Please reference as:  Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Archival Personae', https://sites.google.com/view/soundscapesandechoes/home/archival-personae

In my archival encounters with letters, diaries, and fragments of women’s writings, I have searched for ways of attending to the multiplicity of voices that emerge in the act of narrating a life. Out of this work, I have developed the notion of narrative personae—a conceptual tool for tracing how women have written themselves across shifting registers of voice, role, and relation.

This formulation is indebted to two sources of inspiration. From Deleuze and Guattari, I have taken the figure of the conceptual persona—that creative force which accompanies the philosopher, opening up new planes of thought. Conceptual personae are not the philosopher’s mask; they are the dramatis personae of philosophy itself, shaping what thinking can become. From Arendt, I have taken the idea of the persona as the worldly face through which one appears in public, bound up with the fragile conditions of plurality and recognition.

My work on narrative personae brings these two trajectories into the space of women’s life-writing. In letters or autobiographical fragments, women are not simply “expressing themselves.” Rather, they are composing figures of selfhood that are at once intimate and public, singular and collective. Narrative personae emerge in this tension: they are created in the act of narration, but they are also relational, produced in response to interlocutors, conventions, and the social conditions of their time.

Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari allows me to recognize the generative and inventive aspect of these personae—life-writing as a laboratory of becoming. Thinking with Arendt reminds me that these personae are also fragile, situated in webs of relations where speech and appearance are precarious.

To speak of narrative personae is therefore to resist any singular or unified notion of subjectivity. Instead, it is to attend to the plurality of figures through which women have narrated themselves into the world. It is a feminist move, but also a philosophical one: to recognize that the self is always a composition, always in movement, always more than one.

In the feminist genealogies I am sketching in this project however, the ninth-century Byzantine nun Kassia— the celebrated “first woman composer”— cannot appear as a narrative persona, because there is no narrative substrate on which such a persona could be built. Instead, she emerges as what I call an archival persona: a figure whose very legibility is produced through the near-total absence of conventional life writing. With no autobiography, correspondence, or biographical testimony beyond her hymns and gnomai, Kassia reaches us not through a coherent self-narration but through the dispersed and fragmentary traces that the archive makes available. It is precisely this condition—an existence mediated by textual remnants rather than by life-writing—that brings the concept of the archival persona into view. 

Kassia's appearance in the archive exemplifies how an archival persona can be constituted without first-person documents—through the diffuse, even contradictory mediations of textual transmission and tradition. What we know of Kassia arises from a dispersed corpus: the austere eloquence of her hymns; the philosophical epigrams attributed to her; the courtly anecdote of the bride-show in which she rebuffs the emperor Theophilos; and the monastic traces that present her as abbess and intellectual authority. Each of these elements generates a distinct register of persona, and none can be privileged as the primary or “true” one. Instead, together they invite us to consider how, in the near-total absence of life writing, a historical woman becomes thinkable only at the entanglement of textual genres, devotional practices, and later retellings.

In this sense, Kassia complicates any linear model of life-writing. Her archival persona is not self-fashioned in the autobiographical mode but is produced retroactively through the entanglement of liturgical tradition and cultural memory. Her hymns, composed for communal recitation, craft a persona of theological depth and emotional intensity—an authorial figure that is at once interior and collective, speaking through the ritual voice of the church. Meanwhile, the anecdotal Kassia of Byzantine chronicles, clever and unyielding, introduces a different figure: a woman whose sharpness unsettles imperial authority, a persona constructed as much by patriarchy’s fascination as by her own agency of thought. And the philosophical Kassia—epigrammatist, moral thinker—adds yet another layer, one that aligns her with the masculine intellectual lineages of her time even as her voice displaces them.

Reading these materials through the lens of the archival persona allows us to refuse the pressure to synthesize them into a single coherent subject. Instead, Kassia emerges as an assemblage whose various figures resonate with and disrupt one another. She is not reducible to the hagiographic saint, the rebellious court figure, or the contemplative theologian. Her archival persona circulates across these domains, shaped by the relational conditions of liturgical communities, monastic life, and the historiographical imaginations of later centuries.

In attending to this multiplicity, we can perceive how women’s writings persists even in the absence of explicit autobiographical form. Kassia’s persona demonstrates how voice can be distributed across genres, how fragments can echo one another, and how the archive itself becomes a site where narrative figures are repeatedly reconstituted. She thus invites us to imagine life-writing not as a stable record of a unified self, but as a dynamic field in which the figures of a life emerge, diverge, and return—always in movement, always more than one.