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Please reference as: Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Kassia', https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home/research-projects/soundscapes-and-echoes/kassia/imperial-inscriptions
The Invective Against the Armenians (C 33–42 [1-10]), attributed to Kassia, provides a striking example of how women’s textual voices in Byzantium could be both appropriated and implicated in imperial discourse. As Marc Lauxtermann (2003, 251) demonstrates, the poem is divided into two incongruous parts: verses C 33–36 [1-4] may preserve an authentic invective by Kassia, while verses C 37–42 [5-10] are a later addition, imitating an epigram from the the Anthology of Cephalas (AP XI, 238). This discontinuity renders the text a composite artifact, a palimpsest of hostility in which Kassia’s name functions less as a guarantor of coherence than as a legitimating signature for an expanding rhetoric of ethnic contempt. Her voice is absorbed into the machinery of the empire, its authority leveraged for purposes beyond her original intent.
Historically, Kassia was neither a feminist nor a proto-feminist. Her writings—ethical, liturgical, and gnomic—are fully embedded in the monastic and theological milieu of ninth-century Byzantium. Modern historiography, however, has reimagined her as the first woman composer and, in some interpretations, as a feminist avant la lettre. As Kurt Sherry argues in his chapter “Kassia the Feminist,” such retrospective identifications are less about recovering a historical subject than about producing a usable past—a narrative through which feminist modernity secures its prehistory by installing figures like Kassia as precursors. Sherry claims that her “feminist philosophy, while employing traditional Byzantine ideals of femininity, left no room for passivity or submissiveness … [she] exemplified the power, strength, and action of women” (2023, 41). The force of this claim lies precisely in its anachronism: a monastic author writing within the hierarchies of empire is transformed into a proto-feminist emblem of empowerment. The figure of “Kassia the feminist” thus illuminates the performative labour of feminist historiography itself—its need to locate beginnings, inscribe continuity, and authenticate its lineage through the bodies and voices of women who could never have imagined its terms. [1]
Read through Sophie Lewis’s lens of enemy feminisms—those internally divided, co-opted, and complicit in reproducing the violences they seek to oppose (Lewis 2023)—Kassia’s case further exposes the recursive structure of such genealogical desire. Her attributed invective participates, willingly or not, in reproducing imperial hierarchies; her modern reception participates, equally unwittingly, in reproducing historiographical hierarchies that privilege origins and exemplarity. Both appropriations—Byzantine and feminist—depend on the authority of her name, which circulates as a legitimating token of purity, piety, or precedence. The interpolation of the invective, far from being a mere scribal accident, becomes emblematic of this broader process: an authorial signature expanded, distorted, and weaponized in the service of power.
To read Kassia today is thus to confront not only the instability of authorship but the politics of its afterlife. A feminist reading adequate to this task must resist the comfort of exemplarity and attend instead to the ways women’s texts are repeatedly re-inscribed—by imperial, ecclesiastical, and feminist traditions alike—into systems of value that convert singular voices into tokens of continuity. As Sherry notes, the appeal of Kassia’s modern iconization lies in its ability to reconcile historical absence with symbolic presence, to compensate for the silence of women’s archives by monumentalizing one of its few audible figures, “one of the few surviving female voices from the Byzantine era” (2023, 23). Yet this compensatory gesture risks reproducing the very logics of appropriation it seeks to undo: where recovery becomes sanctification, and remembrance becomes containment.
Chrono-DREAMer, © Firelei Báez
From a Glissantian perspective, what resists both imperial and feminist capture in Kassia’s corpus is its opacity—its refusal to yield to the transparent categories of subjecthood or exemplarity. Opacity, as Édouard Glissant writes, is not a lack of clarity but a relational mode that preserves difference without subordinating it to comprehension. (2010) To read Kassia opaquely is thus to allow her voice to remain partially unreadable, to acknowledge its singular historicity without converting it into a symbol of continuity. Against the monumentalizing impulse of feminist historiography, opacity functions as a counter-ethic: a way of sustaining the irreducible density of women’s textual afterlives, their resistant temporalities, their refusal to serve as origins.
The invective attributed to Kassia thus materializes not only the entanglement of female authorship and empire but also the paradox of feminist recovery itself—the coexistence of empowerment and complicity, critique and replication. Reading Kassia through this dual lens—of enemy feminism and opacity—reorients feminist historiography from the search for origins toward a critique of its own genealogical desires. It redefines feminist work as an inquiry into the economies of power, mediation, and myth that govern the afterlives of women’s words, and as a practice of relation that honours what remains unassimilable in their voices. In this sense, Kassia’s textual afterlife can be read rhythmanalytically—as a temporal composition of interruptions, repetitions, and resonances through which the feminist archive listens not for origins but for the uneven rhythms of survival itself. [2]
Notes
[1] See the blog “Kassiani: Placing a Woman at the Center of the Easter Drama” by Carol P. Christ, https://feminismandreligion.com/2015/04/13/kassiani-placing-a-woman-at-the-center-of-the-easter-drama-by-carol-p-christ/
[2] For a discussion of “narrative rhythmanalysis” in women’s writings, see Tamboukou 2025, particularly chapter 7, pp.269-293.
References
Glissant, Édouard. (2010 [1990]). “For Opacity”, in Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing (transl.), pp. 189-194. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Lauxtermann, Marc, D. (2003) Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Géomètres, vol. 1, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
Sherry, Kurt (2013) Kassia the Nun in Context: The Religious Thought of a Ninth-Century Byzantine Monastic. New Jersey: Gorgias Press.
Tamboukou, Maria (2025) Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies. London: Routledge.
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