo-Byzantine Studies,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 279 (Rome, 2007). Among these manu-
scripts, the euchology Sofia, Ivan Dujč ev Centre, MS gr. 237 contains quires of both the thirteenth
and fifteenth centuries, and the collection also includes a late euchology of the eighteenth century, Ivan
Dujč ev Centre gr. 45.
45
The prayer is found in the fourteenth-century euchology, Ivan Dujč ev Centre, gr. 236 (fols. 113r–
114r), on which see Getov, A Catalogue of Greek Liturgical Manuscripts, 323. The redaction of the
prayer in this manuscript is that of Coislin 213.

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1080 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
made at Venice in the sixteenth century.46 Thus, we note a steady decline in the use of
the rite until its eventual disappearance. The fact that the rite is best represented by
some of the oldest extant euchologies, including the Barberini euchology, urges us
to seek its original context before these sources were copied, namely, within the early
Byzantine period.

Analysis of the Text

While the manuscripts do not describe the rite, certain aspects are discernable.
Since it is found in a euchology, there can be no doubt that the rite was officiated
by a cleric, namely a bishop or priest. The text also alludes to an adjunct female of-
ficiant who performs the actual binding up of the woman’s hair. This is apparent in
the priest’s invocation to bless the female subject of the rite, as well as “the one who
binds her up,” given in the feminine (rt̀ m τgͅ ̃ a̓ madgmούrgͅ at̓ τήm).47 Since the rite
originally stems from the early Byzantine period, a deaconess could be a tempting
candidate for this role, given that deaconesses held ritual functions in Constantino-
ple at this time. Interestingly enough, the later redaction of this prayer excludes this
reference beginning from the eleventh century, precisely when the last remnants of a
female diaconate ceased to operate.48
However, a commemoration of a deaconess would represent a liturgical hapax,
as medieval Greek sacramental texts do not feature public prayers for individual
liturgical ministers, save for the periodic supplications on behalf of the local bishop.49
It is far more likely that the woman referenced here as assisting in binding up the
subject’s hair was a personal sponsor of the woman undergoing the rite, perhaps

46
For a list of editions produced in the sixteenth century, see Evro Layton, The Sixteenth Century
Greek Book in Italy: Printers and Publishers for the Greek World, Library of the Hellenic Institute of
Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies 16 (Venice, 1994), 142. Cf. the shorter list compiled by Anselm
Strittmatter, “Notes on the Byzantine Synatpe,” Traditio 10 (1954): 51–108, at 77 n. 59. Note that
no copies of the 1526 editio princeps are known to survive, although later editions are presumably based
on that edition. Already in the nineteenth century, it was noted that surviving copies of the 1526 edition
could not be located. See Émile Legrand, Bibliographie hellénique ou description raisonnée des ouvrages
publiés en grec par des Grecs aux XVe et XVIe siècles, 4 vols. (Paris, 1885–1906), 1:195.
47
̓ madgmούrgͅ ), is not attested anywhere else in
The substantival participle, given here in the dative (τgͅ ̃ a
the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (henceforth TLG). Our reading of the line as referring to a female indi-
vidual who is dressing the hair of the subject accords with the interpretation of Arranz, “Les sacrements,”
58, which was in turn affirmed by Baun, “Coming of Age,” 132. In contrast, the most recent edition of
the Barberini euchology includes a Russian translation that interprets τgͅ ̃ a ̓ madgmούrgͅ not as a woman,
but as the object for covering the hair (платком). See Parenti and Velkovska, Евхологий Барберини гр.
336, 227. However, the context of the line, which asks for the eternal benefits of God, is more applicable
for an animate individual than for an object of dress. Furthermore, if the prayer here referred to an item
of dress, one would expect a proper substantive without the need for the accusative personal pronoun
at̓ τήm.
48
See Cipriano Vagaggini, “The Ordination of Deaconesses in the Greek and Byzantine Tradition,”
in Women Deacons? Essays with Answers, ed. Phyllis Zagano (Collegeville, 2016), 100–43; Robert F.
Taft, “Women at Church in Byzantium,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 27–87, at 63–64.
49
The exception of course being rites of ordination, on which see Stefano Parenti, “Ordinations in the
East,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies, vol. 4: Sacraments and Sacramentals, ed. Anscar Chupungco
(Collegeville, MN, 2000), 205–16, and bibliography therein.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1081
a mother, older sister, or other role model. Thus this liturgical service could have
played a role in solidifying bonds of physical or spiritual kinship, similar to the so-
cial dynamics of baptismal sponsorship.50 The inclusion of a sponsor here aligns
well with liminal life phases across cultures, where a sponsor can serve as a model
of the state into which a subject is being initiated and can help to allay the subject’s
apprehensions about her own entry into that stage of life.
The early manuscript sources do not indicate the location in which the rite took
place. While the church building was the primary space for liturgical services, the
use of the euchology book was not isolated to that building. Prayers for blessing a
house or a flock of sheep make that point clear enough.51 Even some blessings that
came to be associated with the church building, like the sacrament of marriage,
were at one time celebrated by clergy within a domestic setting.52 Since the prayer
here primarily concerns an individual subject as opposed to the corporate Chris-
tian body, it is plausible that some women underwent this rite within the confines
of their home, although we should avoid presuming uniform practice. Furthermore,
comparison with the medieval West reveals that some rather domestic coming-of-
age rituals, such as the first shaving of a young man’s beard, could be performed
in a church building.53
It is also not immediately clear from the title of the prayer what exactly the rite
intends to do with the woman. The oldest texts indicate that it is for “binding
up” a woman (Εt̓ vg̀ ei̓ ς τὸ a̓ madήrarhai γtmaij̃ a), while later versions from the
eleventh century explicate that this refers to her head (jeuakήm). Passages within
the prayer clearly indicate that the rite concerns a woman’s hair, although there
is no clear indication in the text what exactly the female attendant does with the sub-
ject’s hair during this rite. An analysis of the prayer alongside other late antique
Christian sources—both literary and visual—will provide clarity on this and several
other issues.
The prayer consists in a classical two-part orational format that scholars of liturgy
typically term the “anamnesis” (from a ̓ mάlmgriς, “remembrance”) and “epiclesis”

50
See Ruth Macrides, “The Byzantine Godfather,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11 (1987):
139–62.
51
Parenti and Velkovska, Евхологий Барберини гр. 336, section 183. On the latter rite, see André
Jacob, “La prière pour les troupeaux de l’euchologe Barberini: Quelques remarques sur le texte et
son histoire,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 77 (2011): 471–86.
52
The description of the 582 wedding service of Emperor Maurice and Constantina by Theophylactos
Simocatta states that the nuptial service was presided over by the patriarch and that it occurred in a large
inner room (e̓ m τxͅ ̃ leγάkxͅ hakάlxͅ ) near the hall known as the Augusteus (Αt̓ γοtrτaiο̃ ς), not in the nearby
palatine oratory of Saint Stephen. See Immanuel Bekker, ed., Theophylacti Simocattae Historiarum
libri octo (Bonn, 1834), 51. On this imperial marriage service, see Michael Zheltov, “Вступление в
брак: библейское осмысление и церковное чинопоследование,” in Таинства Церкви: Материалы
подготовительных семинаров международной богословской конференции Русской Православной Церкви
“Православное учение о церковных Таинствах” (Moscow, 2007), 198–206, at 204–5. For the domestic
ecclesiastical marriage ritual among Byzantine Christians outside the imperial context, see Gabriel Radle,
“The Development of Byzantine Marriage Rites as Evidenced by Sinai Gr. 957,” Orientalia Christiana
Periodica 78 (2012): 133–48, at 142–43, and notes.
53
The Bobbio missal (BnF lat. 13246, fol. 280v) includes a Benedictio super eum qui in aeclesia pri-
mis tunditur. See E. A. Lowe, The Bobbio Missal: A Gallican Mass-Book (London, 1920), 169. On
early medieval liturgical barbatoria, see Yitzhak Hen, “The Early Medieval Barbatoria,” in Medieval
Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin (Princeton, 2009), 21–24.

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1082 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
(from ̓epίjkgriς, “invocation”).54 The anamnesis of a prayer brings to mind exam-
ples of God’s past intervention in history, while the epiclesis requests that God make
a similar concrete intervention regarding a specific exigency in the present moment.
In the text presented here, the two parts hinge at the line “you, O master of all
things” (at̓ τός, dέrpοτa τx̃ m a̔ pάmτxm). Both parts of this prayer contain a rich rep-
ertoire of biblical citations and allusions dealing with New Testament theological
concepts and issues of womanhood, sexuality, and dress.
The anamnesis first highlights how the paschal mystery of Christ opens the pos-
sibility of salvation to all humans, summarized in Galatians, “For as many of you as
were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, nei-
ther slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Je-
sus” (Gal. 3.27–28).55 Given that the rite specifically concerns women, it would ap-
pear the composer sought to emphasize this equality of the sexes in terms of the
potential for salvation. The prayer also exhibits Pauline dependence in its citation
of the first letter to Timothy, which invites women to adorn themselves with mod-
esty and sobriety (leτà aἴdοtς jaì rxuqοrύmgς), not through luxurious apparel
but by good works (di᾽ ἔqγxm a ̓ γahx̃ m) (1 Tim. 2.9–10).
The strongest biblical reference in the prayer, however, is the famous passage
from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which admonishes women to offer prayer
and prophesy with their heads covered: “Any man who prays or prophesies with
something on his head disgraces his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies
with her head uncovered (a ̓ jaτajakύpτxͅ ) disgraces her head—it is one and the
same thing as having her head shaved. For if a woman will not cover her head, then
she should cut off her hair” (1 Cor. 11.4–16).56 Few Pauline passages have gener-
ated as much debate in contemporary biblical studies.57 However, one thing is agreed
upon by scholars: women at Corinth actively participated in prayer at liturgical

54
On this common orational division, attested widely in both Christian and non-Christian prayers,
see for example Cesare Giraudo, Eucaristia per la chiesa: Prospettive teologiche sull’eucaristia a partire
dalla “lex orandi” (Rome, 1989), 382–517. Note, however, that there has been much scholarly debate
with regard to the application of the bipartite division onto texts of the Eucharistic anaphora.
55
Cf. Col. 3.11.
56
Translation of the Revised Standard Version.
57
For interpretations that view this passage as part of a power struggle between Paul and Corinthian
women, see Antoinette Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s
Rhetoric (Minneapolis, 1995), 220–23; Anna Miller, Corinthian Democracy: Democratic Discourse
in 1 Corinthians, Princeton Theological Monograph 220 (Eugene, OR, 2015), 115–53. On Corinthian
women as radical sexual ascetics and the primary interlocutors of the passage, see Margaret MacDon-
ald, “Women Holy in Body and Spirit: The Social Setting of 1 Corinthians 7,” New Testament Studies
36 (1990): 161–81. For scholarly attempts to situate this passage as an affirmation of women, see Alan
Padgett, “The Significance of ’anti in 1 Corinthians 11:15,” Tyndale Bulletin 45 (1994): 181–87;
Padgett, “Paul on Women in the Church: The Contradictions of Coiffure in 1 Corinthians 11.1–
16,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 20 (1984): 69–86; Jerome Murphy-O’Conner,
“Sex and Logic in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42 (1980): 482–500; Murphy-
O’Conner, “1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Once Again,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 50 (1988): 265–74. See
also the influential interpretation in Elizabeth Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Re-
construction of Christian Origins (New York, 1999), 226–30. For theories on Paul’s relationship to the
female body, see also Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, 1995), 239–51; Lucy Peppiatt,
Women and Worship at Corinth: Paul’s Rhetorical Arguments in 1 Corinthians (Eugene, 2015), 21–65.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1083
gatherings, yet Paul enjoins them to do so with their hair covered.58 The inclusion of
this passage within the prayer could tempt us to assume that the rite under consid-
eration is primarily concerned with women covering their heads during church ser-
vices.59 On the other hand, no other portion of the prayer betrays such an interest.
Rather, the epiclesis connects the subject’s assumption of a head ornament to her
general abiding by the commandments and the education of her body toward self-
control, concerns that would take on particular force within the context of a rite
for unmarried women who had reached puberty. An investigation of early Christian
writing reveals that several influential authors used the passage from Corinthians in
support of their admonitions for women, both married and unmarried, to cover their
heads not only at prayer, but as a general rule of dress.

Female Hair Coverage in Early Christian Texts

In the early third century, Tertullian composed his treatise On the Veiling of Vir-
gins, originally in Greek, although only the subsequent Latin translation survives. It
represents an exceptionally extensive treatment on the topic among extant early
Christian writings. Tertullian uses Paul’s epistle to defend head coverings as norma-
tive for all Christian women, both married and unmarried. He claims that in his day,
unmarried Christian women covered their heads throughout “Greece and certain of
its barbaric provinces.”60 Tertullian advocates that a girl begin to veil her head
“from the time when she begins to be self-conscious, and to awake to the sense of
her own nature and to emerge from the virgin’s (sense), and to experience that novel
(sensation) which belongs to the succeeding age.”61 He adds that the awakening of a
woman’s sexual sense is tied to menarche, “For a virgin ceases to be a virgin from
the time that it becomes possible for her not to be one. And accordingly, among Is-
rael, it is unlawful to deliver one to a husband except after the attestation by blood
of her maturity.”62
Tertullian develops a long rationale for the covering of Christian women’s hair.
While he warns that men—including close kin—are imperiled by exposure to the
female body,63 many of his arguments highlight the perceived benefit of veils to

58
Was this because Paul did not intend to place emphasis on veiling outside the church assembly? Or
was it because women were removing their normal head coverings in the church assembly? Tertullian
complains against women who unveil in church, all the while wearing veils in public and among non-
Christians. See the discussion below. On the likelihood of Corinthian Christian women wearing veils in
public outside the context of the Christian assembly, see, for example, the discussion in Peter Brown,
The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York,
2008), 80–81.
59
This possibility was suggested by Baun, “Coming of Age,” 134.
60
Tertullian, De virginibus velandis 2.1, CCSL 2:1210; English translation in The Ante-Nicene Fa-
thers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, vol. 4, Tertullian, Part Fourth;
Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. Alexander Roberts and James
Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI, 1989), 27–37.
61
Tertullian, De virginibus velandis 11.1, CCSL 2:1220.
62
Tertullian, De virginibus velandis 11.2, CCSL 2:1220.
63
Tertullian, De virginibus velandis 16.3, CCSL 2:1225: “veil your head: if a mother, for your sons’
sakes; if a sister, for your brethren’s sakes; if a daughter, for your fathers’ sakes. All ages are periled in
your person.” In chapter 7, Tertullian also alludes to a potential peril for angels: “so perilous a face . . .

