Category: Departments & Disciplines

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Confinement in Byzantine Narrative, Part II: A Woman Between Walls – St. Matrona of Perge and the Power of Chosen Enclosure

In Part I of this discussion, we saw how imprisonment in Byzantine martyr narratives could become a spiritual threshold. Confinement was not merely punishment; it could mark transformation.

But what happens when confinement is not imposed – when it is actively sought?

The Greek Life of St. Matrona of Perge, written in the mid-sixth century or later, offers a striking answer. Unlike martyrs forced into prison, Matrona repeatedly chooses enclosure. Yet she must move constantly in order to find it.

Her story unfolds across cities – Constantinople, Emesa, Jerusalem, Beirut – and is marked by flight, disguise, and pursuit. Beneath this movement, however, lies a single, persistent aim: isolation for the sake of God.

Movement Toward Enclosure

Matrona begins as a married woman who longs for a more ascetic life. In Constantinople, she takes the dramatic step of disguising herself as a eunuch and entering the male monastery of Bassianos. There she lives for three years in disciplined seclusion. The monastery becomes her first chosen confinement – a space of radical self-redefinition.

When her identity is discovered, she is compelled to leave. What follows is not freedom, but further searching. Her husband pursues her from city to city. Each escape becomes a new attempt at enclosure.

The most revealing episode occurs in Beirut.

A Deserted Temple at the Edge of the City

After a series of perilous journeys, Matrona settles in a deserted pagan temple on the edge of the city. It is an abandoned structure – neither fully urban nor truly wilderness. This marginal setting becomes the stage for her most intense confrontation with space.

Here, the narrative slows down. The rapid sequence of travels pauses, and attention shifts to the place itself.

One night, while chanting psalms, Matrona hears voices responding to her, though no one is present:

Now, it happened once, as she performed the nightly psalmody, that demons sang most fervently in response, for she heard the voices of many men singing. Taking fright and fortifying herself with the sign of the cross, she completed the psalmody, considering within herself and saying: “this place is deserted and the house unhallowed; there is no populated place in this area, nor have any passers-by approached; whence, then, come these voices?”

(trans. Featherstone and Mango 1996: 35)

The temple is empty – yet inhabited. In late antique imagination, abandoned pagan sites were not neutral ground. They were associated with demons, remnants of displaced gods. By choosing this place, Matrona does not withdraw into safety. She enters contested territory.

Soon a demon appears in the form of a woman and urges her to leave: this is no place for you; return to the city, where there is comfort, hospitality, and provision.

The temptation is subtle. The demon does not threaten; it invites. The argument is pragmatic: ascetic isolation is unnecessary, even dangerous. The city offers order and security. Why remain in desolation?

Matrona refuses.

Yet the text carefully preserves tension. The temple, including its environs, is described in two sharply contrasting ways. On the one hand, it is hostile, demonic, barren. On the other, it miraculously sustains her, “supplying her with daily nourishment, as if by tribute” (cf. trans. Featherstone and Mango 1996: 36). The very space that appears lifeless becomes productive.

Confinement in Matrona’s Life is thus presented as both threat and gift. The place resists her presence, yet it also yields to it. The demon attempts to drive her away; the environment sustains her perseverance.

The temple is not merely a backdrop. It becomes an active participant in her ascetic formation.

By remaining in the temple, she affirms that isolation is necessary for spiritual concentration. Confinement becomes a deliberate narrowing of focus. The deserted temple is thus transformed into a workshop of holiness.

What makes Matrona especially compelling is that she is not a desert solitary; she remains largely within urban settings. Even her most radical isolation occurs at the margins of a city. Her holiness is shaped not by geographical remoteness, but by deliberate withdrawal within inhabited worlds.

Movement, paradoxically, enables enclosure. Each journey strips away a former identity – wife, mother, and disguised monk. Each new space intensifies her spiritual focus.

Return, Foundation, and Spatial Memory

After years in Beirut, Matrona eventually returns to Constantinople. The narrative comes full circle. The city she once fled becomes the site of her lasting foundation: she establishes her own monastic community and dies as its revered abbess.

The woman who once concealed herself within male walls now builds her own.

A later reworking of her Life from the tenth century adds a striking spatial detail. It specifies the precise location of her convent in Constantinople: the place “had the sea on the right side, and on the other, it neighbored the monastery of Bassianos” (cf. trans. Bennasser 1984: 148).

