By the end of the twelfth century, the Byzantine <i>genos </I> was a politically effective social group based upon ties of consanguineous kinship, but, importantly, it was also a cultural construct, an idea that held very real power, yet defies easy categorization. This study explores the role and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or <i>genos</i>, as a distinct social entity, particularly its political and cultural role, as it appears in a variety of sources in the tenth through twelfth centuries.

Slavery and family were deeply linked in Byzantine society. When Byzantine writers and theologians envisioned and contextualized both the realities and the idea of the household, they universally assumed the presence of enslaved people within it. Slavery was foundational in Byzantine conceptions of the family, as was the role of kinship and the family in their thinking about slavery. This study explores how the language, ideals, stereotypes, and literary tropes associated with enslaved people were deeply linked to Byzantine thought about the family and the household as a social unit. Drawing on a wide range of sources and modern theories like intersectionality and social death, this monograph seeks to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the long-term, widespread presence of enslaved people in Byzantine society influenced and even defined medieval Byzantine thought regarding the domestic space and its dynamics.