Anna Comnena: A Study

Author: G. Buckler

Number of Pages: 576

Anna Comnena (1083-1148) was a princess of the Comneni dynasty, the eldest daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius I, and the first woman historian. After her father’s death Anna tried unsuccessfully to take the imperial throne of her brother, John II for her husband, Nikephorus. After the death of Nikephorus in 1137, she retired to a monastery where she wrote her celebrated biography of her father, theAlexias. Anna described herself as “not unversed in letters, not unpractised in rhetoric.. having well mastered the rule of Aristotle and the Dialogues of Plato, and having furnished my mind with the quadrivium of sciences” and her great work is not just first-rate history, but the only Greek contemporary account of the court of Alexius and of the First Crusade. This book, first published in 1929 (long before any English translation of theAlexias had appeared), remains the only full length study of Anna Comnena, as a woman, as a historian and as a writer.