This detail is remarkable. In the end, Matrona is situated between the two elements that shaped her identity: the monastery of Bassianos – her first place of confinement in male disguise – and the sea, the medium of her repeated journeys from one city to another. Movement and enclosure, which structured her life, are now fixed in geography.

St. Matrona of Perge, Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000), Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 1613, p. 169. The miniature from the Menologion depicts her simply as a nun. The dramatic episode of male disguise has faded from view. What remains is her identity as founder and spiritual mother. The visual tradition, like the later literary tradition, stabilizes her legacy.

Matrona’s story suggests that holiness in Byzantine narrative is not achieved through static withdrawal alone. It is forged through negotiation with space – through choosing where to remain, where to depart, and where to resist departure.

In Part I, prison was a threshold imposed by others. In Matrona’s Life, enclosure becomes intentional. She enters it again and again, not because she is forced, but because she recognizes its power.

Confinement, in her life, is not a boundary. It is a method.

And perhaps that is why her story endured: it proposes that spiritual transformation does not always require distant deserts. Sometimes it begins at the edge of the city – in a place others have abandoned – when someone decides to remain.

For Matrona, holiness is not found by fleeing walls, but by deciding which walls to inhabit – and why.

Christodoulos Papavarnavas
Visiting Assistant Research Professor
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Papavarnavas, Christodoulos. “Confinement in Byzantine Narrative, Part I: Martyrs and the Threshold of Holiness“. Medieval Studies Research Blog. Medieval Institute: University of Notre Dame (October 15, 2025).

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Pinpointing the Great Schism

If there’s anything I hope to have conveyed via the handful of articles that I’ve written on the subject, it’s that no definitive rupture occurred, or was perceived to have occurred, between the Greek and Latin churches in the year 1054. Indeed, I don’t know of any historian or theologian over the last hundred years or so who’d be willing to defend that year as the date of the Great Schism. So why does it persist in popular historical accounts of the split? In part, I think that there’s no denying the dramatic image of a cardinal of the Roman Church marching into the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia and slapping a bull of excommunication on the altar. In part, the weight of much older, Western historiography gives gravitas to the date. But I think that most of the reason we continue to use 1054 as a point of reference is that we simply haven’t come up with anything better. So, if not then, when?

Of course, assigning a date to the schism demands a more precise definition of what a schism is. Broadly speaking, it might generally be taken to signify a breakdown in liturgical concelebration, particularly of the Eucharist, but even this is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, and therefore, of dates. For Anton Michel, one of the great scholars of 11th-century, Eucharistic unity was symbolized by the inclusion of the pope’s name in the diptychs, a set of tablets in which were inscribed the names of the various patriarchs with whom the Church of Constantinople was in communion [1]. These names would have been read aloud following the Great Entrance during the celebration of the Eucharistic service, serving as a very public statement of intercommunion [2]. But even if we’re to look only at the diptychs of Constantinople (ignoring the other patriarchal sees of the East), we already run into problems of communication breakdowns, occasional lapses into heresy (on both sides: Iconoclasm, Monothelitism, Nestorianism, etc.), and interference from political authorities, none of which can be taken to indicate a break between the churches as a whole. Indeed, the last mention of a Roman pontiff in the diptychs of Constantinople occurred sometime around the year 1009. If the documents of 1054 so clearly indicate the absence of a generally-felt schism, it certainly can’t be dated to before then.

Conversely, it’s become more popular over the last few decades to point to the year 1204 and the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade as the point of definitive rupture. Defenders of this view typically acknowledge that some level of division existed beforehand, but maintain that the final nail in the coffin, as it were, was the considerable (and justified) animosity generated against the Latins by their behavior during the crusade. I think that this appeal to what we assume was popular sentiment still misses the mark: there is good evidence from the time that the churches already considered themselves in a state of schism, and the barbarity of the Latin army might be better explained as result rather than cause.  It was this longstanding “disobedience” on the part of the Greeks that motivated Pope Innocent III eventually to accept the results of the crusade, in hopes of returning Constantinople to obedience to Rome [3]. If we can say, then, that no schism yet existed in 1054, but that it already existed by 1204, that leaves us a 150-year window to search for something that can be defended as a point of definite rupture.

