Journal of Early Christian Studies

Byzantine Intersectionality is driven by the author's commitment that "as historians we can use the privilege of recorded historical figures to excavate interstitial subjectivities that were denied to those less privileged" (207). Betancourt succeeds in laying the groundwork of this endeavor, producing a methodologically complex and analytically nuanced study of Roman intersectional identities that adroitly draws on material culture, sacred art, and textual corpora that few scholars can navigate with such sophistication and dexterity. On purely academic merits, Byzantine Intersectionality is a great service to scholars sympathetic to matters of social justice in relation to the excavation of the past, but who are unfamiliar with intersectional historiography.

What distinguishes this book further, however, is a leveraged intervention by speaking in the interstices of its findings to contemporary power dynamics in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Benjamin Dunning's Specters of Paul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Betancourt's book takes calculated shots at an internationally growing movement among white patriarchal supremacists to appropriate the medieval Roman empire as a symbolic imaginary of a past that, the book incontrovertibly shows, never in fact existed. Indeed, critics have questioned how truly "intersectional" this book is (seemingly with little awareness of how the application of the term has developed since Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it), while failing to notice that Betancourt demands of his readers the critical self-reflection that their own intersecting positionalities are never neutral or innocent, even in relation to this content. From this perspective, Byzantine Intersectionality doubles as a handbook for those inclined to contest imaginary lines of continuity between the Romans and those who want to appropriate them for a patriarchal white supremacist dystopia.

These ethical motivations are apparent from Chapter One, "The Virgin's Consent," which examines changing Roman attitudes to sexual consent surrounding Mary's response to Gabriel's annunciation. Purely as a history of culture, the chapter is riveting in its exegesis of consent as a legal, moral, and religious category before and after Iconoclasm. Betancourt highlights differing attitudes [End Page 253] to consent, from Germanos of Constantinople's appalling suggestion that Mary would be impregnated whether willing or not (26–27), to Photios of Constantinople's belief that Mary's consenting words "enacted the Incarnation" (35), to Nikolaos Kabasilas, whose words on the matter Betancourt equates with "a modern defense of sexual and reproductive consent" (39). Indeed, the Romans were concerned about involuntary marriage and marital rape (30–31), instances where consent was "fundamentally impossible" (29), and how terminological slippage surrounding fornication, rape, and adultery had to be clarified during the Isaurian dynasty (28). So, while consent was contested in early Roman culture, in the latter centuries opinion congealed around the belief that because "humanity is remade through consent," therefore "consent is fundamental to the nature of humanity itself" (57).

This discussion is closely linked to Chapter Two, "Slut-Shaming an Empress," which focuses on Prokopios's invective against Theodora in the Secret History. This chapter compellingly excavates the subjectivities it set out to find by demonstrating how technologies of reproductive self-determination were accessible in proportion to class. Contrary to public opinion, in cities like Constantinople, "we find . . . a grasp, understanding, and promotion of what we might call a woman's right to choose in reproductive and sexual matters" (78). Certainly, ecclesial and civil Roman law unambiguously condemned reproductive technologies in principle, but that hardly means they did not flourish, even under Christian physicians, such as Aetios of Amida (sixth century) and Paulos of Aigina (seventh century). Thus, Betancourt undercuts contemporary beliefs that premodern Christians categorically and unambiguously opposed reproductive self-determination.

Chapter Four, "Queer Sensations," primarily develops from an art history perspective the groundwork laid by Derek Krueger and others in reference to same-gender intimacies, particularly in monastic texts. Even as a non-specialist in art history, I found the chapter compelling and accessible, but I leave further review of it to others better suited to assess it.

Conversely, Chapter Three, "Transgender Lives," and Chapter Five, "The Ethiopian Eunuch," form a couplet in that they examine hagiographical depictions of what I call "transaints" and textual and visual interpretations of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26–40) from similar perspectives that show the interrelatedness of gender and race. Approaching these subjects today is inescapably fraught, so Betancourt's thorough grasp of cutting-edge queer and intersectional theories shines through all the brighter. He affirms transgender identities from the start and explores further "what a transgender Byzantine identity might have looked like" (89), while calling out—as is long overdue—scholars who "deny the feasibility of trans identities in the medieval world" and thereby "promote the notion that trans and nonbinary subjects are a modern invention" (91). Similarly, Betancourt interrogates scholarly sentiments that racialization did not exist until early modernity; instead, he explores the numerous intersections of cultural, racial, and gendered alterities in the Roman empire, especially through the representation of the Ethiopian eunuch in Basil II's Menologion. Betancourt's discussion of Roman racialization is engrossing, particularly for its ability to accord localized nuance to each text or artwork, ranging from the ill-treatment [End Page 254] of Abba Moses the Ethiopian (184–85) to the reportedly lavish treatment of the Nubian king in Constantinople (174–75). Indeed, some of the concluding phrases in this chapter are particularly hard-hitting in light of the priorities I believe animate the study: "The image of the Ethiopian eunuch requires that we confront the fact that, despite having inherited a long history of racial invective, the Byzantines repeatedly turned racist stereotypes on their heads" or "The Byzantines were not white" (203).

While Chapters One, Two, and Four offer compelling and methodologically innovative readings of relatively well-known materials, the book's most lasting intervention will likely prove to be Chapters Three and Five. In my estimation, these two chapters are the most important contribution to the intersectional treatment of Roman transgender, nonbinary, and racialized identities so far penned by any scholar.