Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680-850

Leslie Brubaker is Professor of Byzantine Art and Director of the Graduate School (College of Arts and Law) at the University of Birmingham. Her previous publications include Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (1999) and, with John Haldon, Byzantium in the Era of Iconoclasm: The Sources (2001). She has edited Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? (1998) and co-edited, with Robert Osterhout, The Sacred Image East and West (1995) and, with Julia M. H. Smith, Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (2004). John Haldon is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. His previous publications include Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1990; revised edition 1997) and Byzantium: A History (2000). He has edited The Social History of Byzantium: Problems and Perspectives (2008) and co-edited, with Elizabeth Jeffreys and Robin Cormack, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (2008).

• Introduction; 1. Belief, ideology and practice in a changing world; 2. Leo III: iconoclast or opportunist?; 3. Constantine V and the institutionalisation of iconoclasm; 4. The triumph of tradition? The iconophile intermission, 775–813; 5. The second iconoclasm; 6. Economy, society and state; 7. Patterns of settlement: urban and rural life; 8. Social elites and the court; 9. Society, politics and power; 10. Fiscal management and administration; 11. Strategic administration and the origins of the themata; 12. Iconoclasm, representation, and rewriting the past.

'This is the most important book on Byzantium to appear in my lifetime. The authors admirably fulfil their stated intention to discuss political recovery and institutional reshaping, the final stages in the evolution of eastern Orthodox dogma, the emergence of a new political and social elite, the transformation of urban life and also urban-rural relations, and the generation of a new 'medieval' perspective on the past.' Thomas F. X. Noble, Journal of Interdisciplinary History