Averil Cameron is professor emeritus of late antique and Byzantine history at the University of Oxford and former warden of Keble College, Oxford. Her books include The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, The Byzantines, and The Later Roman Empire.
Why the marginalized story of Byzantium has much to teach us about Western history
For many of us, Byzantium remains "byzantine"-obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. In this book, renowned historian Averil Cameron presents an original and personal view of the challenges and questions facing historians of Byzantium today.
The book explores five major themes, all subjects of controversy. "Absence" asks why Byzantium is routinely passed over, ignored, or relegated to a sphere of its own. "Empire" reinserts Byzantium into modern debates about empire, and discusses the nature of its system and its remarkable longevity. "Hellenism" confronts the question of the "Greekness" of Byzantium, and of the place of Byzantium in modern Greek consciousness. "The Realms of Gold" asks what lessons can be drawn from Byzantine visual art, and "The Very Model of Orthodoxy" challenges existing views of Byzantine Christianity.
Throughout, the book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a forthright and compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination. "Byzantine Matters is a fighting book. It may well be that the title was chosen to echo Cornel West's Race Matters. In a more restrained and academic vein than West--but with no less tenacity--Cameron points to an injustice: the absence of Byzantium from the historical consciousness of Western Europe. . . . Seen from the mean streets of university and state policies in the United Kingdom, Cameron's book makes depressing reading. But seen as a program for Byzantine studies in themselves, it is a crackling description of an intellectual trajectory."---Peter Brown, New York Review of Books "No one has written about the history and culture of Byzantium with such luminous intelligence as Averil Cameron."---Peter Thonemann, Times Literary Supplement "This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation. . . . Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry. . . . Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow."---Christopher Kelly, Times Literary Supplement "This is a must-read for anyone studying Byzantium. . . . [I]t will be very useful to students and enthusiasts of the empire, as well as medievalists and late antiquarians." "Byzantine Matters is a deceptively small and slight volume in appearance, but it is a book on a mission. Taking five interlocking themes, it sets out to do nothing less than make its readers realise why Byzantium is not something long ago and far away but something that should matter to us all. . . . I, for one, as a feminist scholar working on Byzantine women, have gained and learnt a huge amount from her and her work."---Liz James, Anglo-Hellenic Review "[A]ttractively produced. . . . [A] more distinctive book, accessible but also directed at the field itself."---Shaun Tougher, History Today "Cameron makes her case, as one would expect, with eloquen
