A major revisionist survey of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history.

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 730 and continued for nearly 120 years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era is the first book in English to survey the original sources crucial for a modern understanding of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to cover both the written and the visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors, an art historian and a historian who both specialise in the period, have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual and the written materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium.

Law was central to the ancient Roman conception of themselves and their empire. Yet what happened to Roman law and the position it occupied ideologically during the turbulent years of the Iconoclast era, c.680-850, is seldom explored and little understood. This volume uses Roman law and canon law to chart the various responses to these changing times - especially the rise of Islam, from Justinian II's Christocentric monarchy to the Old Testament-inspired Isauriandynasty - and the transformation from the late antique Roman Empire to medieval Byzantium.

Byzantine ‘iconoclasm' is famous and has influenced iconoclast movements from the English Reformation and French Revolution to Taliban, but it has also been woefully misunderstood: this book shows how and why the debate about images was more complicated, and more interesting, than it has been presented in the past. It explores how icons came to be so important, who opposed them, and how the debate about images played itself out over the years between c. 680 and 850. Many widely accepted assumptions about ‘iconoclasm' – that it was an imperial initiative that resulted in widespread destruction of images, that the major promoters of icon veneration were monks, and that the era was one of cultural stagnation – are shown to be incorrect. Instead, the years of the image debates saw technological advances and intellectual shifts that, coupled with a growing economy, concluded with the emergence of medieval Byzantium as a strong and stable empire.

Twelve scholars contextualize and critically examine the key debates about the controversy over icons and their veneration that would fundamentally shape Byzantium and Orthodox Christianity.

This volume brings into being the field of Byzantine intellectual history. Shifting focus from the cultural, social, and economic study of Byzantium to the life and evolution of ideas in their context, it provides an authoritative history of intellectual endeavors from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth century. At its heart lie the transmission, transformation, and shifts of Hellenic, Christian, and Byzantine ideas and concepts as exemplified in diverse aspects of intellectual life, from philosophy, theology, and rhetoric to astrology, astronomy, and politics. Case studies introduce the major players in Byzantine intellectual life, and particular emphasis is placed on the reception of ancient thought and its significance for secular as well as religious modes of thinking and acting. New insights are offered regarding controversial, understudied, or promising topics of research, such as philosophy and medical thought in Byzantium, and intellectual exchanges with the Arab world.

In The Concept of the Elect Nation in Byzantium, Shay Eshel shows how the Old Testament model of the ancient Israelites was a prominent factor in the evolution of Roman-Byzantine national awareness between the 7th and 13th centuries. The Byzantines' interpretation of the 7th century epic events as manifestations of God's wrath enabled them to incorporate the events into a paradigm which they now embraced: the Old Testament paradigm of the Israelite Elect Nation's complex relationship with God, a cyclic relation of sin, wrath, punishment, repentance and salvation. The Elect Nation concept enabled the Byzantines to express the shift in their collective identity toward a shrunken, yet more clearly defined, national awareness.