Byzantine Matters by Averil Cameron (review)

Weaving together history and historiography into a unified reflection on the state of Byzantine studies, Averil Cameron manages to stage the strengths, challenges, and possibilities of the field within the contexts of their Byzantine and modern origins. Given that a comprehensive historiography of Byzantine studies is yet to be written, Cameron’s method here is both methodologically useful and historically enlightening. Her narratives allow this intellectual lineage to not simply explain where the field has come from but to poignantly and suggestively nudge us into the future, indicating to us where the field might and at times must go. Of particular and notable merit is the book’s generosity to younger scholars, not only acknowledging the significant contributions of mid-career and junior Byzantinists but also implicitly addressing younger generations as the volume’s key audience and interlocutor.

In the first chapter, entitled “Absence,” Cameron aptly starts us off with the key concern for most Byzantine scholars when we confront our friends and colleagues: the absence, confusion, and conflations of what Byzantium or Byzantine means. Grappling with its marginal and contradictory positions in history—between East and West, religiosity and secularism—this chapter is perhaps the book’s most succinct contribution. Poignantly, Cameron engages not only Byzantium’s absence but the incessant desire to rehabilitate Byzantium and distance it from its pejorative treatment, particularly around matters of its seriousness, its bureaucracies, its religiosity, and its lack of originality and creativity. Here, Cameron seems to push back against contemporary methodological trends, questioning the primacy of performance and performativity in literature over reading, for example, and describing studies on gender and the lower classes as “equally modernizing” (23) as the defenses of Byzantine originality and creativity.

In “Empire,” the second chapter, Cameron then turns to address a key question regarding Byzantium, which continues through the third and fifth chapters on Hellenism and Orthodoxy, respectively—namely, the question of empire. Considering present concerns regarding a post-Soviet world in the twilight of the American empire in late modernity, Cameron draws our attention to the undercurrents of imperialism and colonialism in Byzantine studies, which, as she comes to resolve at the end of the chapter, is a story yet unwritten. Her chapter makes us realize that we often treat Byzantium to our own detriment as a Constantinopolitan city-state rather than as an empire. This chapter is prophetic of the Global Turn in medieval and early modern studies, which is currently endeavoring to better understand the reaches of trade, as well as the interactions and social networks of people, and which will hopefully lead to a reevaluation of the Byzantine world writ large and its articulation as empire—not just in military or economic terms as it has been discussed, but as a thriving exchange of people, things, and ideas that are truly global. Cameron urges us to rethink terms such as aristocracy and give due consideration to newer models such as the Byzantine commonwealth and to those scholars that argue against notions of Byzantine exceptionalism.

In chapter 3, entitled “Hellenism,” Cameron directly focuses on the complex issue of Hellenism in Byzantine Studies, doubly defined as (1) the question of Byzantine identity and its relation to Classical Greece and (2) the question of Byzantine identity and its relation to Modern Greece. As her opening questions articulate, “Who owns Byzantium? Is there a Byzantine identity?” (46). The latter question confronts the often difficult matter of how the Byzantines sought to define themselves in terms of their Roman identity vis-à-vis their continuation of the Empire, their continuous interest in and education through the texts of Classical antiquity, the issues that these connections with antiquity engenders in our understanding of periods of so-called revival or renaissance, as in the case of the Macedonian dynasty, and the broader question of understanding a Hellenic Byzantine identity within the context of a diverse and polyglot imperial sphere. Moreover, the former question alludes to James Cuno’s provocative defense of the universal museum and its cultural heritage...