When I entered graduate school, I knew that teaching would be a major component of my training; I did not, however, imagine how much teaching would impact my research.
I began crafting this course, “Women, Sex, and Power in the Mediterranean World (c. 450BCE – 1200 CE)” as a response to my own preliminary examinations (prelims). As a researcher of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), my readings forced me to not only look at my own time period (10th century) and geographic range (Constantinople), but to also move forward and backward in time across the entire Mediterranean basin. Across these readings, I could make connections between Greco-Roman precedents and Medieval ideas of religion, gender, sexuality, and economics, challenging the arbitrary temporal divide between “Antiquity” and “Medieval.” I was struck by the sheer amount of primary and secondary sources that complemented each other, but, due to their temporal stratification, had not been put in conversation with each other. I kept careful track of any instance of women behaving “unwomanly” or what made a man so “manly.” By the end of prelims, I had accidentally compiled what would become many of the core readings for the class.
As a Mosse Teaching Fellow, I was able to connect these threads for a class of twenty-eight undergrads across a variety of academic disciplines from freshmen to seniors. The course became a multifaceted exploration into the lives of women (and some exceptional men) across the broadly construed “Mediterranean World.” Our investigation took place on two levels: first, using primary source documents, and some physical objects. We examined the kinds of opportunities women could access, the work that women contributed to their societies, and finally the societal expectations that institutions such as legal structures and religious institutions placed upon women. This required a considerable amount of background instruction and reading so that the students were equipped to properly contextualize each Mediterranean society. The second level of analysis focused on the issue of “bias” – not only in premodern sources, but also in modern academic texts. The students were frequently shocked that some of the biases and stereotypes that premodern sources used to describe women were often repeated uncritically in modern scholarship. Together, we not only examined the factors that may have created these premodern caricatures but also questioned what social factors exist today to produce and reproduce such preconceptions across time and space.
The course was divided into three distinct units: the ancient world, the early medieval world, and the high medieval world. Within the first unit we examined Ancient Greece from 400BCE until the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the rise and “fall” of the Roman Empire. We explored figures such as Neaira, a Greek woman put on trial for questions of citizenship and prostitution, Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great who attempted to claim power after his death, and Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman official who was sexually assaulted and committed suicide rather than allow dishonor to fall on her family.
The second unit focused on the changes that occurred in the Roman Empire in the Late Antique world and the development of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). Here we focused on figures such as Christian martyrs (Perpetua and Felicity), scandalous empresses (Theodora), and women who ruled in their own right, without the support of male relatives (Irene the Athenian). We also examined the relationship between early Christianity and Islam, and the ways in which these two religious traditions communicated, shaped, and molded one another, particularly in the case-study of Iconoclasm.
The last unit focused on the high medieval era. We considered medieval constructions of “gender” using saints’ lives whereby the titular characters might hide their gender in order to reside within a monastery. Subsequently, we explored the gendered role of eunuchs in the Eastern Roman Empire and saw the ways in which they constituted a kind of “third gender” in this society. Finally, we explored the multifaceted ways that the Crusades utilized gendered conversations and stereotypes to heighten divides between “East” and “West” and “Christian” and “Muslim.” We ended this unit by considering how the rhetoric of the Crusades has been utilized in modern discourses. Despite these temporal categorizations of each unit, we focused on the continuity of the Mediterranean world writ large and would often put these distinct time periods in conversation with each other, to understand how the past influenced developments across these time periods.
Since the course covered almost sixteen hundred years of history, the assignments were structured to give the students a considerable amount of choice to practice the careful and critical work of being historians. First, each week the students were asked to respond to an open-ended prompt focused on one of the primary source readings of the week or were asked to find connections between primary source materials of a complementary time period or geographic location. These responses demonstrated the sheer curiosity and intellectualism of the students, as many would take their assignment even further, drawing on material from their other classes – such as biological metaphors or literary connections – to support their arguments. Second, the students wrote two longer analytical essays, where they were asked to perform a close reading of the texts for that unit. The first of these essays focused on what traits the ancient authors found characteristic of a “good woman” in their particular ancient society. The second essay challenged the students to think beyond questions of femininity, and in fact, required students to argue what texts focused on medieval women might tell modern readers about ideas of “masculinity” at that time. Finally, the students had the opportunity to visit the Chazen Museum of Art to experience a behind-the-scenes, up-close examination of Imperial Roman coins. This experience allowed them to learn about museum collections and curation within the museum environment. In lieu of a final research paper, the students designed their own museum exhibits covering their choice of women’s history in the Mediterranean world using the online collections of over twenty museums worldwide. Ultimately, this project allowed the students to think about how the general public engages with history and how to communicate the themes of the course to a non-academic audience.
While I entered the classroom with my own plan for the course’s trajectory, the students truly shaped the final version of the course. Not only did their frequent questions, concerns, and curiosity shape the course of lectures day-to-day, but their clear interest in certain topics also pushed me to amend the syllabus to accommodate their keen interests. Despite discussing challenging topics such as sex work, abortion, citizenship rights, and slavery, the students were always respectful of the historical subjects they were studying as well as each other. It was incredibly rewarding to watch students who professed their own anxieties about studying the premodern world in Week 1 draw connections in Week 10 that myself and other academics in the field have missed! The students were not merely passive recipients of knowledge, but active co-collaborators responsible for maintaining an inquisitive classroom environment.
The course was a resounding success. Despite the course running in a tumultuous societal environment, the students were always excited to engage with the day’s material. In fact, for the work of this class I was the recipient of the History Department’s 2024-2025 Award for Excellence in Teaching, given in recognition of outstanding teaching of undergrads. I am immensely grateful for the Mosse Program and the Mosse Teaching Fellowship donors for giving me this opportunity to grow as a researcher, a teacher, and most importantly, as a person.
Tiffany VanWinkoop is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences and an M.A. in History at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her research focuses on gender, sex, and sexuality in the Medieval Roman Empire (Byzantium) and spans a variety of topics situated in the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (r. 913-959). In the Spring of 2025, with support of the Mosse Teaching Fellowship, Tiffany offered an ambitious survey course on women, sex, and power in the expansive Mediterranean World spanning from 400 BCE to approximately 1200CE.