Antony Eastmond

Writing the biography of any medieval woman is an exercise in steely determination, given the nature of the surviving source base—even the most elite woman can leave a surprisingly sparse trail in the archives. This is doubly the case when it comes to a figure like Tamta Mqargrdzeli, whose career must be pieced together from written sources in half a dozen different languages and from archaeological remains in a part of the world that is still fraught with difficulties for outside scholars. Antony Eastmond must be applauded for teasing out as much as he can about Tamta and her life: she was born into a powerful ethnically Armenian family at the end of the twelfth century, was married multiple times, was for a time a hostage of the Mongols, and for much of her life was the ruler of what is today the provincial town of Ahlat in eastern Turkey. Not much more than that can be said about her with any certainty.

In the absence of much source material about her, Eastmond opts instead to use Tamta's career as a lens through which to explore the dynamic and multicultural world in which she lived. His analysis of the architectural and art historical evidence is the most interesting, though I don't know enough about the area to know how convincing it would be to an expert in the field.

However, there are times that Eastmond drifts perhaps a little too far afield from his topic: Tamta and the specific context of her life. Too, he writes explicitly in the hopes of reaching those with an interest in medieval women's history who aren't experts in western Asian history, but I have to confess that at times I found the torrent of dynasties, rulers, and relatives hard to follow—some family trees to accompany the lavish illustrations would have been very welcome. As someone who does work on medieval women's history, moreover, I would have liked to see more evidence of real engagement on Eastmond's part with the burgeoning body of work about women and power in the Middle Ages that's developed over the past several decades. He tends to position Tamta as both passive and exceptional, when the historiography would suggest we see her as anything but.… (mais)