On 17 June 2026, our department had the honor of hosting Dr. Larisa Ficulle Santini (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Professor Anna Maria Taragna (University of Turin). They presented a joint paper in a double Guest Talk, organized by our fellow Riccardo Stigliano, titled: In and Beyond the Female Body. Between Reproductive Control and Renunciation in Byzantium.

The lecture offered a fascinating exploration of the Byzantine female body as a contested space, shaped by tensions between reproduction, social control, and spirituality. The presentation was structured around two distinct but interconnected papers.

In the first part, Dr. Ficulle Santini introduced the underexplored field of fertility control in the Eastern Roman Empire. She demonstrated that practices such as contraception and abortion were known and used, drawing on a wide range of sources. She introduced us on who had the authority and the knowledge of sexual practices between early and middle Byzantine period.

In the second part, Professor Taragna turned to the Lives of cross-dressed female saints. She examined a paradoxical model of holiness in which the female body is not simply disciplined, but symbolically suppressed and transformed. Holy women abandoned their visible femininity to enter male monastic environments and attain ascetic authority. However, she showed that this erasure is only temporary. The female body re-emerges at crucial narrative moments, particularly in scenes of recognition.

Moving beyond the female body as a merely constrained entity, the joint lecture offered two complementary perspectives on how it could be defined, controlled, transformed, and, at times, transcended in Byzantium. It is worth noting that the participation has been very stimulating, and the papers fostered a rich and diverse discussion afterward.