My own preferred date for the Great Schism is the year 1099. Before discussing the events of that year, though, we need to explore a little bit of canonical history, that is, the development of the laws that guided the internal functioning of the church. The canons promulgated by the ecumenical and regional councils during the first few hundred years of Christianity have generally been understood to indicate a principle of one bishop per city or diocese. This rule was applied even to the point that bishops were prohibited from performing ordinations, liturgical functions, teaching, or even sometimes traveling in another diocese without the express permission of the local hierarch [4]. It is also the violation of this rule, in which two different members of the clergy claimed the same episcopal see, that defined schisms in the early church. To take a particularly well-known example, the Christian community in Rome during the middle of the third century was divided in its support for Novatian, on the one hand, who held that Christians who had sacrificed to idols during periods of persecution could not be readmitted to the community, and Cornelius, who took a more lenient view. Both men were proclaimed as the bishop of Rome by their supporters, and therefore, by virtue of the fact that it was impossible for there to be two bishops of the same diocese, each was compelled to deny the validity of the other. It was only after Cornelius had secured more support (particularly from the influential Cyprian of Carthage), that he could retroactively have been seen to have secured the episcopal office.

Returning to the end of the eleventh century, we find the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, established by the military success of the First Crusade [5]. The (Greek) Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon II, who had represented the Chalcedonian Christian community, had been compelled by the Artuqids to live in exile some years before. Although he had been in communication with the Latin military leadership prior to their capture of the city — indeed, even supportive of their cause (presumably with the expectation that he would be restored to his cathedral in the event of their success) — the Crusaders immediately elected Arnulf of Chocques as the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Something analogous happened in the city of Antioch the following year. Antioch had been captured by the Crusaders from the Seljuk Turks in 1098. The city had previously been under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire (until 1084), and so the population was heavily Greek and Greek-speaking, including John Oxeites, the Patriarch of Antioch. Initially tolerated by the Crusader authorities, he was eventually compelled to flee the city, and, in his absence, the Crusaders nominated and had consecrated a second Patriarch of Antioch, Bernard of Valence, in 1100.

The election of Arnulf of Chocques as Patriarch of Jerusalem. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 9084 fol. 101r (13th c.). Open license.

In both cases, the Latins attempted to replace the Chalcedonian patriarchs, whom they had previously recognized as holding legitimate office, with prelates of their own choosing, thereby setting up parallel hierarchies. This, as we can see in the history of the early church, is the very definition of schism. Moreover, this state of affairs persisted: the Greek community continued to choose Greek successors for these patriarchates, although they typically resided in Constantinople while the Crusaders controlled their sees, and the Latins maintained their own patriarchal structure, which relocated to Rome after the fall of the Crusader states. The Latin church retained a titular Patriarch of Antioch until the middle of the 20th century; it retains a titular Patriarch of Jerusalem to the present day. And if, as the tradition holds, the one church cannot have two bishops in the same episcopal see, then the presence of two bishops necessarily indicates that there are two, and separated, churches.

Nick Kamas

PhD in Medieval Studies

University of Notre Dame

  1. Anton Michel, Humbert und Kerullarios, vol. 1, Quellen und Forschungen 21 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1924), 20–24.
  2. Robert Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1975): 227–228.
  3. Innocent III, Registrorum Lib VIII, Ep. 274. PL 215.636–7.
  4. See Canon 8 of the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325), Canon 2 of the Second (Constantinople, 381), Canon 12 of the Fourth (Chalcedon, 451), and Canon 20 of the Sixth (Constantinople, 680–1), among others. The Rudder, edited and translated by Ralph J Masterjohn (West Brookfield, MA: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 438–9, 509–10, 608–9, 701.
  5. Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States (London: Routledge, 1980), 12–17.
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Uncovering Bede’s Theory of Everything with Michelle P. Brown

A few years ago, Ben and Will sat down to chat with Dr. Michelle P. Brown, Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and the previous Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. She has published numerous books, key among which are works on Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Luttrell Psalter. Their conversation with Dr. Brown was so rich that it was deemed worthy of two whole episodes!

The focus of their conversation was Bede the Venerable, especially in relation to Dr. Brown’s then-forthcoming book, Bede and the Theory of Everything. Bede was a Benedictine monk of the twin monastery Monkwearmouth–Jarrow in Northumbria, England. He is famous for his work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), a work that proved central to the formation of the English identity, and which has, over time, earned Bede the title, “Father of English History.”

Dr. Brown is a well of information on the life and writings of Bede, but she is equally full of insight into—what is, for her—the vocation of medieval studies. She speaks of moving into the world of Bede, coming to see every individual artifact—no matter how mundane it may at first appear—as an “individual witness” with its own biography. For her, “every pot shard matters.” Every shred of history is irreducibly unique and, in that way, a clue to the whole.

Transcript – Brown 1_2 (05_24)Download
Transcript – Brown 2_2 (05_24)Download