We’ve quoted at length from The Alexiad in the past few narrative episodes. But who was its author, Anna Comnena, and how did she come to write this 500-page history? We look into the life of this extraordinarily talented polymath to understand more about the background to one of the most important contemporary historical sources for the era that we’ve recently been talking about. And we look at some of the obstacles that she faced as a woman working in a world that was dominated by men.

The book by Professor Leonora Neville that we mention during these episodes is "Anna Komnene: The life and work of a medieval historian", first published in 2016.

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Intro and outro music is Inverno from Vivaldi’s Le Quattro Stagioni, used under Creative Commons licence from musopen.org