Who Was the First Female Historian?
Over the course of my Christmas blog break, I read two separate claims that someone was the first known female historian. Two separate women in very different times and places. I was so excited when I read about the first one that I almost interrupted my scheduled silence to share it with you. When I read about the second I was really glad I didn’t, since she is even earlier.
The first of the two that I stumbled across was Byzantine princess and scholar Anna Comnena (1083-1153)–also spelled Komnene for those of you who want to look her up. We don’t know much about how she was educated, but we know a lot about what she read: Homer, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle et al. She was a self professed history buff long before the word was invented: Thucydides and Polybius were her favorites. She was less taken with works of theology, which she said made her “dizzy”. She is best remembered for her Alexiad, a history of the life and reign of her father, the emperor Alexius I Comnenus– Including, among other things, an eyewitness account of the knights of the First Crusade (1095-1099), who passed through Byzantium on their way to the Holy Lands. (The short version? She wasn’t impressed with the “Frankish barbarians”.)
Then I stumbled across someone even earlier, the Chinese historian Ban Zhao (45 – c. 116 CE)–or Pan Chao depending on which romanization the sources you check use. (To put her in historical context: she was a contemporary of Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer.*) She was the youngest child of Bian Bao, one of the Chinese literati, and the sister of the court historian Ban Gu. Like Anna Comnena, she received an unusual education for a woman of her time, like Anna Comena she was well-versed in the classics and the histories of her culture. She wrote in a variety of literary styles, including a type of work known as annotation, which I think of as a conversation between the original author and the annotator for the benefit of a third reader. When her brother Ban Gu died, leaving his monumental and influential History of the Han Dynasty (Han shu) incomplete, the emperor ordered Ban Zhao, who he described as “erudite and competent in writing prose” to finish the work in conjunction with the eminent scholar Ma Xu. The Han shu became the model on which other later dynastic histories were based.
Several thoughts come to mind:
• Both of these women are considerably later than Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE) and his Chinese counterpart Sima Qian (ca. 145-86 BCE) .
• Neither of them are “forgotten.” I stumbled across them by accident when I was poking around in Byzantine and Chinese history. Presumably anyone who spends much time in either culture is at least familiar with the name.
• Is there another woman with a better claim to being the “first woman historian”? If you’ve got a candidate, or would like to weigh in on the troubling issue of “first woman [fill in the blank], let me know.
*I don’t know about anyone else, but dates flapping on the page don’t do me much good when confronted with something new. I need a contemporary event that I already know to ground me in time.
The Coming Year of History Nerdery
Several years ago I got in the habit of starting the year here at History in the Margins by talking about the historical topics I hope/plan/expect to read and think and write about in the coming year. It’s a useful exercise as far as I’m concerned; you can think of it as the coming attractions portion of the blog. (Feel free to step out for popcorn and come back later.)
Usually I find when I look back that I was diverted along the way.. That didn’t happen in 2017. (And a good thing, too.) As promised, I spent most of the year working on my global history of women warriors. It’s been frustrating, overwhelming, and fascinating. I’ve discovered wonderful examples of women warriors who I didn’t know existed. (Alexander the Great’s older half-sister! A Tibetan nun who led her clan against the Chinese!) I’ve had to abandon fascinating women who just didn’t fit my definition when I looked at them more closely. (Some of them appeared as blog posts. Hojo Masako, for instance. And the Empress Maud.) And I found out what writing a global history really means–struggling to understand the history of times and places that I know nothing about, relying heavily on translations and secondary sources, deciding when to stop researching a time/place/battle and write the dang thing. I now know more about Illyria in the 5th century BCE, the imperial succession in 3rd century Rome, medieval Georgia,*and eighteenth century Hungary–to name a few–than I could have imagined. Unfortunately, I learned more about each time and place than went into the book because I need to feel like I’m on on solid ground when I write. I don’t like skating around gaping holes in my knowledge. (Gaping holes in the historical record are an entirely different issue–and another thing I’ve spent some time on this year.)
I’m not done yet. (By the time you read this I hope to be quite a bit further along.) I need to expand some chapters, fill in some holes, write a conclusion and an introduction, and give the whole thing a final scrub and polish before I turn it in on March 1.* Still on the docket: women who disguised themselves as men to fight, the all-female regiments of Dahomey in West Africa, Russia’s Women’s Battalion of Death in WWI, female samurai, and the vexed question of Viking women warriors.
Wish me luck.
*Tamar of Georgia didn’t make it into the book, either. It about broke my heart.
**At this point last year, I expected to turn in the draft manuscript by January 1–the stupidest deadline known to man.
Merry, Jolly, Happy, Blessed, Etc.
In the interest of sanity, I’m going to take a holiday break from blogging. Unless I stumble across something that I feel I absolutely need to tell you RIGHT NOW, I’ll be back on January 2nd, or maybe January 3rd, with some great stories from the corners of history, some books you ought to read, and some things I’ve been mulling over. In other words, business as usual.
In the meantime, have a merry/jolly/happy/blessed time as you celebrate the victory of light over the darkness in the tradition of your choice.