Anna's intrusions, defending her role as a historian and lamenting her bad luck, create an image of herself as an admirable and a devoted daughter. Sewter's revised edition of The Alexiad places Anna within the tradition of Byzantine historiography to effectively demonstrate her emulation of her predecessors, subjects, and innovations. This draws on a cultural and intellectual development that emerged during the period called Byzantine humanism (Comnenus 1). Anna effectively integrates concepts that help create her character through intrusions. In this article, I will indeed show that Anne's intimate relationships with her subjects make her more reliable than any other Byzantine historical source. In the preface to The Alexiad, Anna Comnena shows the purpose of undertaking her father's story. She says that “the telling of history constitutes a very powerful bulwark against the flow of time…As much as history has taken over, they remain together” (Comnena 1). This statement clearly shows the importance of writing history. This also shows the particular reason that motivated Anna to write the Alexiad. She argues that events of the past will often be lost: they should be preserved for future reference by diligent historians (Dalven 2). Anna records her father's reign to ensure his memories survive. This explicitly stated intention gives him recorded material credibility in relation to other historians. His intimate relationship with the recorded subjects, for example his mother and father; making his work serve a greater and more personal purpose than any other Byzantine historian (Peterson 23). In addition to explicitly stating his reason for preserving his father's middle of paper ......e as a historical source than any other Byzantine historian. Dalven, Rae. Anne Comnena. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. Print. Hill, Barbara. Imperial women in Byzantium 1025-1204: power, patronage and ideology. New York: Longman, 1999. Print. Kazhadan, Alexander. Studies on Byzantine literature of the 11th and 12th centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print Komnene, Anna. The Alexiad.Ed. Pierre Frankopan. Trans. ERA sewer. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009. Print.Petersen, Thalia Gouma "Why the Alexiad is a masterpiece of Byzantine literature." Peterson, Thalia Gouma. Anna Kiomnene and her times. New York: Garland Publishers, 2000. 169-86. Print Thiebaux, Marcelle. The Writings of Medieval Women: An Anthology. New York: Garland Editions. 1994. Print. Ward, Jennifer. Women in Medieval Europe 1200-1500. New York: Pearson Education, 2002. Print