The Byzantines.

Reese, Alan W.

The Byzantines, by Averil Cameron. Oxford, Blackwell, 2006. xii, 275 pp. $36.95 US (cloth).

Averil Cameron needs no introduction to serious students of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, and even generalists will know her as the co-editor of the Cambridge Ancient History's volumes XII, XIII, and XIV. The Byzantines is a welcome addition to the renewal of Byzantine Studies in contemporary academia. Until fairly recently, as Cameron suggests, Byzantium figured more as an absence than a presence in our historical consciousness. It tends to get caught between traditional modes of periodization and falls between the cracks of the major divisions of intellectual and cultural history. Recently, however, things have begun to change, and the Byzantines are getting some long overdue respect among historians. Cameron notes, "like its successor empire, that of the Ottomans, the territory of Byzantium included large swathes of Europe, where its influence after 1453 has continued until today" (p. ix).

Byzantium is "an integral factor in the political and cultural histories of the emerging post-Communist states of central and eastern Europe," and, as such, "acquired a newly sensitive role, both as predecessor of the Ottoman empire and bringer and guarantee of Orthodox Christianity, and as conveying an uneasily 'Eastern' inheritance" (ibid). Given the new immediacy of the old questions of "the extent and nature of Europe" and "the relation of the 'West' with the Islamic world," which are raised, say, in relation to the inclusion of Turkey in the EEC, Byzantium's relevance merits renewed consideration. Cameron's book challenges the partial and insular approach to the Byzantine Empire that has often characterized the western European perspective on the Byzantine east. Throughout the book's chapters, we are led to question "certain powerful narratives [that] have held the field," including "the idea of Byzantium as an overwhelmingly Orthodox society," characterized by "Caesaropapism," and the closely connected narrative of Byzantium "as an overwhelmingly religious society" (pp. ix, x).

The author effectively uses the most recent studies to challenge such eminent historians as George Ostrogorsky and presents a masterful historiographic analysis of the ways in which Byzantium has been constructed in the western imagination since the Enlightenment. However, the book also presents fresh and clear discussions of major themes in the development of Byzantium, both in its transformations and continuities. This book is an excellent foil to the older treatments of Byzantium that still dominate our libraries. It will be of great use to undergraduate students as well as specialists. The book is illustrated with 24 black-and-white illustrations, 10 useful and detailed maps, a handy chronology of emperors, patriarchs, and notable events in the West and the East.

Alan W. Reese

Saint Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan