In late October 2016, I received an email from a heretofore unknown interlocutor named Douglas Galbi with the seemingly innocuous title “Hiera, Palamedes, and Tzetzes.” Galbi thanked me for my recently published translation of the Allegories of the Iliad by the twelfth-century Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes, adding “You might find interesting my perspective on that work.” But as I clicked on the embedded link to his blog, my initial excitement that my work was reaching beyond the narrow target audience of specialists in Homeric reception or Greek literature of the twelfth-century turned to horror.

I quickly came to realize that poor Tzetzes was being posthumously appropriated for sinister purposes far removed from teaching the Byzantine elite how to read Homer. Perhaps worse, this misappropriation put me and many of my fellow Byzantinists at risk of becoming unwittingly and involuntarily entangled in a worldwide web of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. I suddenly understood the ominous undertone of the otherwise banal conclusion to his email: “If you feel that I have treated your work unfairly, please explain and I’ll reconsider.” As even I knew that the first rule of the internet is to never feed the trolls, I have so far resisted doing so — until now.

Tumbling down the rabbit-hole of his blog (which, because of its misogynistic content, I won’t directly link to in this piece) led me to a veritable Mad Hatter’s Tea Party attended by men’s rights activists with a fetish for defending misogyny through historical appeals to ancient and medieval literature and culture. Galbi, I would come to find out, was part of what more savvy netizens call the “manosphere,” the term used to describe the constellation of blogs, websites, reddit and 4chan threads, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages that fertilize the larger men’s rights movement. These digital forums in turn spawn activities in the real world: conferences, lectures, and books — and, ultimately, votes, legislation and political office holders. All of these forums are dedicated to the airing of perceived male grievances and organized around an ideological commitment to freeing men from what its adherents believe has been centuries of pervasive gender-based subjugation by women. Recent school shootings in Parkland, FL and elsewhere by the aggrieved manosphere subculture of “incels” —self-described involuntary celibates — mean that the ideas propagated there can, in their most extreme form, have life or death consequences.

At first, I breezily dismissed Galbi as a writer on the fringe of marginal alt-right and men’s activist groups, but further exploration revealed that he is neither an isolated figure nor an outlier in his use of ancient and medieval literature for men’s rights activists. Rather, Galbi — who claims a BS from Princeton, an MA from Oxford, and a PhD from MIT, and boasts of having held research positions at Cambridge and Harvard — operates in a sort of parasitic shadow academy, deriving prestige from his proximity to the university system and authority from his familiarity with its approved scholarly forums.

His detailed footnotes and long bibliographies referencing major scholars offers credentialed academic weight to larger misogynist and other illiberal movements. His posts then feed into significantly more prominent forums on the internet and elsewhere — all the while remaining largely invisible to the academics upon whose work he ostensibly relies. Traditional academic work is often hidden behind subscription-only paywalls or written in the jargony language of the academy; Galbi’s (and his fellow travellers’) posts, by contrast, are freely and widely available on the internet and written in a plain and easily accessible style. It is almost certain, therefore, that their works have a larger audience than all but the most successful of their scholarly sources.

The title of the post linked in the email, “Achilles in Women’s clothing: Tzetzes’s Allegorical Interpretation,” was bland enough, but the blog’s thesis statement indicated the overall tone and message of the piece: “Tzetzes,” Galbi argued, “re-interpreted Homer to present strong, independent women rejecting the gender structure of violence against men and insisting that men’s lives matter.” A post ostensibly about Byzantine literature transformed into one about contemporary American politics: “In the U.S. today, about four times as many men suffer violent deaths as do women. That reality attracts no more public concern than pervasive discrimination against men in criminal justice systems, in family courts, and in reproductive rights. Men’s lives don’t matter in gynocentric society, nor in dominant readings of the Iliad.”