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1084 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
the female wearers themselves. In a rather graphic expansion of the Sermon on the
Mount’s admonition against committing adultery with the eyes (Matt. 5.28), Ter-
tullian describes the veil as armor that protects a woman from being “penetrated
by the gaze” of men. It also shields a woman against the temptation to please men
with her body and serves as a defense against scandal, suspicion, and envy. The veil
is such an emblem of modesty for Tertullian that he likens its use to the covering
of female genitals.
Although Tertullian casts his understanding of veils as moral armor within a
Christian vocabulary, he echoes pre-Christian understandings of head coverings as
defensive structures. In ancient Greek, the word jqήdelmοm commonly refers to a
woman’s veil as well as to a city’s battlements. It is also a term employed for a wine
stopper, an object associated with the female sexual anatomy.64 Thus, “breaking
through a city’s walls” or “removing a woman’s veil” were euphemisms for sexual
intercourse.65 For many ancient Greeks, the covering of a woman’s head limited vi-
sual access to her body and in turn signified that sexual access to it was limited.66
Likewise at Rome, Varro alludes to similar ideas of sexual (in)accessibility being ex-
pressed through the dressing of the head when he writes that some Romans associ-
ated the binding up of a married woman’s hair with woolen bands (vittae) as em-
blematic of a protective citadel tower.67
Tertullian’s expansive treatment of this topic implies that Christian women were
not universally covering their heads in North Africa at his time. This corresponds to
a general loosening of social norms for veiling in the Roman world that set in around
the age of Augustus.68 Tertullian pleads with his female audience to counteract what

which has cast stumbling-stones even so far as heaven.” On this topic, see also Martin, The Corinthian
Body, 242–47.
64
See the discussion in Lorenzo F. Garcia, Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad, Hellenic
Studies Series 58 (Washington, DC, 2013), chapter 3, available online at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn
-3:hul.ebook:CHS_GarciaL.Homeric_Durability_Telling_Time_in_the_Iliad.2013 (last accessed 1 June
2019).
65
Garcia, Homeric Durability, chapter 3.
66
The use of veils as symbols of sexual unexploitability goes back as far as the Middle Assyrian Em-
pire. See Assyrian law 40 (tablet A) in Theophile Meek, “The Middle Assyrian Laws,” in Ancient Near
Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James Pritchard (Princeton, 1969), 180–88, at 183.
See also the trial by ordeal described in Num. 5. For the history of female veiling in ancient Greece, see
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Swansea, 2003).
67
Varro, De lingua latina, ed. and trans. Ronald Kent (Cambridge, MA, 1938), 1:308–11 (7.44). For
further context on bound and loose hair in the Mediterranean world in the first century, see Charles H.
Cosgrove, “A Woman’s Unbound Hair in the Greco-Roman World, with Special Reference to the Story
of the ‘Sinful Woman’ in Luke 7:36–50,” Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 675–92.
68
As Elaine Fantham has noted, traditional norms in Roman women’s headgear declined by the age
of Augustus, when we find many funerary depictions of married women with their hair unveiled:
Elaine Fantham, “Covering the Head at Rome: Ritual and Gender,” in Roman Dress and the Fabrics
of Roman Culture, ed. Jonathan Edmonson and Alison Keith (Toronto, 2008), 158–71. In a represen-
tative sample of 113 funerary monuments from Italy (first century BC–first century AD), Lisa Hughes
identifies veils on fifty-nine percent of women. See Lisa Hughes, “Unveiling the Veil: Cultic, Status, and
Ethnic Representations of Early Imperial Freedwomen,” Material Religion 3 (2007): 218–41, at 227.
See also Elizabeth Bartman, “Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment,” American Journal
of Archaeology 105 (2001): 1–25, at 9–11. On methods of styling women’s hair at Rome, see also the
creative work of Janet Stephens, “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)pins and Needles,” Journal
of Roman Archaeology 21 (2008): 110–32.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1085
he views as laxity in dress habit. From his criticisms, we gather that some women
removed their veils in particular circumstances, such as when attending church (a
phenomenon that existed in first-century Corinth), while other women only covered
their hair partially.69 On the Veiling of Virgins provides a valuable description of dis-
tinct hairstyles. Tertullian characterizes some women as binding their hair up with
turbans (mitris) or woolen bands (lanis), while others covered only the top of their
head with small linen coifs (modice linteolis).70 All these solutions fall short for Ter-
tullian, who argues that a proper veil should cover the entire top of the head, together
with the ears and neck.71
Tertullian’s treatise was written in the early third century in North Africa at a
time when he was attracted by—if not already a follower of—the radical ethics of
Montanism.72 We must be cautious therefore in reading his opinions about female
hair coverage as representative of our Byzantine liturgical rite. Nevertheless, On
the Veiling of Virgins resonates with some of the same concerns manifest in the Byz-
antine ritual under examination here. While there is certainly no direct connection
between the rigid views of Tertullian and the Byzantine rite, both seem to be partic-
ipating in a broad intertextual web of ideas about women’s hair in the late antique
world. First, the ancient understanding of a head covering as moral armor is en-
countered within the prayer, which links the act of covering the head with being
“fully armed” (jahxpkirlέmai) in faith.73 Second, Tertullian’s idea that covering
the head should accompany the awakening of a girl’s sexual sense at puberty is like-
wise echoed in the Byzantine prayer, which refers to the woman “educating the mem-
bers (of her body) toward self-control” (τà lέkg pqὸς rxuqοmirlὸm paidaγxγοt̃ra),
implying—like Tertullian—that modesty through keeping female hair ordered and
covered is correlated to control of sexual passions.
While we do not possess any equivalent treatise on veiling from a Christian au-
thor in the eastern Mediterranean, we find similar concerns echoed throughout
many texts. In his Pedagogue, Clement of Alexandria devotes substantial attention
to the topic of dress, including issues of both men’s and women’s hair. He writes that
a modest Christian woman should not spend time fixing her hair in decorative tresses,

69
Considering that veiling rules were presumably laxer in the domestic context, it is perhaps not sur-
prising that sometimes a woman who normally veiled in public removed her head covering in the in-
timate surroundings of her ecclesial community. However, Tertullian’s rigid strictures do not seem to
have permitted any relaxing of veiling even in the home. See the text cited in n. 63. See also the dis-
cussion in Peter Brown, The Body and Society, 80–81.
70
Tertullian, De virginibus velandis 17.1, CCSL 2:1225.
71
It is interesting to note that while he does not advocate facial veils for Christian women, Tertullian
voices admiration for the modesty of Arabian women, who allow visibility to one eye alone: Tertullian,
De virginibus velandis 17.2, CCSL 2:1226.
72
The piece could have been written between 208 and 213, when Tertullian was already a Montanist,
or during his “semi-Montanist” years, sometime between 202 and 207. On the dating of this text, see
Geoffrey D. Dunn, “Rhetoric and Tertullian’s De virginibus velandis,” Vigiliae Christianae 59 (2005):
1–30, at 25–29.
73
In her brief discussion of the prayer, Baun suggests that the arming of the maiden mentioned in the
text represents a positive contrast to the “negativity famously found in cranky church fathers such as
Tertullian”: Baun, “Coming of Age,” 134. On the contrary, an attentive reading of both the prayer and
Tertullian reveals there is much in common.

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1086 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
but simply pin it up.74 One might argue that the absence of any reference to a veil or
turban here implies that Clement did not view hair coverage as necessary, which
would be a rather liberal approach when compared with Tertullian. Still, if this were
the case, his would be a lone voice among extant early Christian writings on the topic.
The passage must also be read in context with Clement’s later Stromata, where he ad-
vises that a woman should “shut herself away as much as possible from the gaze of all
but her relatives.”75
The document known as the Didascalia apostolorum, originally composed in
Greek c. 230 in northern Syria, possibly by a bishop, alludes to some of the same
preoccupations about the exposure of women’s bodies, including their heads. The
author admonishes women not to dress their hair “with the hairstyle of a harlot,”
but instructs them, “when you walk in the street cover your head with your robe so
that your great beauty is concealed by your veiling.”76 When encouraging gender
separation at public baths, the author goes on to imply that body coverage in public
could even extend to the face. “If you conceal your face so that you may not be seen
by other men, how can you go naked in a bath with other men?”77
Into the fourth and fifth centuries, the topic of female hair coverage continues to
circulate. These texts do not just offer strong moral advice on dress, like Clement
and the Didascalia apostolorum, but, like Tertullian, they appeal to a high authority
to support their recommendations. In his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Co-
rinthians, Cyril of Alexandria goes so far as to refer to the covering of the female
head as part of natural law (uύrexς mόlοm).78 John Chrysostom, in his commentary
on this same Pauline passage, would likewise agree:

74
Clement of Alexandria, The Pedagogue 2.11, 62, ed. Claude Mondésert and Chantal Matray,
Clément d’Alexandrie: Le Pédagogue, Livre III, Sources Chrétiennes 158 (Paris, 1970), 12; English
translation in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, Fathers of the Second Century, ed. Alexander Roberts
and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, 1994), 286.
75
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.23 (146), ed. Alain Le Boulluec, Sources Chrétiennes 38 (Paris,
1954), 144; English translation in David G. Hunter, Marriage in the Early Church (Minneapolis,
1992), 49.
76
Didascalia apostolorum, 1.8 (3.26); Syriac text published by Paul de Lagarde, Didascalia
apostolorum Syriace (Leipzig, 1854), English translation here taken from Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The
“Didascalia apostolorum”: An English Version with Introduction and Annotation (Turnhout, 2009),
115.
77
Didascalia apostolorum, 1.9 (3.26); Stewart-Sykes, The “Didascalia apostolorum”, 115. The ref-
erence to covering the face, while not as common as admonitions to cover the hair, is nevertheless not
unique among late antique Christian sources. Writing at Rome in the early fifth century, Jerome attests
to a variety of dress habits for women, but also praises the woman who in public “veils all of her face
except her eyes, and only uses these to find her way.” See Jerome, Epist. 130 “To Demetrias,” chapter 18.
English translation in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Sec-
ond Series, vol. 6, St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York,
1893), 270. Ambrose in De poenitentia 1.14, ed. PL 16:487, encourages women (apparently here also the
unmarried) to use veils not only for placing over the head (caput), but also to obscure the face (vultus). See
the broader discussion of Ambrose on veiling in Tahmina Tariq, “Let Modesty Be Her Raiment: The
Classical Context of Ancient-Christian Veiling” in Implicit Religion 16 (2013): 493–506, at 501–504,
although one should be cautious not to presume that this specific passage is referring to the class of con-
secrated virgins.
78
See Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 11 in PG 74:880–84, at 881.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1087
Symbols many and diverse have been given both to man and woman; to him of rule, to her
of subjection: and among them this also, that she should be covered, while he has his head
bare. Now if these be symbols, you see that both err when they disturb the proper order,
and transgress the disposition of God, and their own proper limits, both the man falling
into the woman’s inferiority, and the woman rising up against the man by her outward ha-
biliments. For if the exchange of garments be not lawful, so that neither she should be clad
with a cloak, nor he with a mantle or a veil . . . much more is it unseemly for these things to
be interchanged.79

He goes on to specify that women should keep their head covered “with all care and
diligence” (leτ᾽ ̓epilekeίaς jaì rpοtdg̃ ς a̔ pάrgς), carefully wrapping it up on all
sides (a̓ jqibx̃ ς pάmτοhem peqierτάkhai).80
Chrysostom’s attention to this issue could have been partially motivated by his
reaction to female radical ascetics of his day. The popular stories of Paul’s disciple,
Thecla, describe her as cross-dressing, and the fourth-century Synod of Gangra in
Anatolia condemned Eustathian ascetic groups that both preached against mar-
riage and apparently encouraged women to dress as men.81 Regardless of his mo-
tives, Chrysostom, like Tertullian and Cyril, takes Paul’s passage and extends it
beyond the activity of prayer. A head covering assumes the status of a divinely or-
dained requisite for the female body.
It is particularly significant that this opinion was held by an archbishop of Con-
stantinople, even if these very words may have been penned while he was still in An-
tioch.82 Given that the liturgical manuscripts suggest that the rite for binding up a
woman’s hair had its origins in Constantinople in the early Byzantine period, it is
noteworthy that a fifth-century archbishop of that city believed that women’s hair
should be wrapped up and covered. If Chrysostom’s opinion on the matter was cul-
tivated in his local church, it is not difficult to imagine an environment in which a

79
John Chrysostom, In epistolam ad Corinthos, Hom. 26.3, ed. PG 61:216. Translation in Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 12, The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of
Constantinople, on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, ed. Talbot Chambers (Buffalo, NY,
1889), 151. An alternative translation is given in Judith L. Kovacs, 1 Corinthians: Interpreted by Early
Christian Medieval Commentators (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005), 180.
80
John Chrysostom, In epistolam ad Corinthos, Hom. 26.3, ed. PG 61:217.
81
See canon 13 of this synod. On the topic of transvestite Christian women in late antiquity, see, for
example, Stephen Davis, “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian
Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2002): 1–36; Ma-
ria E. Doerfler, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Crossdressing, Masculinity, and the Social Body in Late
Antiquity,” in Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity, ed. Alicia Batten, Carly Daniel-Hughes,
and Kristi Upson-Saia (Burlington, VT, 2014), 37–51, and bibliography therein. On Eustathian dress,
see also Arthur Urbano, “‘Dressing a Christian’: The Philosopher’s Mantle as Signifier of Pedagogical
and Moral Authority,” in Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Stud-
ies Held in Oxford 2011, vol. 10, The Genres of Late Antique Literature, Foucault and the Practice of
Patristics, Patristic Studies in Latin America, Historica, ed. Markus Vinzent, Studia Patristica 62 (Leu-
ven, 2013), 213–29, at 224–25. Note that scholarly descriptions of late antique figures as “transves-
tite” or “cross-dressed” are typically meant to describe dress habit alone and are not meant as a his-
torical claim on a past individual’s self-identification. Cf. Roland Betancourt’s review of Byzantine
Matters, by Averil Cameron, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34 (2016): 401–4, at 404.
82
For a review of scholarship on the provenance of the 1 Corinthians homily series, see Wendy Mayer,
The Homilies of St John Chrysostom: Provenance; Reshaping the Foundations, Orientalia Christiana
Analecta 273 (Rome, 2005), 98–99, 182–83, 224.

