This chapter focuses on the practical aspects of education, such as the organisation and funding of the classical schools. It traces the status of classical education as a public institution in the late imperial period, during the transformations of the fifth century, and within the early barbarian successor kingdoms. The chapter begins by establishing the extent of direct involvement of the imperial government in education, arguing that cities and individuals had always played a far more important role in patronising and funding classical schools. It then considers opportunities for ‘graduates’ of classical schools in late and post-imperial Gaul, the crucial difference between literacy and literary education, and emphasises the important connection between classical education and structures of power that promote and demand literary training.

This chapter lays out two key tasks in reading Scripture that Augustine identifies in the Confessions, and especially in his exegesis of Genesis: “the task of grasping meaning” and “the task of grasping truth.” The first task is that of discerning authorial intention; the second is that of “seeing for oneself that what the author is saying is in fact the case.” The task of grasping meaning is difficult in part because of the peculiar character of the Scriptures; they are both accessible to all, using ordinary language (which is open to misinterpretation), and yet full of profundities that only the wisest readers can come to appreciate. It is also difficult because we cannot really know what is in another person’s mind; any judgments about authorial intention are provisional at best, and only pride would claim to have identified the uniquely correct interpretation. The task of grasping truth is likewise difficult. When it comes to intelligible realities, Truth speaks inwardly, not through any text, even that of Scripture. When it comes to historical realities, including the central truths about the life of the Incarnate Word, we cannot have knowledge in the fullest sense.

The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.

Considering theoretical approaches to studies of gender and sexualities in the premodern world, this chapter takes a global approach to the historiography and approaches to these two fields and places them within the context of royal studies. Analysing and challenging the terminology and approaches currently used to pull out premodern ruling sexualities, this introduction lays the foundations for the discussions throughout the volume and its key themes: representations of rulers in literature and artwork, including self-representations; interconnections between gender, identity, and sexuality; and methodological approaches to premodern depictions of sexuality. This chapter highlights the latest discussions of the history of sexuality around the frameworks for discussing premodern desire and attraction, and underlines how this volume enriches conversations between researchers in the fields of royal and monarchical studies and the history of sexuality. It also addresses the issue of binaries when approaching premodern sex – heteronormative versus non-normative, heterosexual versus homosexual, and licit versus illicit – all further evidence of anachronistic terms being employed as descriptors for past attractions and liaisons. We elaborate upon this by discussing the impact such terminologies and binaries have had upon our uniing of premodern sexual activity and attraction within the field of royal and monarchical studies, in particular. The introduction concludes with an overview of the chapters, how they speak to one another, and how they generate and add to conversations regarding premodern ruling sexualities and attraction more generally.

Islam’s stance on homosexuality is well defined in its jurisprudence, not least in the Qur’an. Sodomy is forbidden, and its punishment varies according to the hadiths acknowledged by each different school of jurisprudence. In Baghdad, government was totally incongruous with any non-heteronormative orientation. The Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), was deeply concerned about the open homosexuality of his crown prince and designated successor al-Amin. His behaviour was scandalous because he openly chose males as sexual partners and kept catamites. In al-Andalus (Iberia), homosexual pleasures were much indulged in by the Umayyad intellectual and urban political elites. Evidence includes a flourishing of homoerotic poetry between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, particularly in the genre known as mujun (obscene) poetry. In Cordoba, al-Hakam II (r. 961–976) did not produce a suitable heir before the age of 46 which has been ascribed either to his pederasty (hub al-ghulam) or because he was too absorbed with his books to care for sensual pleasures. This chapter sheds light on the two caliphs’ homosexuality and its impact on both Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates. It seeks to demonstrate the paradoxical reality of historical homosexuality in a Muslim monarchy.

A characteristic feature of Late Antiquity was surely the increasing relevance of empresses. Unsurprisingly, these empresses also gained high prominence in their contemporary literary traditions. However, the so-called ‘classicising historiography’ of Late Antiquity criticised these empresses, often through sexual slander. Hitherto, a comparative study of these sexual anecdotes remained a desideratum of scholarship. The chapter argues that traditional approaches and explanations of Classicists and Byzantinists are determined to fail to elucidate the reason why classicising historians included episodes of sexual slander in their works. Taking as examples Aurelius Victor’s account of Julia Domna and Procopius of Caesarea on Theodora, it explains how the modern concept of ‘misogyny’ can illuminate these reasons. The senatorial aristocracy and a new educated bureaucratic and military elite from the provinces shared common ideals of a more laissez-faire style of imperial rule for the ‘best men’. The hyper-sexualisation served, therefore, as a discursive strategy of a conservative imperial elite, who relied on fragments and rumours from the empresses’ lives to create misogynistic invectives, which served the conservative elite as expressions of their self-definition and self-fashioning, their shared values, and their rejection of autocratic imperial dominion. Some empresses, prominently represented in official media as a complementary female ruler next to the male emperor, would have served as a symbol of imperial autocracy whose image had to be shamed and ‘punished’ in the afterlife in classicising historiography.