The 2016 presidential election was just a few weeks out when I received Galbi’s email and, with debates about Black Lives Matter, gender politics, and the rise of the revanchist right at the forefront of the national consciousness, Galbi’s post summoned the legacy of Byzantium — via the work of unwitting scholars — into the service of men’s rights activism and other illiberal causes. Galbi’s use of Tzetzes was not an isolated incident; as I read through the blog’s archives, a pattern emerged in Galbi’s use of Byzantine literature: the Komnenian novels came in for the men’s rights treatment, as in the post “Rhodanthe as back-biting bitch: the real world of Byzantine romance.” The eleventh-century polymath Michael Psellos was also a frequent subject, as in “Psellos supported gender equality in eleventh century Byzantium,” which uses the Byzantine writer to exemplify how “many today do not recognize the wide range of injustices associated with the actual social and political subordination of men to women.” In another post, Galbi argued that Psellos and John Italos “each struggled in his own way to escape gynocentric oppression and live a humane, fulfilling life.”

Throughout these posts, men are driven to murder each other and rape women only because this is what is demanded of them by a society which, in Galbi’s view, prioritizes the rights and lives of women. In a post on Digenis Akrites, for instance, he argues that the eponymous hero of the story “behaved ambivalently with respect to gynocentric imperatives and values. Under gynocentrism, women amorously favor the man who acts like the bigger jerk. When Digenis suddenly realized that imperative from the love affair of Aploravdis’ daughter, he raped her. He subsequently deeply regretted being such a jerk.” Here as elsewhere, Galbi blames women for their own rapes and thus exonerates men for “being jerks.”

Galbi’s celebration of misogyny perhaps finds its apotheosis in yet another post, in which he claims that “throughout history, some truly heroic, socially conscious persons defied the deplorable devaluation of men’s lives.” This statement seems relatively unobjectionable on its face, but becomes significantly more problematic when his exemplum is Andronikos I Komnenos, whose noted contributions to freeing men from gynocentric oppression included forcing into marriage a 12 year-old girl some fifty years his junior and carrying out broad massacres of civilian populations.

Galbi’s writing is not limited to his own blog; such content circulates widely and quickly through the highly networked world of the manosphere. For instance, his November 20, 2016 post, “Poor Prodromos: an abused husband in 12th century Byzantium,” appears also on A Voice for Men, the largest men’s rights advocacy group. In this entry, Galbi argues that the twelfth-century writer’s ptochoprodromika (beggar poetry) reveals how men in Byzantium and today live at the capricious mercy of their wives: “Prodromos’s fear of his wife throwing him out of their house should be interpreted as realistic. Today men can be thrown out of their homes with a standard-form ex parte restraining order, or through gender-profiling men for domestic violence arrest.” Re-posting this article on A Voice For Men represents a significant increase in the reach and influence of Galbi’s work.

As importantly, these links transform him from an isolated writer on a personal blog to a participant in the larger pseudoacademic ecosystem of the manosphere. Other writers for A Voice for Men share with Galbi a similar discursive and ideological agenda, though their focus on literatures beyond Greece expands and deepens the historical and literary scope of this line of inquiry. The “chivalry” sub-link under the website’s “misandry” tab, for instance, features several articles and books by Peter Wright. Wright has done perhaps more than any other men’s rights activist to mainstream and provide an imprimatur of historical and academic rigor to the concept of “gynocentrism.”

Wright’s various articles on such a popular forum as A Voice for Men is a relative mainstreaming of the ideas from his personal blog, gynocentrism.com, where he elaborates on the history and legacy of chivalry. In books such as Gynocentrism: From Feudalism to the Modern Disney Princess (2014), A History of Gynarchy: Otherwise Known as Petticoat Government (2017) and Feminism and the Creation of a Female Aristocracy (2018), Wright’s particular focus is the way in which high literary culture of the 12th century — i.e. the medieval romance — originated structures of male subjugation to women that persist today. He calls this “gynocentrism,” the erudite-sounding word which appears again and again throughout Galbi’s posts and the men’s rights movement more generally.

Wright and Galbi explicitly connect their writing to activist goals in the present: by demonstrating historical analogues to the plight of oppressed men throughout history and into the twenty-first century, they seek to create political change in the present. Indeed, Wright’s work features a “timeline of gynocentric culture” that begins in 1102 with the first troubadours in France and concludes with “21st century: gynocentrism continues.”

