Évelyne Patlagean (20 October 1932 – 11 November 2008) was a French historian and Byzantinist, working on questions of poverty, welfare, gender, the family, and women in Byzantium.
Poverty is the scarcity or the lack of a certain (variant) amount of material possessions or money. Poverty is a multifaceted concept, which may include social, economic, and political elements. Absolute poverty, extreme poverty, or destitution refers to the complete lack of the means necessary to meet basic personal needs such as food, clothing and shelter.
Welfare is a type of government support for the citizens of that society. Welfare may be provided to people of any income level, as with social security, but it is usually intended to ensure that the poor can meet their basic human needs such as food and shelter. Welfare attempts to provide poor people with a minimal level of well-being, usually either a free- or a subsidized-supply of certain goods and social services, such as healthcare, education, and vocational training.
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures, or gender identity. Traditionally, people who identify as men or women or use masculine or feminine gender pronouns are using a system of gender binary whereas those who exist outside these groups fall under the umbrella terms non-binary or genderqueer. Some cultures have specific gender roles that are distinct from "man" and "woman," such as the hijras of South Asia. These are often referred to as third genders.
Patlagean's doctoral thesis, entitled Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siècles, was published in 1977. In it, Patlagean developed ideas about inherent inequality in the status of women in the eastern Roman empire. She worked on questions of gender indetermination and transgression, including the seemingly unclear status of the eunuch, and in an important 1976 article, Patlagean opened a new dimension on the masculine inscription of circumscribed gender roles in Byzantine religious orders. [1] Georges Sidéris suggests [2] that Patlagean drew upon then-new insights afforded by the work of the sex and gender researchers Robert J. Stoller and Ann Oakley. Patlagean contributed to the first volume of Paul Veyne's edited Histoire de la vie privée (1987).
The term eunuch generally refers to a man who has been castrated, typically early enough in his life for this change to have major hormonal consequences. In Latin, the words eunuchus, spado, and castratus were used to denote eunuchs.
Paul Veyne is a French archaeologist and historian, and a specialist on Ancient Rome. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure and member of the École française de Rome, he is now honorary professor at the Collège de France.
Her final book, Un moyen âge grec, although controversial, was generally well received upon its publication in 2007. [3] Patlagean argued forcefully that Byzantium, a field of study generally kept separate from the Latin West in teaching and research (a bifurcation stemming in large part from the Byzantinist's need for facility with Greek), should be viewed as integrally connected with both the idea of the Middle Ages, and with the history of western Europe. [4] Memorial colloquia were held in honour of Évelyne Patlagean on 21 and 22 November 2011, at École normale supérieure Paris and Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre (the former Paris X-Nanterre) respectively. [5]
Byzantium or Byzantion was an ancient Greek colony in early antiquity that later became Constantinople, and then Istanbul. Byzantium was colonized by the Greeks from Megara in 657 BC.
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.
