Información de la obra y contexto de creación
- Justinian's most important and lasting undertaking was the compilation and unification of all Roman laws into a single code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis. It is a compilation of legal texts from the Imperial period as well as Roman jurisprudence from 117 to 565. It is composed of four collections: Codex repetitae praelectionis (534), Digesta sive pandectae (533), Institutas (533) and, from 535 to 545, he dictated a series of new laws, reflecting contemporary needs, called the Novelas or Novellae constitutiones. These were to be collected, according to his thinking, in a definitive code, but they were never officially collected, but are known through particular collections.
The influence of Theodora of Byzantium is perceptible in the approval of a series of Novels whose aim was to improve the status of women in the Byzantine world, especially those who were doubly stigmatised for being women and for being poor; a double condition that originated in the very situation that the empress suffered from her childhood. Theodora contributed her ideas in those that defended the right to divorce, the prohibition of punishment for adultery, the recognition of bastard children, that women could inherit, that wives could keep their dowries, the death penalty for rapists, the possibility of abortion, the prohibition of forced prostitution and pederasty. Of the 135 Constitutions, at least 20 of them concern women and children.
It is admirable and surprising how, with very little education, coming from one of the lowest classes of society, she was able to legitimise her position as empress and obtain changes favourable to women in a society that was, at its roots, Roman and therefore patriarchal.
The words of María José Bravo (2022, pp. 287, 288) clarify and qualify Theodora's intervention in the elaboration of the Novelas:
We cannot affirm Theodora's authorship, not even in a secondary or invisible way, in the Justinian legislation concerning the female universe in exclusion. Her participation cannot be confirmed even subliminally, inasmuch as the emperor made all the legislative proposals concerning women his own [...] (the emperor) could now have agreed with the august empress to accept her legislative suggestions for the protection and rehabilitation of the most disadvantaged group of women, but preferring her direct participation to prevent the memory of Theodora's past from being used by her enemies to bring her moral disrepute into disrepute.
On the other hand, if we look at the dates of enactment of the different legislative provisions in favour of women as a vulnerable group [...], we can see that the most prolific legislative production corresponds to the time of Theodora's life.
... the information at our disposal only allows us to deduce Theodora's energetic and loyal presence at the side of her husband, the perennial legislator, and to venture the possible suggestions of the empress in feminine matters that Justinian could accept as positive for the Byzantine empire.
... Our sorority with Theodora is given specifically by her mysterious personality, by her primordial social weakness and her vital resilience, by her victorious resolution in delicate moments and her feminine determination to help the cause of women in extremely vulnerable situations, perhaps encouraged by her unconscious proto-feminism in an era of total patriarchy.
(Bravo Bosch, María José (2022). Teodora y el feminismo jurídico en Bizancio [Teodora and legal feminism in Byzantium]. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch).
- Byzantine empresses rose to political prominence as time went on. As early as the 5th century, Eudoxia, wife of Arcadius, had a great influence on the politics of the Empire. Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II, protected Jews and pagans and promoted culture; her works include a paraphrase of the Octateuch in hexameter. Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II, ensured the continuity of the Byzantine Empire in a time of great upheaval. Theodora, the co-regent empress, lived in the 6th century, but later we find Irene, who in the 8th century convened two councils and, after killing her son, became the first Byzantine empress to occupy the throne, not as consort or regent, but in her own name. In the 11th century, Zoe survived three emperor husbands and many conspiracies and power games. Anna Komnene, too, in the 12th century, was the author of The Alexiad, the story of her father's reign.
Theodora, from her influence in the political and legal field, was a staunch defender of women's rights like so many others throughout history. As early as the 1st century BC, Hortense gave a speech to the triumvirate in defence of matrons, and the orators Messia and Carfania also publicly defended themselves against social roles. In the 2nd century, the empresses Faustina the Elder and Faustina the Younger were concerned with the education of poor girls.
Later, Wilhelmina of Bohemia (13th c.) proposed the creation of a women's church, because they did not feel represented; the famous Sardinian judge Leonor of Arborea (14th c.) promulgated the Logu Charter, considered one of the first examples of a constitution in the world; Christine de Pisan (15th c.), author of The City of Ladies, was the initiator of the Women's Complaint; The Mexican writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (17th century) defended women's right to education and knowledge, and Olympe de Gouges (18th century) was the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citi.
In the 19th century, English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman; in the United States, journalist Margaret Fuller authored The Woman of the 19th Century; the abolitionist Sojourner Truth gave the famous speech Am I Not a Woman? and the lawyer and suffragist Mary Ann Shadd was editor of an anti-slavery newspaper; the Brazilian educator and poet Nísia Floresta wrote Women's Rights and Men's Injustice; the Argentinean trade unionist Virginia Bolten founded the newspaper The Voice of Women; and in Spain, Concepción Arenal, author of The woman of the future, was the first woman university professor and one of the pioneers of feminism.
In the 20th century, English suffragette Christabel Harriette Pankhurst founded the Women's Party; in India, writer and lawyer Cornelia Sorabji and activist Pandita Ramabai fought against child marriage; In Spain, Ascensión Chirivella, the first woman in the country to practice law, and the politicians and lawyers Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent - with opposing positions on the issue of women's suffrage - were key figures in the struggle for equality, as was María Telo Núñez, author of My fight for women's legal equality and promoter of vital changes in the 1975 reform of the Civil Code, which eliminated ‘marital leave’; and in France, the right to abortion was legalised in 1975 with the so-called Simone Veil law.