The pseudoacademic musings of Galbi, Wright and others wend their way from the far margins of the manosphere toward its center through re-tweets, hyperlinks and shared social media. One of Galbi’s Twitter followers, for instance, is Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice For Men and a leading men’s rights activist. Elam has used Wright’s medieval framework in men’s self-help videos such as “Chivalry: A Learned Deathwish.” In it, Elam urges men, for instance, not to go “white knighting,” that is, to step in if a woman is being sexually harassed or raped, lest they themselves be on the receiving end of the violence initially directed towards the female target.

Just as individuals like Galbi and Wright are part of the larger men’s rights movement, both men’s rights activism and the manosphere itself exist within an even larger right-wing ecosystem operating at the intersections of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, racism and other illiberal and patriarchal ideologies, an intersection explored recently in Christa Hodapp’s Men’s Rights, Gender, and Social Media (2017).

Take, for example, an editorial on A Voice for Men from March 2016 entitled “Why Should We Fight?,” which puts its anti-white knighting stance in an explicitly racial context: “In the wake of the wave of alleged sex attacks perpetrated on white western women by members of immigrant Muslim gangs across Germany during NYE celebrations, white western males are once again being called (and shamed) into action. It’s on ‘us’ apparently to defend ‘our’ women from the unwanted attention of these unwashed savages. Or so the mainstream gynocentric (suddenly conservative-led) narrative goes, anyway. […] I will not risk my life for female approval or a pat on the back or because anyone is gonna try to shame me for not wanting to dive into mortal combat with a 16-man Syrian gang in defense of some club rat skank I don’t know and have never met and who’s drank so much that her eyes are pointing in different directions and she’s walking in zig-zags.” The editorial manages to conflate women’s sexual liberation with xenophobic fears of rapist Syrians, rhetoric complemented by images of gladiators and knights at war alongside those of drunk or passed out women.

This intersection is given the patina of historical veracity through the use of Byzantine parallels in an article from another men’s rights website. Return of Kings posted an article on September 7, 2016 with the title “Byzantium Emperor Justinian Shows How ‘Gender Equality’ Leads To Decadence & Mass Slaughter” [sic]. The author, who uses the pseudonym Amasa Lyman, an early Mormon leader, begins: “Emperor Justinian I fought fiercely to restore Rome’s former glory. But in 532 A.D., he rounded up and slaughtered 30,000 of his own Byzantine citizens. How could such a strong and accomplished ruler commit such an atrocity?”

The answer, of course, is his wife, the Empress Theodora, and, in particular, her sexuality unrestrained by patriarchal control: “Theodora’s parents got her involved in popular entertainment as a child, like a Hollywood celebrity today. As a popular actress, her mother got Theodora the position of suppliant at the hippodrome. Then, as we often see with daughters of celebrities today, Theodora turned to a life of stripping and became a prostitute at a very young age.” Lyman elaborates on Theodora’s sexuality as the cause of Justinian’s bad policies in subheadings entitled “Adulterous Women Ruin Men” and “Gender Equality Leads to Genocide.” The imagery that accompanies this supposedly historical analysis conflates the destructive power of Theodora’s sexuality with pro-gay marriage flags, making an implicit argument that homosexuality leads to social chaos and consistently reinforcing the ostensible parallels between the medieval and the modern.

In the concluding section, this conflation becomes explicit: “This speaks to the policy of gender equality to made Theodora the most influential empress in Roman/Byzantine history. Feminists make mighty promises and say that it is the only fair and compassionate policy. But the second they gain power, they only care about accumulating more power for themselves. Who does this describe today? Hillary Clinton is today’s Theodora. From Benghazi to Whitewater, she leaves a long trail of blood. […] Byzantium’s quick decline after Justinian can arguably be considered the result of Theodora. What will happen if Hillary Clinton becomes leader of the United States? How high will the body count be?” Byzantine history becomes contemporary political electioneering.

In her post “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies” on the blog “In the Middle,” Sierra Lomuto argued, “When white nationalists turn to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for whiteness — to seek validation for their claims of white supremacy — and they do not find resistance from the scholars of that past; when this quest is celebrated and given space within our academic community, our complacency becomes complicity. We have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the knowledge we create and disseminate about the medieval past is not weaponized against people of color and marginalized communities in our own contemporary world.”