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1088 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
formal liturgical rite would develop for young women to adopt this dress norm at
puberty. But what exactly is the dress norm advocated by the Byzantine prayer?
The fact that the prayer prefers to use the verb “bind up” (a ̓ madέx) instead of
the verb more commonly used for “veil,” jaτajakύpτx, might induce us to hypoth-
esize that the rite is concerned only with pinning up the hair, as Clement of Alex-
andria discusses. This interpretation founders, however, when confronted with
the text’s own reference to the need for women to cover their hair (γtmaij ̃ eς jaτa-
jejaktllέmai τg̀ m jeuakήm) in contrast to men who leave their heads uncovered
(ἄmdqeς a ̓ jaτajakύpτxς τg̀ m jeuakήm). Furthermore, the prayer’s mention of a
symbolic ornament on the head representative of a moral life only takes on full
meaning when the rite itself involves an actual ornamental object being placed on
the head. While we certainly cannot project that a full veil, or maphorion, was nec-
essary to this rite, it does seem that the binding up process in our rite involves some
material object that acts as a cover for the hair—however complete or partial it may
have been.
We must also recall that words for “binding” and “covering” have a semantic flex-
ibility in the Greek language. One of the most commonly attested words for a head
covering in ancient Greek is the aforementioned substantive jqήdelmοm, which liter-
ally means a “binder of the head,” stemming from the word “head” (jάqg) and the
verb “to bind” (dέx).83 Yet experts of ancient Greek dress warn us that the term
jqήdelmοm should not be translated as “headband,” since it is clear from Greek liter-
ature that the term often refers to a piece of cloth that functioned as a veil.84 Further-
more, the verb a ̓ madέx in the Byzantine prayer is also used in both ancient and Byzan-
tine Greek to refer to placing an object, typically a crown or wreath, on an individual’s
head.85 This usage of the word is attested in the late antique Constantinopolitan mi-
lieu that produced this rite, as evidenced in a number of Chrysostom passages that
employ a ̓ madέx in this sense.86 Thus, the placing of a textile covering on a woman’s
head here—whether a turban, snood, or veil—has linguistic resonances with the act
of glorifying an individual.
It is possible that our Byzantine liturgical rite is intentionally ambiguous, insisting
upon binding up an adolescent’s hair, all the while leaving open the possibility of
different dress practices for the actual coverage of her hair. This possibility is akin
to what Mireille Lee has observed about ancient Hellenic dress norms. The hair of
an ancient Greek adult woman was nearly always bound up, typically with fillets or
a snood, while, depending on the occasion and social circumstance, a woman could
also extend an additional textile over her head to increase her body’s concealment.87

83
Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 28.
84
Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 28. See also the entry “kredemnon” in Greek and Roman
Dress: From A to Z, ed. Liza Cleland, Glenys Davies, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (London, 2007), 106.
85
Henry Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by
Sir Henry Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie, 9th ed. reissued with revised supplement
(Oxford, 1996), 103.
86
See, for example, TLG 2026.006: Chrysostom, Ad Stagirium a daemone vexatum, ed. PG 47:432,
448, 471. For later usage at Constantinople, see TLG 2702.008, ed. Elizabeth Fisher, Michaelis Pselli
orationes hagiographicae (Stuttgart, 1994), 111 (4:234).
87
Mireille M. Lee, Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, UK, 2014), 158–60.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1089
The same was true in ancient Rome, where the palla could be extended over a
woman’s bound hair if she desired to increase coverage of her body in public.88
Scholars of late antique Egyptian dress habits have noted the same.89
For further context about the social meaning and practices implied by our litur-
gical rite, we can turn to other Byzantine sources, both literary and visual.

Context from other Literary Sources

In recent decades, medievalists have gone to great lengths to liberate Byzantine

women from the perceived chains of patriarchal texts that express a desire to limit
exposure of their bodies within society.90 Scholars have concentrated these efforts
on the topic of women’s movement within and outside the house. Angeliki Laiou,
and later Sir Steven Runciman, tore down the imagined walls of the Ottoman harem
that some had projected onto the Byzantine home and highlighted examples of
women contributing to societal life outside the house.91 This process reached its
apex with Alexander Kazhdan’s study, “Women at Home,” in which he argued that
sources that speak about the confinement of women follow a literary construct that
existed throughout Byzantium, and which did not correspond to the lives of many
Byzantine women.92 Far less attention, however, has been paid to the exposure of
women’s bodies through their dress habits. Independent movement outside the
house must not be equated with unrestricted dress norms for women, since it was
precisely the performance of modesty in her dress that often afforded a woman free-
dom to move among unrelated men in a manner that was socially acceptable.93
Literary sources reveal that Byzantines were generally concerned with keeping
women’s bodies—including their hair—ordered and covered. For example, the veil
features within Byzantine hagiography as a symbol of feminine modesty and self-
control. The Life of Pelagia from the fifth or sixth century describes that saint before

88
Norma Goldman, “Reconstructing Roman Clothing,” in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Ju-
dith Lynn Sebesta and Larisa Bonfante (Madison, WI, 2001), 213–40, at 228. See also Kelly Olson,
Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-presentation and Society (New York, 2008), 53–54. Compare with
our discussion above in n. 68.
89
See discussion below and n. 133.
90
One classic text for the isolation of Byzantine women is by Kekaumenos, the author of the Pre-
cepts and Anecdotes, who writes, “Keep your daughters confined (e̓ γjejkeirlέmai) like criminals.”
See the discussion in José Grosdidier de Matons, “La femme dans l’empire byzantin,” in Histoire
mondiale de la femme, ed. Pierre Grimal, 4 vols. (Paris, 1967), 3:11–43, at 27–31; Alexander Kazhdan,
“Women at Home,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 1–17, at 2. See also the description of the
seclusion of the ninth-century saint-empress Theophano by her father before her marriage in Eduard
Kurtz, Zwei griechische Texte über die hl. Theophano, die Gemahlin Kaisers Leo VI., Mémoires de
l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg, 8th ser., Classe Historico-Philologique 3/2
(St. Petersburg, 1898), 3.
91
Angeliki E. Laiou, “The Role of Women in Byzantine Society,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen
Byzantinistik 31 (1981): 233–60, at 241–53; Steven Runciman, “Women in Byzantine Aristocratic So-
ciety,” in The Byzantine Aristocracy, IX to XIII Centuries, ed. Michael Angold (Oxford, 1984), 10–
22, esp. 13, 15–16, 18.
92
Kazhdan, “Women at Home,” 2–10.
93
Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier,
1304–1589 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 81–82.

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1090 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
her conversion as not covering her head according to custom.94 Another instance is
the Life of Ioannikios, written about the year 847. The hagiographer, a certain Pe-
ter, describes how the saint heals a woman possessed by the spirit of fornication who
let her hair hang loose.95 While her sexual promiscuity is linked to her unbound hair,
she asks the saint to heal her precisely through the image of binding: “Lift from me
the heavy collar of fornication and bind me by your supplications with the bridle
of self-control” (ἆqοm a ̓ p᾽ ̓elοt̃ τὸm baqt̀ m jkοiὸm τg̃ ς pοqmeίaς jaì rxuqοrύmgς
ἅllari raiς̃ kiτaiς̃ peqίruiγnοm).96 In these texts, hair is a metonym for the person;97
its binding represents control of the human passions. This is echoed in the oldest
manuscripts of our adolescent rite, which entitle the prayer simply for “binding
up a woman,” without any need for explaining that hair is involved. It is worth not-
ing that these hagiographical texts refer to unmarried women, underscoring that
binding up the hair is intended for women in general and is not linked specifically
with marriage.
The use of the image of loose or uncovered hair is encountered in other literary
genres as well. In the historical writing of Niketas Choniates, we find the empress
Euphrosyne Doukaina described as “a monstrous evil,” a money-obsessed adulter-
ess who domineered her husband, Emperor Alexios III Angelos, and altered his de-
crees.98 In reference to her sexual impropriety, Choniates writes, “By dishonoring
the veil of modesty, she was hooted and whistled at and became a reproach to her hus-
band.”99 Here, the abandonment of the veil serves as a metaphor for Euphrosyne’s
adulteress behavior, and by extension, her insult to the oikoumene through shaming
the emperor. But just as references to women’s confinement in the home cannot be
applied in a blanket manner to Byzantine women at large, we must not necessarily
read literary constructs of veiling as an indication of a ubiquitous custom for women

94
See the discussion in Ruth Webb, “Salome’s Sisters: The Rhetoric and Realities of Dance in Late
Antiquity and Byzantium,” in Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (New
York, 1997), 119–48, at 131.
95
The Greek text of this life (BHG 936) was published by Joseph van den Gheyn in Acta Sanctorum
Novembris 2.1 (Brussels, 1894), 384–435. English translation and study of the text by Denis F. Sulli-
van, “Life of St. Ioannikios,” in Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Trans-
lation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, Byzantine Saints’ Lives in Translation 2 (Washington, DC, 1998), 243–
52. On the dating of this life, see Sullivan, 247. On the pmet̃la τg̃ ς pοqmeίaς in Greek hagiography, see
Alexander P. Kazhdan, “Byzantine Hagiography and Sex in the Fifth to Twelfth Centuries,” Dumbar-
ton Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 131–43, at 141.
96
Sullivan, “Life of St. Ioannikios,” 283. Greek text from van den Gheyn, 339A.
97
On hair as a metonym for the person, see Molly Myerowitz Levine, “The Gendered Grammar of
Ancient Mediterranean Hair,” in Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Re-
ligion, and Culture, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger (Berkeley, 1995), 76–130, at
85–86: “Particularly important for ritual is the fact that hair is the only prominent feature of the body
(fingernails and toenails are too small and transparent to be of comparable visual significance) which is
at the same time capable of painless amputation, infinite manipulation, and endless regeneration, what
anthropologists would call ‘a wasting asset.’ That is to say, if ritual is a game, then hair is the stuff par
excellence of game-playing, allowing us always to ‘have our cake and eat it, too’ as we modify, elab-
orate, and backtrack ad infinitum.”
98
O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. Harry J. Magoulis (Detroit, 1984), 252.
See also the discussion in Lynda Garland, Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium
AD 527–1204 (London, 1999), 213.
99
O City of Byzantium, trans. Magoulis, 213.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1091
to cover their hair,100 especially since the “loosening of a veil” is a double entendre as
old as Homer.101 At the same time, a trope functions precisely because of a broad cul-
tural referent. These metonymic and metaphorical uses of head covering are echoed in
literary references that describe Byzantine individuals as preoccupied with covering
the female body.
One place this can be observed is in manuals of dream interpretation. According
to the tenth-century anonymous compilation known as the Oneirocriticon of Achmet,
if a woman’s veil is forcefully stolen, damaged, or lost in a dream, some degree of evil
will befall her or her husband in real life.102 In contrast, if a woman dreams of wear-
ing a splendid veil, some good will come to one of her kin.103 Another passage in this
work suggests that a woman who dreams of walking around unveiled in public will
imminently lose her husband to death.104 Even if this Greek work largely represents
a Christian adaptation and translation of Arabic sources that purport to contain the
wisdom of dream interpretation from India, Persia, and Egypt, the text functioned
within medieval Greek communities and reveals their interests and worries.105
Middle Byzantine authors also resorted to describing a woman’s modesty in her
bodily exposure as a way of complimenting her virtue.106 This often extended to the
coverage of the head. In his Encomium for His Mother, the eleventh-century poly-
math Michael Psellos describes how his mother once helped a prostitute abandon
her lifestyle. He gives his own testimony to the apparent genuineness of the woman’s
conversion specifically by describing her dress: “for she kept her eyes lowered and
veiled her entire face with modesty” (τό τe γà q ὄlla jaτήmeγje jaì nύlpam τὸ

100
Jennifer Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress (New York, 2005), 100; Baun,
“Coming of Age,” 133.
101
Garcia, Homeric Durability, chapter 3.
102
See Achmet, Oneirocriticon 263, trans. Steven Oberhelman, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A
Medieval Greek and Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams (Lubbock, TX, 1991), 229.
103
Achmet, Oneirocriticon 263, trans. Oberhelman, 229.
104
“A married woman came and consulted the dream interpreter saying, ‘I saw that I was walking
unveiled in public (a ̓ rjέparτος ̓em lέrxͅ kaοt̃ ). What will happen to me?’ He asked, ‘Do you have a
husband?’ She said, ‘Yes, I do, but he is abroad.’ He answered: ‘You will not see him <again>.’ Indeed
things happened as he said, because her husband died abroad.” See Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine
Book on Dream Interpretation: The “Oneirocriticon of Achment” and Its Arabic Sources (Leiden,
2002), 390–91 and n. 38. Mavroudi notes that she could not locate a parallel for this text in the Arabic
dream books she analyzed. We should admit that one could argue a more general translation as “walk-
ing in public uncovered” (i.e., not necessarily referring to a veil per se). At the same time, the passage in
question immediately follows the aforementioned chapter dealing with a woman’s veil being stolen or
damaged.
105
On the use of this text for understanding Byzantine culture, see Maria Mavroudi, “Byzantine and
Islamic Dream Interpretation: A Comparative Approach to the Problem of ‘Reality’ vs ‘Literary Tra-
dition,’” in Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Christine Angelidi and George T. Calofonos
(Farnham, UK, 2014), 161–86, esp. 177–85.
106
Michael Psellos states that his mother “disdained the gaze of men” (a ̓ qqέmxm jaτauqοmήrara
ὄψexς), while the twelfth-century Byzantine princess Anna Komnene likewise alludes to her own mother’s
modesty in body exposure. For Psellos, see Konstantinos N. Sathas, Μeraixmijg̀ bibkiοhήjg, vol. 5
(Paris, 1876), 30. For Anna Komnene, see Diether Reinsch and Athanasios Kambylis, Annae Comnenae
Alexias, vol. 1, Prolegomena et textus, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 40/1 (Berlin, 2001), 94
(3.3.4). Cf. the discussion in Timothy Dawson, “Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure: The Parameters of
Women’s Dress in Byzantium, A.D. 1000–1200,” in Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience, 800–
1200, ed. Lynda Garland (Aldershot, 2006), 41–76, at 61–63.

