Averil Cameron (1940–2026)

Averil Cameron's Byzantine Matters speaks to two audiences at once: to Byzantinists, whom she urges to engage in more interdisciplinary dialogues and to develop a more sophisticated theoretical apparatus, and to other medievalists to pay closer attention to a society often wrongfully dismissed as static and unimaginative. As the opening salvo in what Cameron clearly hopes will be a wide-ranging debate, she offers little by way of answers/solutions to the issues which she raises, though her show more questions are often interesting and provocative, even for someone like me, a non-Byzantinist medievalist who lacks any real familiarity with the historiography under discussion and who found the dense prose tough going at points. Yet with that caveat about my lack of familiarity, I wonder if Cameron's call for Byzantium to be seen as less "exceptional" and to see it "against more 'normal' and wider perspectives" (115) is truly helpful when it just implicitly strengthens the idea of Latin Christendom, its periodisation and historiography, as the default.

One last, slightly petty point: I was irritated by Cameron's continual reference to Anglophone universities as "Anglo-Saxon" universities. This seems anachronistic when talking about scholarship produced in English universities; it is entirely out-of-place when talking about universities in Ireland or the United States. Perhaps Cameron was seeking to inspire in non-Byzantinists the same kind of irritation which Byzantinists surely feel when they see someone using the adjective "byzantine" as a pejorative. If so, touchée. show less

Dr. Kennedy's collection of fourteen articles is grouped into three sections dealing with 1) Late Antiquity to Islam in Syria, 2)Byzantine Islamic diplomatic contacts in the period 650 – 750. 3) Early Islamic state Admin .systems. Episodic but informative. His essay likening the collapse of the Abbasid Empire after 900 CE to a Commonwealth like devolution is particularly interesting.

A solid, framework for further reading in the field of mostly Mediterranean history. We have here political history from Theodosius II to Maurice, with a good emphasis on North Africa and the near East, as well as Europe. The sections on Architecture and Religion are a little jargon heavy. One does get fairly lively prose, so it reads pretty well. Spoiler alert: the Western Empire falls! This is the new edition revised for 2000 CE.

This is a series of linked essays relating to the technical concerns of the current crop of Byzantinists rather than directly relating to the object of the study, the orthodox Christian Empire. She does attempt to set out the tension between the Hellenists in the city and the consciously Orthodox intellectuals and religious figures. The English-speaking world has always been a poor source of funds for investigating the later Roman Empire, and the value of that study has been less obvious show more than rivals. But every now and again incidents ignite some level of interest so she keeps trying. I obviously applaud her efforts. show less