IMC 2026: Sessions

This session explores how maternal roles were enacted, negotiated, and reimagined in the Middle Byzantine period, across healing shrines, households, and sacred imagery. By situating mothering within both lived practice and cultural representation, the papers highlight its centrality to Byzantine understandings of power, sanctity, and gender. The first paper examines mothers in miracle collections, showing how women who are otherwise marginalised in hagiography acquire authority in healing shrines. As they pray, travel, and intercede on behalf of their children, they emerge as visible agents of divine mediation within public religious space. The second paper turns to domestic life, analysing the position of enslaved women who functioned as surrogate mothers through wet-nursing, caregiving, and education. These dynamics complicate hierarchies of gender and status, revealing the ambivalence of maternal roles in Byzantine households. The third paper investigates sacred imagery, tracing how the Virgin's role as Galaktotrophousa was sometimes displaced onto the midwife in Nativity scenes. This iconographic shift reflects broader theological efforts to distance Mary from biological motherhood while reinforcing patriarchal frameworks of sanctity. Together, the papers demonstrate how mothering in Byzantium was a dynamic and contested category, shaping devotional practice, household life, and visual culture alike.