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1092 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
pqόrxpοm ai̓ dοi ̃ jaτejάktψe).107 References to facial coverage are quite rare,108 and
even Psellos himself implies that this woman could still be recognized on occasion in
public by former clients, cautioning us from reading this reference to veiling the face
too literally.109 Be that as it may, in the middle Byzantine period, the partial coverage
of women’s faces in public was not an altogether unknown phenomenon in Con-
stantinople. This is evident by the fact that Irene, daughter-in-law of Alexios I Kom-
nenos, was able to employ a face veil in the twelfth century as a legitimate method of
disguise during the Komnenian revolt.110
While extant texts reveal that coded meanings of dressing and covering the hair re-
mained strong into the middle Byzantine period, it is somewhat surprising that the li-
turgical rite for binding up (and covering) a young woman’s head would drop in usage
precisely at this time. No text provides a direct answer for the reasons behind this phe-
nomenon, but some suggest one possible explanation. In Psellos’s description of the
converted prostitute, it is noteworthy that he not only describes her as covering her
head. He goes on to make a second reference to veiling that seems tied to her regular
attendance at the liturgies: “she attended the sacred temples and kept her head cov-
ered” (heίοiς τe pqοrῄei maοiς̃ jaì τὴm jeuakg̀ m eἶvem t̔ pὸ jakύpτqaͅ ).111 Given that
he had already informed us of her tendency to veil, it would appear his reference here
is specifically to her veiling while at church, thus underscoring a particular emphasis
on veiling inside the church building.
We find confirmation from Psellos that veiling in church was considered more im-
portant, or at least more broadly applied, than standard hair coverage in public. In
his funeral oration for his deceased daughter, Styliane, he describes her religious zeal
and regular attendance at the liturgies, where she stood reverently and sang along
with the choir, having memorized all the psalms.112 But he goes on to point out
the sincerity of her devotion through a series of rhetorical questions with an implied
negative answer: “Did she have an eager disposition in ecclesiastical rites but no in-
terest in the mystical and sacred rituals? . . . Did she partake of the sacraments as a
pure and undefiled maiden or, perhaps, did partake of them but not reverently and
decorously and in an honorable manner suitable for a lady? Or did she do this too,
but without veiling herself appropriately (οt̓ j ̓epijakύllari d᾽et̓ rτόkxς), as befits a
maiden especially?”113

107
Anthony Kaldellis, ed. and trans., Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Fam-
ily of Michael Psellos, with contributions by David Jenkins and Stratis Papaioannou (Notre Dame,
2006), 74. See also Jeffrey Walker, “Michael Psellos: The Encomium of his Mother,” Advances in
the History of Rhetoric 8 (2005): 239–313, at 264. Greek text in Michele Psello, Autobiografia:
Encomio per la madre, ed. and trans. Ugo Criscuolo (Naples, 1989), 113.
108
See the example of the Didascalia apostolorum, discussed above, n. 77.
109
Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters, 74.
110
Reinsch and Kambylis, Annae Comnenae Alexias, 68 (2.5.8). See also the critical discussion in
Dawson, “Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure,” 62–63.
111
Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters, 74. Greek text in Michele Psello, Autobiografia,
ed. and trans. Criscuolo, 113.
112
Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters, 122.
113
Translation adapted from Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Dauthers, 122. Greek text found
in Sathas, Μεjaiqnikh̀ bibliοvήkh, 67. The Greek verb ̓epijakύpτx literally means “cover over,” but is com-
monly used to refer to veiling, including the related forms in 1 Cor. 11 and the liturgical rite under exam-
ination (γtmaij̃ eς jaτajejaktllέmai τg̀ m jeuakήm).

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1093
What is striking here is not that he puts emphasis on hair coverage at church,
which we already saw in his description of the converted prostitute. Rather, it is that
he provides us this important detail with respect to his daughter, a young girl who
died “before the age of marriage” (pqὸ ὥqaς γάlοt τeketτήraram), as the very title
of the funeral oration explicates.114 It is clear from Psellos’s other writings that his
notion of “before the age of marriage” specifically means before the time of pu-
berty.115 Yet elsewhere in the oration Psellos supports our theory that loose and ex-
posed hair was standard dress for young girls, since he describes his daughter’s hair
as “flowing down to her ankles,” while also being parted in the front and stylized
with hairpins that let it cascade down her temples “like a bunch of grapes.”116 In other
words, within Psellos’s Constantinople, coverage of hair in church appears to be im-
portant for both adult women and young girls. But while adult women covered their
heads also outside church as part of their regular public dress habits, his daughter had
a fully exposed head, styled with substantial loose and flowing hair.
The conclusion we may draw is that late antique Christian modesty norms for
women were largely maintained in Constantinople: adult women continued to bind
up and cover their hair in public, while young girls were not held to the same expec-
tation. At the same time, by Psellos’s day, a new dress norm had also come into play
specifically in church, where even prepubescent girls were expected to cover their
heads, an expectation not found in any of the patristic sources. In other words,
the use of a liturgical rite for binding up and covering the hair of a young woman
as a marker of her passage into maturity did not fall out of use because adult women
were abiding any less by this dress standard. On the contrary, the liturgical rite may
have lost currency precisely because in the liturgy itself, girls were already following
this norm prior to the onset of womanhood. Especially within an ecclesiastical con-
text, the liturgical rite would no longer have represented such a clear departure from
a girl’s outward appearance.

Context from Visual Evidence

While Byzantine texts attach importance to the binding and covering of the female
head, it is difficult to speak about concrete, universal dress habits for a civilization as
geographically widespread and long enduring as Byzantium. Dress in the medieval
world was not static, and Byzantium is no exception. Alongside concerns with mod-
esty there existed a “fashion system” according to which Byzantine women clothed
and ornamented their bodies based on considerations of style and taste.117 This flex-
ibility extended to the dressing of the head. Visual representations in frescoes, mosa-
ics, and illuminations help to underscore this point, although they also represent a

114
Sathas, Μεjaiqnikh̀ bibliοvήkh, 62.
115
In the court memorandum for breaking off the engagement of his adopted daughter to Elpidios,
Psellos describes his own original arrangement of the engagement thus: “(Psellos) did not wait for the
time of puberty when marriages and sexual relations are legally contracted.” See David Jenkins, “The
Court Memorandum (hypomnêma) Regarding the Engagement of his Daughter,” in Kaldellis, Mothers
and Sons, Fathers and Daughters, 139–56, at 148.
116
Sathas, Μεjaiqnikh̀ bibliοvήkh, vol. 5, 71, trans. Kaldellis, Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daugh-
ters, 125.
117
Ball, Byzantine Dress, 3.

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1094 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
methodological challenge for reading evidence of everyday life. Not only are they
selective in the types of women they represent (typically saints and aristocrats), but
Byzantine art continued to depict dress types long after they had disappeared from
general use.118
At the same time, art historians have identified ways in which images suggest ac-
tual dress customs of medieval Greek women. Their studies highlight that the man-
ners in which women dressed their heads changed over time and varied between the
regions of the Hellenic Mediterranean in which the Byzantine liturgical rite was
practiced. For example, while early Byzantine images suggest that women may fre-
quently have employed padded head rolls and figure-eight turbans, by the time of the
Fourth Crusade, many Constantinopolitan women wore a cylinder head wrap that
was sewn together and could be easily slipped on or off.119 Veil lengths also changed
over time.120 Heterogeneity among Christian women is a given throughout the east-
ern Mediterranean and even within individual regions. As Linda Safran has noted,
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century fresco images from Salento reveal a great variety
of female headgear. Although at least some of these images must reflect real customs
of the area, it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which differences in headdressing
may have stood for a distinct identity status, such as a woman’s age or her marital
status.121 Dress norms varied across social classes as well, a circumstance that cer-
tainly played out on the female head.122
Given that the Byzantine rite for binding up a young woman’s head was used
across different regions over the period of several centuries, it most certainly would
have been adapted to different dress norms depending on region and period. We
should therefore avoid associating this liturgical rite with a single manner of dressing
a Byzantine woman’s head. However, it would be a lost opportunity here if no men-
tion were made of at least some of the well-known Byzantine images that support our
theories and help contextualize some of the dress habits that may have coincided
with this liturgical rite. In the interest of space, it will suffice to review some examples
of the variety of ways in which Byzantine imagery relates to women’s hair in the early
and middle Byzantine periods during which this rite was practiced.
It should first be noted that early Christian art in both East and West generally
reinforces ecclesiastical injunctions for women to bind up and cover their hair.
118
On this methodological challenge, see, for example, Maria G. Parani, Reconstructing the Reality
of Images: Byzantine Material Culture and Religious Iconography (11th–15th Centuries) (Leiden,
2003), esp. 8–10, 100–107, 216, 228–29. See also the discussion in Mati Meyer, “On the Hypothetical
Model of Childbearing Iconography in the Octateuchs,” Dεlτίοn τh̃ ς Χrijτianikh̃ ς a̓ rxaiοlογikh̃ ς
ἑτairείaς 44 (2005): 311–18.
119
Dawson, “Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure,” 44–47. For terms used in Byzantine texts for var-
ious head coverings, see also Melita Emmanuel, “Some Notes on the External Appearance of Ordinary
Women in Byzantium: Hairstyles, Headdresses: Texts and Iconography,” Byzantinoslavica 56 (1995):
769–78, at 772–73.
120
Dawson, “Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure,” 45.
121
See Safran, The Medieval Salento, 73.
122
On Byzantine female court dress, see Ball, Byzantine Dress, 49–52. See, for example, the represen-
tation of Empress Zoe and her sister, Theodora, in the eleventh-century manuscript Sinai gr. 364 (fol. 3r),
in which both women have hanging locks: Iohannis Spatharakis, The Portrait in Byzantine Illuminated
Manuscripts (Leiden, 1976), 100. Compare with the enamel plaque of Michael VII and Maria at the Geor-
gian National Museum discussed in Kriszta Kotsis, “Mothers of the Empire: Empresses Zoe and Theo-
dora on a Byzantine Medallion Cycle,” Medieval Feminist Forum 48 (2012): 5–96, here figure 5.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1095

Fig. 2. Procession of women on baptistery wall from Dura Europos (c. 240–45), Yale Uni-
versity Art Gallery. See the online edition for a color version of this image.

Famous images of early Christian women wearing veils include frescoes from the
Roman catacombs and the house church of Dura Europos (Fig. 2).123 For the early
Byzantine period, when our rite seems to have first appeared, we have numerous
visual examples of women who cover their head. The Euphrasian basilica in Poreč
is an interesting case study, since it displays three different manners of headdress
in images of the Virgin Mary. At the Annunciation, Mary’s hair is bound up, and
a semitransparent veil covers the back of her head and wraps around her upper
body, all the while leaving a significant portion of the front of her hair exposed
(Fig. 3).
As Henry Maguire notes, the use of this type of veil on the Virgin Mary is so
unique that it does not appear to follow any artistic canon, and therefore may indeed
reflect one example of an actual late antique head covering.124 The exposure of fron-
tal, bound-up hair is likewise encountered in contemporaneous images of other
women. Examples include the female martyrs in the apse arch of the same basilica

123
On the Dura Europos fresco of the partially veiled women in procession, see the recent work of
Michael Peppard, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria (New
Haven, 2016), 111–54.
124
Henry Maguire, “Body, Clothing, Metaphor: The Virgin in Early Byzantine Art,” in The Cult of
the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Mary B. Cunningham
(Farnham, UK, 2011), 39–52, at 45–46. On the other hand, Maguire’s theory that the veil of the An-
nunciate Virgin could be citing the actual relic of her veil at Constantinople is much more conjectural.
On this relic, see the discussion below.

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1096 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium

Fig. 3. Mosaic of the Annunciation, Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč , Croatia (Photo: James
D’Emilio). See the online edition for a color version of this image.

as well as the female saints processing in the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics added
to Sant’Apollinare Nuovo.125 The use of a semitransparent veil over a portion of the
head is also attested in Byzantine Egypt. A well-known sixth-century domestic funer-
ary image at Antinoopolis shows a certain Theodosia with a light, translucent himat-
ion over the backside of her tied-up hair.126 Given the broad artistic attestation for
these light veils, it is easy to imagine that they had at least some real use in the dress
habits of late antique Mediterranean women.
Returning to Poreč , the other images of the Theotokos show complete coverage of
her hair. The Visitation shows Mary with a full opaque mantle, while the apse mo-
saic also depicts a cap under her mantle. Nevertheless, in all three images, Mary’s
hair is bound up and at least partially covered. Pre-iconoclastic encaustic icons of
Mary agree with this general principle: the Virgin’s hair is typically bound up in a
cap, on top of which she wears a veil.127 Likewise, in early Gospel illuminations, such

125
On the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, see Deborah M. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiq-
uity (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 152–74. Note that these women are often collectively referred to as “vir-
gins,” when in fact the procession includes saints who had given birth, for example, Felicity and
Perpetua. See Deliyannis, 364 n. 148.
126
Thelma Thomas, “Material Meaning in Late Antiquity,” in Designing Identity: The Power of
Textiles in Late Antiquity, ed. Thelma Thomas (Princeton, 2016), 20–53, at 45–46. See also the funer-
ary fresco of Aelia Arisuth at Qerqarish, Libya, from the second half of the fourth century, which
shows the deceased wearing a head wrap.
127
Compare the various encaustic examples gives in Bissera Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother
of God in Byzantium (Philadelphia, 2006), figures 66, 75–78.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1097
as those of the sixth-century Syriac Rabbula Gospels or the Greek Rossano Gospels,
all biblical women wear opaque veils.128 Such images of biblical women may be fairly
static in their representation of hair and their reliability for the specific dress habits of
late antiquity is to some degree questionable. At the same time, they are significant in
so far as they universally display women with bound-up hair that is at least partially
covered. Furthermore, it is such depictions of biblical women that would have filled
liturgical spaces, providing at least some visual cues to congregants as to the modesty
of ideal Christian women.
Beyond biblical women, early Byzantine imperial imagery commonly displays
women’s hair as bound up and partially covered. One famous example of female court
attire is the panel of Theodora and her attendants in the sixth-century presbytery mo-
saics of San Vitale at Ravenna.129 Here, the women have their hair bound up and wear
head rolls, while the empress in addition dons ornamental pearls and gems, with pen-
dant strings of pearls falling beside her face. Similar hairstyles are encountered in the
other early images of Byzantine empresses, such as the ivories of Ariadne.130 For other
aristocratic women, marble busts of the fourth and fifth centuries display hair bound
up in braids or with a fillet.131 Moving forward in the early Byzantine period, such fe-
male portraits also increasingly include textile coverings on the head. Given that the
liturgical rite likely originated at Constantinople, it is important to note that this in-
crease in the coverage of hair is attested at New Rome. A Pentelic marble portrait likely
made at Constantinople around the turn of the fourth to fifth century and once thought
to represent Juliana Anicia provides us an example of a woman’s head covering from
that time (Fig. 4).132 It does not appear to be an accident that artistic depictions of
women increasingly attest to bound-up, covered hair precisely during the same era
in which the Byzantine liturgical rite for binding up the female head was composed.

