The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium

Kathryn M. Ringrose's The Perfect Servant is a scholarly study examining the social and religious role of eunuchs within Byzantine court and church life, arguing that Byzantine culture constructed eunuchs as a distinct social gender category rather than simply as diminished men, a category that in some cases carried real access to ecclesiastical and imperial power. Its authority rests on close reading of Byzantine hagiography, court records and canon law addressing eunuchs specifically. As a work advancing a particular interpretive framework, gender as social construction rather than only biological fact, applied to a historical population that left limited firsthand testimony of its own, the book's central claims sit within an active and still-developing scholarly conversation about how to read Byzantine sources on this question.