Byzantinists, too, could become more forceful allies and do more of this work ourselves by being more receptive of projects that examine the ways in which our discipline has become weaponized against (or at least indifferent to) women, minorities, and other disenfranchised groups. There is no need for the individual scholar to reinvent the wheel either; relatively new groups working on these issues include the group Medievalists of Color, which seeks to advance critical race studies in medieval disciplines and to bring down some of the barriers that have prevented a more diverse set of scholars from entering our fields. The Classics and Social Justice group has been organizing panels at conferences, among other work, such as making suggestions for more activist syllabi, and engaging in outreach to prisoners, veterans, immigrants, and other groups who are underrepresented in our field. Pharos, about which Eidolon has written elsewhere, is a place where Classicists can “learn about and respond to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups online.” Given that Galbi is as frequent an abuser of Classics as of Byzantine Studies, this could become a common space for people working in all periods of Greek.

At the disciplinary level, Byzantinists are engaged in more direct forms of activism through participation in professional organizations that have adopted advocacy as part of their mission. The American History Association (AHA) website, for instance, has a subheading link for “News & Advocacy,” with a further subheading “Statements and Resolutions of Support and Protest,” which contains both its document outlining when it can engage in activism (“Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance”) and a list of the various letters, resolutions, and statements of support and opposition it has registered over issues of the exercise of freedom of speech, destruction of historical artifacts and documents, education reform, and other concerns both within the United States and overseas.

Similar pages can be found for other major disciplinary organizations in which Byzantinists participate, including the Society for Classical Studies, which has a “statement on condemning the use of the texts, ideals, and images of the Greek and Roman world to promote hateful ideology.” By contrast, none of the major organizations for Byzantine Studies, including the umbrella organization for the discipline, the International Association of Byzantine Studies (AEIB), nor its national subgroups, including the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (based in the UK), and the Australasian Association for Byzantine Studies, have similar advocacy language in their documents or on their webpages.

One notable exception — perhaps the first act of political engagement by the BSANA — occurred after the white supremacist march on Charlottesville on August 11–12, 2017. On August 18, the Medieval Academy of America posted a statement co-signed by a variety of medieval societies, including the BSANA:

In light of the recent events in the United States, most recently the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the undersigned community of medievalists condemns the appropriation of any item or idea or material in the service of white supremacy. In addition, we condemn the abuse of colleagues, particularly colleagues of color, who have spoken publicly against this misuse of history. As scholars of the medieval world we are disturbed by the use of a nostalgic but inaccurate myth of the Middle Ages by racist movements in the United States. […] Institutions of scholarship must acknowledge their own participation in the creation of interpretations of the Middle Ages (and other periods) that served these narratives. Where we do find bigotry, intolerance, hate, and fear of “the other” in the past — and the Middle Ages certainly had their share — we must recognize it for what it is and read it in its context, rather than replicating it.

This is a laudable — and I hope first — step towards a more explicit and sustained rejection of the elevated position of medieval studies within the alt-right imaginary.

In her 2005 book The Ethics of Cultural Studies, Joanna Zylinska argues that an “ethical sense of duty and responsibility has always constituted an inherent part of the cultural studies project” (ix), and these ethical norms are broadly shared by those who study culture — indeed, the acceptance of these norms is an important marker of participating in cultural studies — and that these norms are as often unspoken as they are spoken.

When we think of cultural studies, however, we often think of disciplines that are more clearly engaged in contemporary political debates: Queer Studies, Gender Studies, African-American Studies and other disciplines addressing non-normative or minority identities are often seen as the academic branch of larger political movements. In this way, they differ from Byzantine Studies, which has no natural political constituency, at least in the United States, and a less direct connection to contemporary debates about culture and identity. And yet I would suggest that there is an ethical dimension to Byzantine Studies, and that Byzantine Studies is, whether we like it or not, both implicitly and explicitly engaged in these same kinds of debates, and we must either resist such movements or become complicit with them.

Adam Goldwyn is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and English at North Dakota State University. He is the author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-editor of the forthcoming Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 2018)