128
For facsimile editions of these Gospels, see, respectively, The Rabbula Gospels: Facsimile Edition of the
Miniatures of the Syriac Manuscript Plut. 1, 56 in the Medicaean-Laurentian Library, ed. Carlo Cecchelli,
Mario Salmi, and Giuseppe Furlani (Olten, 1959); and Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, vol. 1, Vollständige
Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat der Handschrift Rossano Calabro, Museo dell’Arcivescovado (Rome,
1985).
129
On this mosaic, see Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, 240–43, and bibliography therein. On
late antique dress in Ravenna more broadly, see Olga Magoula, “Multicultural Clothing in Sixth-
Century Ravenna,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 14 (2018): 1–36.
130
On these two ivory images as well as on Byzantine empress portraiture in general, see Diliana
Angelova, “The Ivories of Ariadne and Ideas about Female Imperial Authority in Rome and Early Byzan-
tium,” Gesta 43 (2004): 1–15, and bibliography therein. One could also cite the Trier Ivory of Pulcheria,
although art historians now seriously question the early dating of this work. See Kenneth G. Holum and
Gary Vikan, “The Trier Ivory, Adventus Ceremonial and the Relics of St. Stephen,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 33 (1979): 113–33; John Wortley, “The Trier Ivory Reconsidered,” in Greek, Roman, and Byzan-
tine Studies 21 (1980): 381–94; Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era,
c. 680–850 (Cambridge, UK, 2015), 132–35.
131
See, for example, the aristocratic woman (Aelia Flaccilla?), New York, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Fletcher Fund inv. 47.100.51, discussed in Stephen Perkinson, “Sculpting Identity,” in Set in Stone:
The Face in Medieval Sculpture, ed. Charles Little (New Haven, 2006), 120–45, at 129–31; or the female
bust (with archaizing hair?), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund inv. 47.100.52, discussed in
Perkinson, 134.
132
On this sculpture, see Perkinson, “Sculpting Identity,” 131–33; Ioli Kalavrezou, “Representations
of Women in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium,” in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World,
ed. Sharon James and Sheila Dillon (Oxford, 2012), 513–23, at 515.

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1098 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium

Fig. 4. Marble portrait bust of a woman with a scroll, late fourth– early fifth century, Con-
stantinople, The Cloisters Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the online
edition for a color version of this image.

While we do not have extant material evidence for head coverings in late antique
Constantinople, comparison to other parts of the Byzantine world is revealing.
Hairnets are frequently found in late antique women’s tombs in Egypt (Fig. 5). In
addition to hairnets, many tombs also include other head covers, including veils,
which women may have added on top of their hairnets when leaving the house.133
Recent analysis of Christian burial textiles from Upper Egypt also suggests that
133
Christina Thérèse (Tineke) Rooijakkers, “The Luscious Locks of Lust: Hair and the Construction
of Gender in Egypt from Clement to the Fatimids,” in Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterra-
nean 30 (2018): 26–55, at 35.

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Fig. 5. Hairnet, c. fifth century, Antinoopolis, Egypt, British Museum. See the online edition
for a color version of this image.
1100 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
the practice of female head covering increased in late antiquity already prior to the
Islamic period.134 It appears the early Christian strictures on female hair modesty had
at least some effect on actual practice in the early Byzantine period, even if a variety
of means of keeping the hair bound and covered are attested. The visual and material
evidence from this time suggests that the liturgical rite for binding up a woman’s
head stemmed from and reinforced a social context of shifting dress norms in the
pre-Islamic late antique Roman Mediterranean.
For the middle Byzantine period, during which the liturgical rite of hair binding
continued to be celebrated (even if already in decline), art historians have proposed
that the total coverage of female hair was often not a major concern in notions of
modesty. Rather, the amount of hair covered varied according to circumstance
and social setting. Beyond church contexts, where head coverage was a given,
Jennifer Ball has identified several images of women without any head covering.135
However, the examples she gives are primarily social situations that did not require
a head covering, such as a woman’s baptism, or domestic activity among women.136
Likewise, as Melita Emmanuel and especially Mati Meyer have argued, scenes of
childbirth attracted real-life representations, including some midwives and parturients
shown with uncovered and semiloose hair, such as those in the famous eleventh-
century octoechos, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. gr. 747
(fols. 46v, 56v, 59v).137 Yet birth in Byzantium was largely a private affair in which
maintaining public modesty norms was not the priority. More relevant for our discus-
sion, images of women in public spaces within this same manuscript display a variety
of hairstyles. Two women harvesting the fields roll up their sleeves for work, yet
they maintain their head scarves (fol. 203r, Fig. 6),138 while other scenes show less

134
See the inventory and discussion of the carbon-14 dated hair coverings of the Kharga Oasis in
Fleur Letelleir-Willemin, “Accessories from the Christian Cemetery of El Deir, in the Egyptian Oasis
of Kharga, Western Desert,” in Dress Accessories of the 1st Millennium AD from Egypt: Proceedings
of the 6th Conference of the Research Group “Textiles from the Nile Valley,” Antwerp, 2–3 October
2009 (Tielt, 2011), 96–109. See also Petra Linscheid, Frühbyzantinische textile Kopfbedeckungen: Typol-
ogie, Verbreitung, Chronologie und soziologischer Kontext nach Originalfunden (Wiesbaden, 2011),
37–50. Note that Tineke Rooijakkers warns against drawing too strict a connection with Christianity,
as such hair coverings are also found in graves of polytheist women. See Rooijakkers, “The Luscious
Locks of Lust,” 35 n. 50. At the same time, studies of Roman portraiture reveal head coverage was less
universal in the early imperial period. See, for example, above, n. 68.
135
Ball, Byzantine Dress, 100.
136
For example, Ball cites the menologion Athos, Esphigmenou 14, where the wife of Saint Eustathios
is not always depicted wearing a veil. However, the only image in which she is unveiled is the scene of the
baptism of Saint Eustathios’s family, in which each member of the family is nude. See Stylianos Pele-
kanides, Οi hgratqοί τοt Αγίοt Όqοtς: Εijοmογqauglέma veiqόγqaua. Paqarτάreiς, epίτiτka, aqvijά
γqάllaτa (Athens, 1979), plates 329 and 330. Compare with the illumination in London, British Library,
Add. MS 1870, fol. 151r, where Eustathios’s wife is depicted veiled with a maphorion in each scene. At
baptism, the artist opted to place only Saint Eustathios in the font, and to keep her body clothed and
awaiting baptism.
137
Meyer, “On the Hypothetical Model of Childbearing Iconography”; Emmanuel, “Some Notes on
the External Appearance,” 778. On the beliefs surrounding the loose hair of parturients, see, for ex-
ample, Maurizio Bettini, Women and Weasels: Mythologies of Birth in Ancient Greece and Rome
(Chicago, 1998), 70–72.
138
Kalavrezou, “Representations of Women,” 523.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1101

Fig. 6. Women working in the field, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat.
gr. 747, fol. 203r.

preoccupation with head covering, depicting women with their hair bound up only,
often with fillets (fols. 27v, 45v).139
While an artist’s choice to depict a woman’s hairstyle in a given manner could be
motivated by various factors, Byzantine imagery was also integrally intertwined with
the broader rhetoric surrounding female hair that we encounter in the literary sources.
The tenth-century illuminated manuscript known as the Menologion of Basil II (Vat.
gr. 1613) proves interesting material for this discussion.140 This book includes images
to illustrate the various feast days in the first six months of the Byzantine liturgical cal-
endar, that is, the months from September through February. Most depictions of

139
Compare the first of these images with Vat. gr. 746 (twelfth century), fol. 49r. See also where Vat.
gr. 747 displays women with completely loose hair as a representation of lament and mourning (fols. 44r,
247r). See also the twelfth-century Book of Job, Vat. gr. 1231, fol. 453r. On loose hair as a sign of
mourning in Byzantine imagery, see Mati Meyer, An Obscure Portrait: Imagining Women’s Reality
in Byzantine Art (London, 2009), 164–65.
140
On this manuscript, see Ihor Š evč enko, “The Illuminators of the Menologion of Basil II,” Dum-
barton Oaks Papers 16 (1962): 245–76; Anna Zakharova, “Gli otto artisti del ‘Menologio di Basilio II,’ ”
in Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae 10 (2003): 379– 432. The digitized manuscript is avail-
able online at http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1613 (last accessed 1 June 2019).

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1102 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
women in this book can be divided into two groups: images displaying a martyred
saint in the act of being killed (e.g., fols. 16r, 26r, 42r, 43v, 48r, 62r, 75v, etc.) and
frontal portraits of a saint without a relationship to a specific event in her life (fols. 29r,
63v, 64r, etc.).141 Martyrdom scenes often show the female saint with unbound hair,
a convention employed elsewhere in martyrdom images, and which appears to com-
municate that a woman is suffering violence.142 In contrast, among the frontal por-
traits of female saints, the hair is typically bound up and covered. What is key for
our purposes is that the exposure of hair in this illuminated book hinges on whether
the scene depicts violence against a woman. Thus, these paintings breathe with the
same rhetoric as our medieval Greek texts: loose hair and the absence of a head cov-
ering represent the loss of normal female decorum. A major exception in the meno-
logion is the frontal portrait of Saint Basilissa, who wears a small cap but maintains
loose hair underneath (fol. 8r). This exception may correspond to our interpretation
of a link between hair binding and the onset of puberty, since, unlike the other female
saints in the menologion, Basilissa died as a child.
The link between social norms for hairdressing and puberty is underscored in the
female portraits contained in the miniatures of the Vatican epithalamium, Vatican
City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 1851, which details the story of a for-
eign child princess brought to Constantinople for marriage. Art historians continue
to debate both the period in which these miniatures were produced and the identity
of the bride, with proposals ranging from the twelfth-century Anna of Savoy to the
fourteenth-century Maria of Bulgaria.143 Nevertheless, what is most important for
our discussion is that these images intersect with the same social perceptions of girls’
hair that are found in literary sources and implied by the liturgical rite. As Leslie
Brubaker has most recently pointed out, the prepubescent child bride-to-be is repre-
sented with an uncovered head and loose hair (fol. 3v), while the girls surrounding
her, who are presumably older, have their hair covered.144
One group of women in Byzantine art who consistently appear with uncovered—
often loose or semiloose—hair is the entourage of torch-bearing maidens who

