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Questions of Authorship
There has been much debate as to whether the Alexiad was in fact written by Anna Komnene herself. For one scholar, the text gives very few comments that would suggest the author's gender or any other aspect of their background aside from a few explicit mentions. This has led some scholars to argue that the Alexiad was not written by a woman at all, but by some other male author. This belief, put forward by Howard-Johnston, focuses mainly on the military sections of the Alexiad, and suggests that Anna was merely working from her husbands field notes, thus Howard-Johnston renames it "Nicephoros's Alexiad."

Largely, however, is is agreed that Anna Komnene was the author. Explicit mentions in the text of her engagement, her role as a wife, and the rolling commentary on her female modesty that influences her writing make Anna's authorship of the Alexiad "unmistakable." She certainly could have written about military affairs, since she was able to accompany her father, the king, on military campaign. The great detail of her father's home life and military style, combined with her own personal experiences and mentions of femininity, provide a strong case for her authorship of the Alexiad.

Representations of Gender
In her Alexiad, Anna portrays gender and gender stereotypes in a unique way. Like her male counterparts, she characterizes women along the typical stereotypes, such as being "liable to tears and as cowardly in the face of danger." Yet, despite this, women in the Alexiad never cry, with the exception of Alexios' funeral, in which grief is the appropriate cultural response. Likewise, none of the female characters act in a cowardly way. She nods to her own gender in a similar way when mentioning her own tears while writing certain events. Immediately, however, she informs the reader that she will stop crying in order to properly return to her duty of history, which she does twice in the narrative. By so doing, she shows a desire to control aspects that are, for her culture, feminine. Overall, however, Anna concerns herself primarily with intellect, which she attributes to both men and women, and allows for women to actively break out of societal gender roles in the Alexiad. Her personal attitudes, along with the lack of comparable sources from female authors in that era, make the Alexiad a poor source to use when gauging how average women in Byzantium felt about the First Crusade.

Gender and Style
Anna Komnene's somewhat unique historical style has been attributed to her gender. Her style is noteworthy in that it includes both a history of her father's actions durring the First Crusade, but also narrative reactions to some of these events. Her opinions and commentary on particular events in an otherwise historical text has been assigned to her gender both positively and negatively. This interpretation of her histories is known as a "gendered history," meaning it is both the history of Alexos and of Anna Komnene herself through her particular style, which is not seen in male authors. While the Roman historian Edward Gibbon saw this "gendered" narrative to betray "in every page the vanity of a female author," and others agreed with him, other scholars claim that this style might be indicative of Anna's mentor Michael Psellos. Some take this even further to suggest that Anna used Psellos' Chronographia as a model for her personal narration in history and took it even further, suggesting it was not her gender but her influences that led to her writing style.

Anna is unique for her time in the intensity by which she integrates her own narrative and emotion. Yet in the entire narrative she does not give one mention of her physical beauty or the fact that she had four children. This odd combination of style and lack of information is reconciled by her lack of 21st century feminist ideals, without which she was not interested in questioning her societal place in her own narrative even though her depictions of women do not fit in with male authors of the time. Instead, her style can be understood from her belief system that intelligence and nobility cancel out gender in terms of importance, and so Anna does not view her history as overstepping any necessary gender roles.