141
Exceptions of course exist, such as the image of the nativity of the Virgin Mary (fol. 22r).
142
Melita Emmanuel notes this phenomenon in frescoes, such as that of the martyrdom of Saint Ma-
rina at her church in Mourne, Crete, which dramatically displays the saint’s loose hair, which she con-
nects to an attempt to highlight the violence being perpetrated against her. Emmanuel, “Some Notes on
the External Appearance,” 774 and figure 3.
143
See Cecily Hillsdale, “Constructing a Byzantine ‘Augusta’: A Greek Book for a French Bride,” Art
Bulletin 87 (2005): 458–83; Cecily Hennessy, “A Child Bride and Her Representation in the Vatican
Epithalamion, cod. Gr. 1851,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 30 (2006): 115–50.
144
Leslie Brubaker, “Images of Byzantine Adolescents,” in Ariantzi, Coming of Age in Byzantium,
141–74, at 152. Note, however, that Brubaker goes on to conflate marriageability and puberty with
married status and affirms that the “defining difference between how adolescent females were depicted
had little to do with actual age-in-years, but was instead dependent on whether or not they were mar-
ried”: Brubaker, 152–53. In the case of the Vatican epithalamium, the girl is both prepubescent and
unmarried, and it is thus difficult to argue based on this image alone whether the artist chose to depict
her with loose, uncovered hair as a distinguishing mark of her prepubescence or her unmarried status
(or both). Another fascinating image of a girl with long, loose hair that Brubaker brings into her dis-
cussion is that of the young Eudokia Doukaina Komnene Synadene Palaiologina in a fourteenth-century
communion scroll (Brubaker, 153). However, no age is given for her in the manuscript, and it is not clear
from the image whether she was postmenarche or not.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1103
accompany the three-year-old Theotokos at her entrance into the temple.145 In her
brief study of the liturgical rite for “binding up” a woman’s hair, Jane Baun wonders
whether or not the liturgical service in question has anything to do with the hairstyles
of these girls. Since many such images depict these girls with fillets through their hair,
Baun asks, “Might such ribbons constitute the ‘binding’ of which the prayer’s title
speaks?”146 It is difficult to answer this question positively for two reasons. As we
have already seen, Greek language for “binding up” must not be read literally as nec-
essarily referring to a headband,147 and the prayer itself makes multiple references to
hair coverage. More importantly, though, the early Christian literary tradition of
Mary’s service at the temple assumed these maidens to be undefiled or pure virgins
̓ lίamτοi paqhέmοi), that is, they had not yet menstruated.148 This assumption was
(a
based on the fact that blood was viewed as ritually defiling to the sacred space of the
Jewish temple in antiquity; similarly, the concept of blood impurity would continue
throughout much of Byzantine religious literature.149 If there is any connection be-
tween our liturgical rite and this iconographical tradition, it is more likely to be found
in a link between these girls’ pure, premenarche state and their uncovered, semiloose
hair.150
The examples elicited here from the broad spectrum of Byzantine visual representa-
tions of women reveal a great variety of dress practice. What they confirm is that
postmenarche women, both married and unmarried, are often shown with their
hair bound up, especially in the context of public spaces.151 Already from the early
145
On imagery of the Virgin’s eisodos, see Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 136–43.
146
These are certainly the girls Baun has in mind, although she labels them as belonging to “Candle-
mas scenes,” which represent a different feast: Baun, “Coming of Age,” 133.
147
We might add that prepubescent girls in Byzantium certainly could have employed instruments
for stylizing their hair, which may have included pins and ribbons. See the above discussion of Psellos’s
description of his daughter’s hair, n. 116.
148
See the discussion in Megan Nutzman, “Mary in the Protoevangelium of James,” Greek, Roman,
and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013): 551–78, at 565–70. See also Lily Vuong, Gender and Purity in the
Protoevangelium of James (Tübingen, 2013), 107–145.
149
See, for example, Taft, “Women at Church in Byzantium,” 50–55, 74–76; Patrick Viscuso, “Theodore
Balsamon’s Canonical Images of Women,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005): 317–26,
esp. 321–25; Vassa Larin, “What is Ritual Im/purity and Why?,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly
52 (2008): 275–92; Eva Maria Synek, “The Reception of Old Testament Purity Prescriptions by Byzan-
tine Canon Law,” in Christian and Islamic Gender Models in Formative Traditions, ed. Kari E. Børresen
(Freiburg, 2004), 181–201; Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Re-
constructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, 2000), 160–210.
150
At the same time, many representations of the Virgin’s entrance depict these maidens as physically
developed and questionably beyond menarche. Even in these representations, however, artists tend to
apply a unique dress typology that corresponds to other scenes of women’s spaces. One example is
found in the twelfth-century Marian cycle frescoes on the west wall of the naos in the church of Saint
Panteleimon at Gorno Nerezi, commissioned by Alexios Angelos Komnenos. This fragmented scene of
the entrance of the Theotokos displays maidens with hairstyles that match those of the midwives in the
adjacent Nativity of the Theotokos—some have simple head scarves, while other have their hair tied
with a simple cord, leaving it semiloose and exposed. On the Marian cycle, see Ida Sinkevic ,́ The
Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi: Architecture, Programme, Patronage (Wiesbaden, 2000), 56.
On the patronage of the church itself, see Sinkevic ,́ 4–10.
151
For comparison of our discussion with the medieval West, see Roberta Milliken, Ambiguous
Locks: An Iconology of Hair in Medieval Art and Literature (Jefferson, NC, 2012), 89–255. See also
Robert Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal History
Society 6 (1994): 43–60.

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1104 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
Byzantine period, additional coverage of the hair, either partial or complete, is also
common depending on context. Numerous exceptions and deviations from this gen-
eral rule exist. Some of these were doubtless erotic,152 while others fit into a different
conceptual framework in which unbound hair is connected to ascetic growth. Fres-
coes depicting Saint Mary of Egypt as an emaciated older woman with disheveled
loose hair communicate that she reached a level of self-denial so admirable to medi-
eval Christian asceticism that, like John the Baptist and many desert dwellers before
her, she was no longer bound by the social conventions of appearance.153
Other images of women with exposed hair play on society’s dress norms in differ-
ent ways. The sexual rhetoric surrounding loose hair is found in scenes of the con-
version of prostitutes and adulteresses,154 or in images of women engaged in a sexual
sin.155 Frescoes of the damned in later Byzantine churches also resort to depictions of
women with long, unbound hair.156 As noted above, the absence of a head covering
could serve to highlight the violence being perpetrated against a female martyr, a
symbolic usage that could also be flipped. In the rock-cut church of Santa Mar-
gherita at Mottola in Apulia, a thirteenth-century fresco depicts the homonymous
saint at her martyrdom.157 Here, the virgin Margherita is sexually humiliated by

152
See, for example, the seventh-century necklace pendant of the seminude Aphrodite Anadyomene
arranging her long hair held in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and represented in Byzantine Women
and Their World, ed. Ioli Kalavrezou (New Haven, 2003), fig. 3.
153
To cite two examples: the thirteenth-century fresco in the crypt of the cathedral at Taranto, given in
Safran, The Medieval Salento, plate 16; the early twelfth-century fresco in the church of Panagia Phor-
biotissa at Asinou, in Athanasios Papageorgiou, “The Architecture of the Church of the Panagia Phor-
biotissa,” in Asinou across Time: Studies in the Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa,
Cyprus, ed. Annemarie Weyl Carr and Andréas Nicolaïdès (Washington, DC, 2012), 39–68, at 63,
fig. 2.32.
154
The ninth-century image of the sinful woman anointing Christ’s feet in the Chludov Psalter (fol. 84v)
follows the biblical narrative that describes her as using her hair to dry Christ’s feet (Lk. 7.38). A later ex-
ample of a woman with loose hair in the process of conversion is that of the aforementioned Pelagia in
her fourteenth-century church in Herakleion, Crete. See Meyer, An Obscure Portrait, plates 151, 219.
See also Byzantine depictions of Rahab with loose hair, discussed in Mati Meyer, “Harlot or Penitent?
The Image of Rahab in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts,” Ars Judaica 2 (2006): 25–34, at 32–33.
155
Images of Zimri sleeping with the Midianite woman Cozbi often show her with long hair to visually
reinforce the illicit nature of their sexual encounter. See the discussion of this scene as represented in the
Sacra parallela (BnF gr. 923, fol. 274v) in Mati Meyer, “Constructing Emotions and Weaving Meaning
in Byzantine Art,” in Happiness or Its Absence in Art, ed. Ronit Milano and William L. Barcham (New-
castle upon Tyne, 2013), 9–26, at 11–12. On the Sacra parallela more broadly, see Maria Evangelatou,
“Word and Image in the ‘Sacra Parallela’ (Codex Parisinus Graecus 923),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62
(2008): 113–97. For a similar depiction in the Chludov Psalter (fol. 109v), see Meyer, An Obscure Por-
trait, 288 and plate 200.
156
See, for example, the thirteenth-century images at the church of the Panagia in Apokoronas,
Crete; or the fourteenth-century fresco at the church of Saint Pelagia in Herakleion, Crete, discussed
in Meyer, An Obscure Portrait, 88–89 and plates 66, 67, 127, 152, 153.
157
See Valentino Pace, “Il Salento medievale in un libro di Linda Safran,” Orientalia Christiana
Periodica 81 (2015): 215–225, here 223 and fig. 12. Note that, while the frescoes contain Latin in-
scriptions, Christianity in southern Italy in the thirteenth century was still characterized by the (declin-
ing) presence of the Byzantine liturgical rite and was practiced in Greek-speaking communities there
(the church of Santa Margherita itself includes Greek graffiti). See Safran, The Medieval Salento,
289. On medieval dress in Apulia and its connections to that of Greeks and Slavs in the Balkans,
see Marcello Mignozzi, “Gli slavi a Bari nell’XI secolo: alcuni elementi di storia del costume,” Hortus
Artium Medievalium 19 (2013): 367–386.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1105
her persecutors, who have stripped her nude and placed her in a cauldron. Yet she
does not lose her virtue of chastity, represented by the lone item of clothing kept
on her body, her head covering. Like the textual uses of hair binding and covering
in Byzantine literature, the symbolic force of these images functioned because of a
common cultural language that linked the control of a woman’s hair with the order-
ing of her life and her control over sexual passion. The liturgical rite for binding up a
woman’s hair corresponds to this literary and visual context. As the prayer affirms,
the binding and covering of female hair acts as a moral shield and an aid toward
what it describes as the education of a young woman’s body toward virtue.

Liturgy and the Female Subject

Literary and visual evidence confirm what is implied in the liturgical rite, namely,
both the binding up and the covering of women’s hair functioned as powerful tools
to communicate Byzantine conceptions of virtue and female sexuality. Collectively,
the liturgical, literary, and visual evidence points to real Byzantine dress concerns.
While the rite of hair binding has a social context that stretches far back in Mediter-
ranean history, it is also specific to the theology and spirituality of Byzantium. This
liturgical rite not only fits into its Byzantine social context; it contributed to it, by
seeking to enact Christian virtue through a young woman’s adoption of a dress
norm. As such, it belongs within the broader phenomenon of the liturgy’s active for-
mation of the Byzantine self.158
In recent years, scholars have increasingly looked beyond the (usually male) rhetoric
regarding the articulated desires for female dress norms and have begun to investigate
the subjective experiences of women in societies where hair coverage is widely prac-
ticed. While anthropologists today can interview women in cultures where veils are
experiencing a renaissance and allow them to speak for themselves of the personal
import of covering the head,159 the Byzantine historian cannot avail him- or herself
of this option. At the same time, it is not a methodological impossibility to propose
“female” readings of past veiling cultures based on our knowledge of the mechanics
of ritual and identity, together with the testimony offered by the sources.
Beate Wagner-Hassel did just this when she highlighted the variety of potential
meanings that veils represented for women in ancient Greece. Although veils were cer-
tainly sexual symbols, their significance extended beyond issues of modesty or social
control.160 Women who wore head coverings were not simply passive, objectified
recipients of veil language; they participated in it and used veils as expressions of
identity. In ancient Greece, women could use veils to communicate, not only their

158
See Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of
the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia, 2014).
159
See, for example, Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford, 1999), 161–85,
and bibliography therein; Mohja Kahf, “From Her Royal Body the Robe Was Removed: The Blessings of
the Veil and the Trauma of Forced Unveilings in the Middle East,” in The Veil: Women Writers on Its
History, Lore, and Politics, ed. Jennifer Heath (Berkeley, 2008), 27–43; Salam Sibai, “Narratives of Spanish
Muslim Women on the Hijab as a Tool to Assert Identity,” in Identity and Migration in Europe: Multi-
disciplinary Perspectives, ed. MariaCaterina La Barbera (New York, 2015), 251–68.
160
Beate Wagner-Hasel, “The Veil and Other Textiles at Weddings in Ancient Greece,” in Ancient Mar-
riage in Myth and Reality, ed. Lena L. Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010), 102–21.

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1106 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
sexuality, but also emotions, since the removal—or even rending—of the veil was a
marker of mourning often employed at the death of a loved one.161 Veils functioned
within a social context in which the loom was the female craft par excellence. They
could serve as an exhibition of a woman’s textile skill and could distinguish an indi-
vidual’s talent from that of her peers. Furthermore, the gifting of cloth was one of the
most valuable economic exchanges at the time, and a woman’s head covering could
provide public validation of her family’s financial status.
Many of Wagner-Hassel’s proposed readings of head coverings are equally valid
for Byzantine society. Postclassical Greek texts continued to characterize the produc-
tion of textiles as a gendered activity. According to Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403),
the “wisdom of weaving” (t̔ uάrlaτος rοuίa) was first given to Eve, who created
garments after the Fall,162 and the Protoevangelium of James places Mary in the ser-
vice of the temple, charged with weaving the veil of the sanctuary.163 Proclus of Con-
stantinople in the fifth century would go on to characterize the Incarnation as the
weaving of God’s flesh on the loom of Mary, that is, her womb.164 Likewise, clothing
continued to occupy an important economic position within the postclassical Med-
iterranean,165 thus sustaining the potential for women’s head coverings to commu-
nicate status, wealth, and skill. Furthermore, medieval texts and images show that
some Byzantine women continued to deploy their textile head coverings as instru-
ments for expressing emotion, especially in times of mourning.166
Yet the creation of a specific Christian liturgical rite in Byzantium for the pur-
pose of binding up a woman’s hair offered additional layers of meaning for wom-
en’s experience of dress, since the text of the prayer suggests that objects of cloth—
whether turbans, head scarves, snoods, or veils—were employed in the rite. It is
worth recalling that textile coverings play an important role in Byzantine liturgy
at large. As Teresa Berger highlights, within the liturgy veils are not only gendered
feminine.167 They decorate and signify sacred spaces, such as the altar of the Byzantine

161
Wagner-Hasel, 121 n. 85; Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 304–5. On the use of veils for ex-
pression more broadly, Llewellyn-Jones, 160: “Veils offer women endless opportunities for the wearers to
drop, adjust, tighten, or loosen the cloth, thereby making full use of the potential of the garment as a sym-
bol of female self-expression.” On veils and mourning, see also Douglas L. Cairns, “Weeping and Veiling:
Grief, Display and Concealment in Ancient Greek Culture,” in Tears in the Graeco-Roman World, ed.
Thorsten Fögen (Berlin, 2009), 37–57. On unbound women’s hair as a sign of mourning at Rome, see
Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 2004), 82–84.
162
Epiphanius continues, “To (Eve) this labor was given, for it was through her that nakedness was
discovered, and thus to her was given the task of clothing the perceptible body on account of its per-
ceptible nakedness.” Epihanius, Panarion 78.18.1–4, taken from Nicholas (Maximos) Constas, Pro-
clus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2002), 332–33.
163
Protoevangelium of James 10, ed. Émile de Strycker (Brussels, 1961), trans. Lily Vuong (Eugene,
2019). See also the discussion in Nutzman, “Mary in the Protoevangelium of James.”
164
See the discussion in Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 315–58. See also Maria Evangelatou,
“The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative Iconographic Element
in Byzantine Images of the Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium;
Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, 2003), 269–85.
165
See, for example, most recently, Nikki K. Rollason, Gifts of Clothing in Late Antique Literature
(London, 2016).
166
See above, n. 139.
167
Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on
Liturgy’s Past (Farnham, UK, 2011), esp. xiii–xiv, 163, 180–82.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1107
church.168 Textiles distinguished the orders of the clergy169 and were also used to
cover sacred objects, such as important icons170 and, most especially, the Eucharistic
gifts.171 Within the liturgy, the act of placing something under or behind a veil set it
apart as special, as something to be revered and respected, similar to the role played
by the temple veil in Jerusalem. That there was an interpretive interplay between
women’s veils and liturgical coverings is not the projection of contemporary ritual
theory. According to the Syriac Vita of Barsauma, the empress Aelia Eudokia (d. 460)
donated her personal veil to a monastery for use as an altar cloth.172
By bringing the binding up of a young woman’s head into the church’s liturgical
life, this dress norm took on an explicitly liturgical vocabulary. The liturgical recep-
tion of a new dress habit made that dress habit religious and likely increased its im-
portance for many women as they adopted it. The prayer itself expounds upon the
moral meaning of binding up the hair, providing the young woman with a reason to
practice this custom. If young women began to formally bind their hair up within this
religious context, we cannot exclude the possibility that for many of them, the deci-
sion to abide by this dress norm throughout their life took on a religious meaning,
namely, a desire to live a life of moral character toward the attainment of the eternal
benefits of God (τύvgͅ τx̃ m ai̓ xmίxm rοt a ̓ γahx̃ m). It is true that many women likely
abided by such dress norms because these norms were expected of them or because
they had become routine. Other women could have resisted the social imposition of
dress norms, if not in practice then at least in personal conviction.173 At the same

168
Alexei Lidov, “The Temple Veil as a Spatial Icon: Revealing an Image-Paradigm of Medieval Ico-
nography and Hierotopy,” Ikon 7 (2014): 97–108; Robert F. Taft, “The Decline of Communion in
Byzantium and the Distancing of the Congregation from the Liturgical Action: Cause, Effect, or Nei-
ther?,” in Thresholds of the Sacred: Architecture, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives
on Religious Screens, East and West, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Washington, DC, 2006), 27–52; Elizabeth Bol-
man, “Veiling Sanctity in Christian Egypt: Visual and Spatial Solutions,” in Gerstel, Thresholds of the
Sacred, 73–106. On the relationship between architecture and textiles, see also Warren Woodfin, “Wall,
Veil, and Body: Textiles and Architecture in the Late Byzantine Church,” in Kariye Camii, Yeniden /
Kariye Camii Reconsidered, ed. Holger Klein, Robert Ousterhout, and Brigitte Pitarakis (Istanbul,
2011), 358–85.
169
See Warren Woodfin, The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in By-
zantium (Oxford, 2011).
170
One colorful example is the veiled icon of the Theotokos at Blachernae in Constantinople, de-
scribed by Michael Psellos in the eleventh century as being miraculously unveiled every Friday evening.
See, for example, the discussion and bibliography in Charles Barber, Contesting the Logic of Painting:
Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden, 2007), 80–83; Pentcheva, Icons and
Power, 159–60. On Middle Byzantine textile icon covers more generally, see Valerie Nunn, “The
Encheirion as Adjunct to the Icon in the Middle Byzantine Period,” Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies 10 (1986): 73–102.
171
See, for example, Robert F. Taft and Stefano Parenti, Il grande ingresso: Edizione italiana rivista,
aggiornata e ampliata (Grottaferrata, 2014), 387–92; Roland Betancourt, “The Thessaloniki Epitaphios:
Notes on Use and Context,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 55 (2015): 489–535.
172
See Kenneth Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley, 1982), 187. Compare also the discussion of Pulcheria’s gift of one of her costly robes as an
altar cloth in Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 348–49.
173
Changes in the history of Byzantine women’s dress were socially negotiated. Diana Crane’s affir-
mation about fashion transitions in the Victorian era could be equally applicable to dress developments
in the medieval world: “While histories of fashionable clothing give the impression of consensus, cloth-
ing actually involved a great deal of debate and controversy.” See Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social

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1108 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
time, according to anthropological theory, rites of passage are, by definition, the
creation of a new definition: they witness the death of an old subject and the birth of
a new one.174 It would be folly not to assume, then, that for many Byzantine women,
binding up the head was an activity that could serve their own expression of becom-
ing a Christian woman.175
In Byzantium, this liturgical significance was likely heightened by the existence
of clothing relics of the Virgin Mary. The history and nature of the cult of Mary’s
clothing at Constantinople is complicated and might have its origins as far back as
the aftermath of the fifth-century councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.176 Byzantine
sources often attribute the presence of Mary’s clothing in the capital to the activ-
ities of Empress Pulcheria (450–53).177 The earliest textual sources of these Marian
relics refer to a “garment” (e̓ rhής), “belt” (fώmg), “dresses” (i̔ lάτia), or a “burial
shroud” (e̓ mτάuia).178 However, from about the ninth century, the city boasted the
possession of Mary’s veil (lauόqiοm or x ̓ lοuόqiοm), which is likely an adaptation
in the attribution of an earlier-attested clothing relic.179 The inhabitants and visitors
to Constantinople could venerate the veil and through it call upon the protection of
the Theotokos.180 While Byzantine women certainly dressed differently from the
manner of dress they imagined the Virgin Mary to have assumed through her ubiq-
uitous iconography, the fact that Mary’s head covering existed as an object of Byz-
antine religious veneration reinforced her iconography and the Byzantine moral
association with covering the female body: when a Byzantine woman bound up
and covered her own head, her performance of modesty in dress was akin to that
of the female role model of holiness.

Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago, 2000), 99. On the issue of female agency
within the framework of religious dress norms, see the interesting study on a contemporary Holdeman
Mennonite community by Linda B. Arthur, “Deviance, Agency, and the Social Control of Women’s
Bodies in a Mennonite Community,” NWSA Journal 10 (1998): 75–99.
174
Bell, Ritual, 94.
175
A theoretical discussion that is relevant for our understanding of this liturgical rite of passage is
that which concerns the “paradox of subjectivation,” as elaborated by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler,
Saba Mahmood, and others. According to this line of thought, power structures do not merely dom-
inate subjects but also enable their agency. See the discussion and bibliography in Saba Mahmood, Pol-
itics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005), esp. 17–25.
176
Michel van Esbroeck, “Le culte de la Vierge de Jérusalem à Constantinople aux VIe et VIIe siècles,”
Revue des études byzantines 46 (1988): 181–90; Maguire, “Body, Clothing, Metaphor,” 43–45. See also
Stephen Shoemaker, “The Cult of Fashion: The Earliest Life of the Virgin and Constantinople’s Marian
Relics,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62 (2008): 53–74.
177
Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Threads of Authority: The Virgin Mary’s Veil in the Middle Ages,” in
Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York, 2001), 60–
93, at 62–63 and notes.
178
Carr, 62–63 and 83 n. 27.
179
Carr, 61–64. Cf. Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 63; Shoemaker, “The Cult of Fashion,” 63, 73. It
should be noted that the Piacenza pilgrim describes Marian relics of a head covering (ligamentum, quo
utebatur in capite) and girdle in sixth-century Jerusalem, something not generally observed in scholar-
ship on the Constantinopolitan Marian relics. See Celestina Milani, Itinerarium Antonini Placentini.
Un viaggio in Terra Santa del 560–570 d.C. (Milan, 1977), 152–53.
180
In the aftermath of iconoclasm, the veil became an important symbol of Mary’s protection of the
Byzantine military. See Pentcheva, Icons and Power, 63.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1109
Our reading of this adolescent rite of passage together with the literary and visual
evidence make it clear that modesty in hair dress was a concern for Byzantines from
the moment a girl was perceived to be a woman. However, it is unclear from the li-
turgical evidence whether those Byzantines who practiced this rite would have timed
the rite with menarche, or if there was a generic age at which it was celebrated—the
latter option obviously still tied somewhat to the former.181 Regardless of the answer
to this question, it is evident from our reading that this rite stems from an early Byz-
antine context in which binding up a woman’s hair coincided with womanhood it-
self, and not with the status of being married. Even if the chronological space be-
tween menarche and marriage must have been relatively short for many women,
the fact remains that unmarried adult women abided by the general modesty norms
of dress that applied to the head.
This point is significant, since it advances our knowledge about Byzantine percep-
tions of the female body. The existence of this liturgical rite for inaugurating a
woman’s new dress habits underscores the relationship between religion and dress
in the medieval Mediterranean. At the same time, Byzantine religious culture en-
dured centuries of development and we cannot presume universal practice across
the breadth of territory and time in which the Byzantine liturgical rite was (and con-
tinues to be) used. In fact, while later euchology manuscripts attest to a decline in this
rite’s currency, they also show a repurposing of it for women in other contexts.

Later Adaptation of the Rite

The liturgical rite for adolescent women dramatically fell in use by Byzantium’s later
centuries, given its rare presence in late Byzantine euchologies. As I posited above, this
decline was at least partially influenced by the expected dress habits for women attend-
ing liturgical offices in the middle Byzantine period. While the late antique evidence only
stresses the need for postpubescent female head coverage as a general dress norm, cen-
turies later Michael Psellos alludes to prepubescent girls covering their heads specifically
in churches. If hair coverage applied to all females in church, then this liturgical rite may
no longer have represented as strong a passage into a new form of dress and identity.
At the same time, other factors may have contributed to the gradual disappear-
ance of this liturgical rite. From the middle Byzantine period, we witness a growing
tendency toward liturgical uniformity. As successive waves of liturgical synthesis
swept through the Byzantine world, many customs vanished from use.182 This ap-
plies to other life-cycle rites as well, including that for a man’s first shave. The role
of monks within the process of liturgical synthesis may have helped determine which
rites were jettisoned in the course of history, as there was little reason to devote
parchment space within a monastery’s prayer book to rites that were more central
to families and nonmonastic individuals than to monks. Another potential influence
that deserves to be explored in the future concerns whether local developments in

181
In the medieval West, for example, Merovingian liturgical rites for a young man’s first shave may
have been tied more to age than to the presence or measure of the youth’s facial hair. See Hen, “The
Early Medieval Barbatoria,” 22.
182
The best summary of the development of the Byzantine liturgical rite remains the outdated book-
let by Robert F. Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History (Collegeville, 1992).

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1110 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
late Byzantine fashion reveal shifts in the moral connotations of loose hair,183 and if
such developments could have diluted the force of the rite’s moral claims at least in
those areas. Curiously, however, as the practice of this adolescent rite of passage de-
clined, the prayer itself did not immediately fall out of use. Instead, some manu-
scripts attest that scribes repurposed it for entirely different liturgical contexts. This
corresponds to a general phenomenon in the history of Byzantine liturgy, and espe-
cially for rituals related to the life course, whereby prayers originally intended for
one liturgical function are applied to a different rite altogether.184
One interesting case concerns the rite of passage into female monasticism. While the
coded dress of Byzantine nuns evolved over time, headgear was a given and often con-
sisted of a veil.185 Yet despite this, the Byzantine tradition was slow to formalize the
adoption of a veil within the liturgical rites for monastic profession. Whereas the veil
features prominently in rites for the consecration of virgins—both in monasteries and
in the world—in the early medieval West,186 the oldest Byzantine rites for monastic
profession are devoid of formal texts intended specifically for investing a woman with
this item of clothing.187 With time, however, at least one scribe came to view the prayer
for binding up a young woman’s head as a corrective for this absence.
In the thirteenth-century monastic euchology, London, British Library, Add.
MS 32011, we find the prayer among a group of texts for monastic profession.188
Specifically, the prayer for binding up a woman’s head is found immediately after the
prayers for imposing the rason (cassock) upon a new monk.189 While the imposition
of a rason is a rite performed upon male and female monastics alike, in the case of a
new nun, monastic profession would have also included reception of a veil. The prayer
for female adolescents lent a relevant text to that gesture. Evidently, this repurposing
occurred at a time and in a place where the original adolescent rite of passage was no
longer practiced. A prayer once intended for young women in general was instead used
to define a nun, implying (perhaps accidentally) that the virtue of feminine modesty
expounded upon in the prayer was best defined within the confines of monastic living.

183
While the binding and covering of hair continued to readily feature in later Byzantine images, we
should note the unusual example of the twelfth-century fresco of Anna Radini in Kastoria, which de-
picts her with long flowing locks of blond hair beneath her hat, even if this might be the result of a wool
wig. This representation could be tied to local hair customs, as noted by Katerina Kontopanagou, “Do-
nor Portraits in the State of Epirus: Aesthetics, Fashion, and Trends in the Late Byzantine Period,” in
The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and
1453, ed. Vlada Stankovic ́ (Lanham, 2016), 59–68, at 66 n. 17. See also the exposed side locks of hair
in female imperial portraits, mentioned above, n. 122.
184
See Gabriel Radle, “When Infants Begin to Toddle: A Liturgical Rite of Passage in the Greco-
Arabic Manuscript Sinai NF/MG53,” Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata, ser. 3, 11 (2014):
159–68, at 165–67; Radle, “The Development of Byzantine Marriage Rites,” 145–46.
185
Jennifer Ball is currently addressing the need for a systematic study of Byzantine monastic dress.
See her initial work, Jennifer Ball, “Decoding the Habit of the Byzantine Nun,” Journal of Modern
Hellenism 27–28 (2009–10): 25–52.
186
See, for example, Nichola Emsley, “The Rite of Consecration of Virgins,” in Chupungco, Hand-
book for Liturgical Studies, vol. 4, Sacraments and Sacramentals, 331–42, at 333–35.
187
See, for example, Parenti and Velkovska, Евхологий Барберини гр. 336 (Parenti and Velkovska,
L’eucologio Barberini gr. 336), sections 169–70, 244–256.
188
Images of the manuscript are available online at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx
?refpAdd_MS_32011 (last accessed 1 June 2019).
189
Add. MS 32011, fol. 236r–v: Εt̓ vaì ei̓ ς a
̓ qvάqiοm lοmavὸm q
̔ arοuοqοt̃mτa.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1111
An entirely different repurposing is found on the Slavic frontier of Byzantine
Christianity. The fifteenth-century Serbian manuscript Belgrade, Patriarchal Mu-
seum, MS 3.I.71,190 uses the rite of hair binding as part of the marriage ceremony.
The prayer was not, however, incorporated into the nuptial service at the church.
Rather, it was inserted into a block of three blessings that were officiated by the
priest in the domestic setting after the church service was over. What follows is
the text and translation of the rubrics, together with the incipits of each prayer:

(1) . . . И исходить ис цркви въ д своимь ереи же млтвѹ сію

Бже вѣчніи сьбравіи растоещасе вь F31v еднненіе   

(2) Дрѹ млтва гле ереи ега вьнидѣть юноша сь двцѹ вь чрьтог иде хощеть спати на постѣлю Гѹ помолисе
Ги бе нашь чрьтогь благолѣпіа спообьівіи вьси вьсѣхь иже вь законѣ   
Пото бьівае блгодареніе веліе ядѹше и піюще и влещ о хѣ о юнака и ѡ невѣсте
(3) Дрѹ млтва ега хоще невѣста положити на главѹ завика сѥ ре махрама
Млтва пѡ
F32r Ги бе нашь главьі пррко проповѣдавіи просщеніе разѹма твоего . . .191

[(1) . . . And they go from the church to their (the couple’s) home. The priest prays:
O Eternal God, you who bring together in unity the things that before had been separate . . .
(prayer continues).
(2) Another prayer said by the priest when the young man enters the bridal chamber with
the maiden, where he wants to sleep on the bed.
Let us pray to the Lord.
Lord our God, you who deem all those under the law worthy of a beautiful bridal cham-
ber . . . (prayer continues).
Then the great thanksgiving (feast) takes place, eating and drinking and rejoicing over
Christ, the young man, and the bride.

(3) Another prayer when the bride wants to place the wrap on her head that is called a
mahrama.
The priest (says) the prayer:
Lord our God, you who have spoken through the prophets and have proclaimed that the
splendor of your knowledge . . . (prayer continues).

190
On this manuscript, see the catalog entry in Radoman Stankovic ,́ Рукописне књиге Музеја Српске
православне цркве у Београду: Водени знаци и датирање (Belgrade, 2003), 3.1.71.
191
I give the entire transcription of the hair binding prayer here: Ги бе нашь главьі пррко проповѣдавіи
просщеніе разѹма твоего боущаго вь послѣдніе дніи вьсѣмь езьіко не хотѣи да ни единь  члкь тобою сьтвореньі безчьсти
боуть твоего спсеніа заповѣдавіи избрніимь твои съсоуда павло апло вьса вь славѹ творити зако положи мѹже живѹщи
вѣрою такоже и жена мѹжемь непокрьвеною главою приносити славѹ и хвалѹ имени твоемѹ стмѹ женаже вьѡрѹженіи
покрьвеною главою вѣрою и сь мльчнніемь и ѣеломѹдріемь оукрашати се дѣли блгьіми похваленіе да приносѣть и млтвьі
славе твоеи Тьі влко вьсѣхь блви рабѹ твоею сію ім и оукрасіи главѹ ею оукрашени оугодніимь тебѣ оулѹчитьі вѣчна бгаа
тѣ оувѣзаюшисе и тѣ слава вьзсілае ѡцѹ и снѹ и стмѹ дхѹ и ння и прно и вь вѣки вѣко

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1112 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
This manuscript describes three distinct nuptial rituals. The first is a blessing that
presumably would have been pronounced upon the wedding party’s arrival at the
home of the couple.192 The second prayer is a Slavonic translation of a Greek text
first encountered in the tenth-century Palestinian euchology Sinai gr. 957, where it
is employed to inaugurate, literally “set up,” the nuptial chamber (Εt̓ vg̀ ei̓ ς τὸ
rτg̃ rai parτὸm γάlοt, fol. 21r–v).193 In addition to the Greek title’s reference to a
bedchamber, the text of the prayer has sexual overtones, since it refers to nuptial
crowns as a prize for virginity (ἔpahkοm paqhemίaς)—which is soon to be lost—
and beseeches God to grant the newlyweds good child production (vάqirai at̓ τοiς̃ . . .
paidοpοiίam a ̓ γahήm).194 Likewise, the Serbian manuscript employs this prayer for
the inauguration of the couple’s sexual life, if we interpret the Slavonic verb “sleep”
(спати) here as a euphemism for intercourse, as it is used in derivative contemporary
Slavic languages. We should note that the Slavonic title of the prayer is directed pri-
marily toward the young man, echoing the archaic notion that entry into the nuptial
chamber (and what follows) is the active task of the groom, whereas the bride takes
on a more passive role.195 Likewise in archaic fashion, the wedding party continues its
celebration while the couple is secluded in their chamber.
Only after the prayer for the couple’s entry into the nuptial chamber—and pre-
sumably only after sexual activity had transpired—would the priest recite the third
prayer, “when the bride wants to place the wrap on her head that is called a
mahrama.” The text uses the Turkish-Arabic loanword mahrama, which means a
head scarf.196 Lack of scribal specification leaves it ambiguous whether this prayer
would be recited at home or on a subsequent occasion in a different location. Nev-
ertheless, it is clear that the head scarf is used as an object indicative of the woman’s
sexual transformation through marriage.
Ethnographers have long noted associations between headdresses and marriage
across the Slavic world. When Olive Lodge traveled to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
in the 1930s, she recorded a custom among Serbian Orthodox Christians at Galič nik
that occurred on the morning following consummation, during which the bride cer-
emoniously fetched water: “The bride, for this ceremony of fetching the first water
for use in her new home, wore on her head a white hand-woven fringed scarf, such as
women in old times used to wear, over a kind of silvered chain cap, with silver coins

192
The prayer is nothing other than a Slavonic translation of the Constantinopolitan prayer of be-
trothal (engagement). Its inclusion as a domestic blessing can be explained by the fact that this man-
uscript, unlike most euchologies, does not include the betrothal prayers as part of its church service. On
the betrothal prayer, see Gabriel Radle, “The Nuptial Rites in Two Rediscovered First-Millennium
Sinai Euchologies,” in Rites and Rituals of the Christian East: Proceedings of the Fourth International
Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Lebanon, 10–15 July 2012, ed. Bert Groen, Daniel Ga-
ladza, Nina Glibetic, and Gabriel Radle (Leuven, 2014), 303–16, at 306–9.
193
See Radle, “The Development of Byzantine Marriage Rites,” 139–40.
194
See Dmitrievsky, Описание литургических рукописей, 4. The prayer is found on fol. 22r of Sinai
gr. 957.
195
See, for example, Menander Rhetor’s Pεrì kaτεunajτikοũ (Treatise 2.7) in Donald Russell and
Nigel Wilson, Menander Rhetor (Oxford, 1981), 146–59.
196
The word mahrama is related to the Arabic word mahram, which can refer to a women’s male kin
who have the capacity to serve as a guardian. The relationship between these two words underscores
the ancient Near Eastern association of veils with guardianship, discussed above, n. 66.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1113
attached to it; this she would continue to wear on special occasions during the year,
especially during the next fortnight.”197
The custom recorded by Lodge is certainly related to that encountered in our
fifteenth-century Serbian manuscript. Similar customs are recorded among Serbs in
Kosovo and Ras.198 South Slavic dress culture evidently associated female head cov-
ering with entry into the married state, analogous to contemporary Orthodox Jewish
custom.199 In some communities, this tradition was given an ecclesiastical dimension
through the priest’s recitation of a prayer. The defunct Byzantine rite for binding an
adolescent’s hair provided the text. It is worth noting that in this particular manu-
script, the prayer is slightly altered, as it does not contain the passage most relevant
to adolescent chastity, namely, the reference to the “education of her body parts to-
ward self control.”
The deployment of this prayer for marriage ritual was not isolated to South
Slavs. A Wallachian trebnik (sacramentary) printed at Venice in 1635 includes the
prayer for head binding and associates it with a woman reentering church for the
first time after her marriage.200 The same is true for the influential 1646 trebnik of
Peter Moghila.201 The title there reads, “The prayer of a bride married for the first
time, when she wants to enter the church after marriage and receive the blessing
of the head covering.”202 The text specifies that the rite be performed only if it is a
bride’s first marriage. This indication could be explained by the fact that a woman
who contracted a second marriage would have already adopted this dress habit at
the time of her first marriage. However, because the context here is linked specifically
to the woman’s entry into a church building after consummation, it appears that the

197
Olive Lodge, “Serbian Wedding Customs: St Peter’s Day in Galič nik,” Slavonic and Eastern Eu-
ropean Review 13 (1935): 650–73, at 669–70. Note that today, Galič nik is located in the Republic of
North Macedonia and inhabited by the Miljak people, whom ethnographers in the early twentieth cen-
tury considered a subgroup of Serbs. On the general tendency of traditional East European bridal dress
to conserve archaic clothing customs, see Elizabeth Wayland Barber, “On the Antiquity of East Euro-
pean Bridal Clothing,” Dress 21 (1994): 17–29.
198
On the ceremonial headdress traditionally assumed by Serbian women after the wedding in these
regions, see Jelena Aranđelovic -Lazic
́ ,́ “Женско оглавље у облику рога као одраз примитивне идеје о
плодности,” Bulletin du Musée ethnographique de Beograd 34 (1971): 34–74.
199
In some regions, Jewish and non-Jewish customs of head covering likely influenced one another. We
should also note that, unlike standard contemporary practice, several ancient Jewish texts presuppose that
unmarried virgins covered their heads. See Isa. 46.1–3 and Gen. 24.65. See also the discussion in Lynne
Schreiber, “Halachot of Hair,” in Hide and Seek: Jewish Women and Hair Covering, ed. Schreiber (New
York, 2006), 197–209. Compare with the late antique evidence for the domestic seclusion of unmarried
Jewish women, given in Ross Kraemer, “Jewish Women in the Diaspora World of Late Antiquity,” in Jew-
ish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, 1998), 46–72, at 54–56. See also Mark
Finney, “Honor, Head-Coverings and Headship: 1 Corinthians 11.2–16 in Its Social Context,” Journal
for the Study of the New Testament 33 (2010): 31–58, at 42 n. 47. For a modern example of unmarried
Jewish virgins covering their hair, see the Yemenite custom in Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper, The
Yemenites: Two Thousand Years of Jewish Culture (Jerusalem, 2000), 67.
200
Млтва невѣстѣ хотѧщеи оувестисѧ въ црко по бракѹ Trebnik-Molitvenik (Venice, 1635), fol. 203r.
201
Here, the rite is found after a prayer for the removal of the marriage crowns on the eighth day, a
ritual whose origins lie in a blessing at the consummation chamber, on which see Radle, “The Devel-
opment of Byzantine Marriage Rites,” 139–46.
202
Trebnik (Kiev, 1646), 1:428–31. Digital version via the British Library: https://eap.bl.uk/archive
-file/EAP556-1-7-1 (last accessed 10 July 2019). Relevant pages begin at scan 456. This trebnik includes
a note that this rite was not celebrated everywhere.

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1114 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium
issue of ritual impurity is also at play. Late medieval Orthodox Christian Slavs held
that blood flow made a woman ritually unclean and thereby unfit for entry into the
church building.203 While extant literary sources focus on menstrual and postpartum
seclusion of women from church life, it is likely that similar ideas were projected onto
the consummation of a first marriage, since society expected blood flow on this oc-
casion.204 Thus, within some East Slavic communities, the text of the head-binding
rite was linked not only to a woman’s sexual transformation, as it is in the Serbian
manuscript, but also to her ritual purification.205

***
Our investigation of the Byzantine liturgical rite for binding up the head of a woman
represents in many ways a microhistory of medieval Orthodox Christian liturgical
practice and religious ideas that surrounded the female body. We have observed
that a prayer composed in the early Byzantine period was originally used as an ad-
olescent coming-of-age rite in which womanhood was defined in biblical and litur-
gical vocabulary and manifested through socially coded dress habits. Our manu-
script analysis reveals that throughout various communities of the medieval
eastern Mediterranean, priests prayed over young women when they had their hair
bound up as a symbol of assuming the life of a modest and chaste adult woman.
Comparison of this liturgical rite to literary and visual evidence suggests that the be-
liefs expounded upon in the rite were broadly held across society. While sources re-
veal a great variety of dress customs in the Byzantine world, they also attest that the
binding up and covering of women’s hair were important aspects of women’s public
appearance. Liturgy, literature, and art all employed the dressing of the female head
as a means of communicating women’s identity.
Yet our study also reveals that the relationship between liturgical texts and their
use was not a constant over the long course of Byzantine religious history. Just as
historians of Byzantine art and literature have resisted generalizations with regard
to women’s dress across the vast and long enduring Byzantine cultural sphere, it is
impossible to pin down a single use and interpretation for many liturgical rites.
The rite for binding up a woman’s hair highlights this point, as it was variously em-
ployed in later religious tradition for the veiling of nuns at their consecration and for
signaling the new sexual and relationship status of a woman after marital consum-
mation. While the early Byzantine evidence supports a link between the covering of
hair and a woman’s embodiment of modesty and self-control, later sources, especially
within the Slavic milieu, suggest that the veiling of a woman’s hair could also be used

203
Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, 1989), 169–72.
See also above, n. 149.
204
On a bride’s need for ritual purification after consummation in some medieval German and Swed-
ish communities, see Mia Korpiola, Between Betrothal and Bedding: The Making of Marriage in Swe-
den, ca. 1200–1610 (Vantaa, 2004), 103–7. Cf. Korpiola, “Introduction: Regional Variations and
Harmonization in Medieval Matrimonial Law,” in Regional Variations in Matrimonial Law and Cus-
tom in Europe, 1150–1600, ed. Korpiola (Leiden, 2011), 1–20, at 4 n. 10.
205
While I have only been able to identify the bridal use of this prayer within Slavonic texts, given geo-
graphic proximity and the frequent dependence of Slavonic texts upon Greek sources, it cannot be entirely
excluded that some late Byzantine Greek communities of the Balkans also once knew this practice.

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 The Veiling of Women in Byzantium 1115
as a symbol of her marital status. Thus, within the history of the Byzantine religious
tradition, notions attached to women’s hair could both be distinctly Christian and
also manifest affinities to the diverse social norms of dress found in other religious
communities of the Mediterranean, including those of Muslims and Jews.
Our identification of the variety of uses for a single liturgical text highlights a gen-
eral principle that does endure across the Byzantine religious tradition: the manner in
which a woman kept her hair—whether through adopting varying standards of
binding it up and covering it, or rejecting such norms—could define her relationship
to her society, herself, and God. The liturgical rite thus underscores that religious di-
mensions of dress were not limited to monks and clergy, with their established garb
and vestments. An individual laywoman’s adoption of a specific dress habit could
equally be an act of religious investiture.

Gabriel Radle is Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame
(e-mail: [email protected])
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