This richly illustrated edited volume adds to the fast growing scholarship on the reception of Byzantium, joining recent volumes on the modern afterlives of the Byzantine world.Footnote ¹ Where those studies range widely across national contexts and media, Amalia G. Kakissis’ volume narrows its focus and examines how Byzantium was received, constructed and deployed in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, by one specific network of architects, scholars and artists, across the Byzantine Revival in architecture and the decorative arts from the late 1880s to the mid-1930s.

The volume’s centre of gravity is the Byzantine Research Fund (BRF) and the British School at Athens (BSA), where a group of architects and scholars studied Byzantine monuments at first hand, producing the drawings and photographs that helped establish Byzantine studies and artistic styles in Britain. The twelve chapters gathered here are organised into three thematic sections: Prelude to the Byzantine Revival, Pioneers and Patronage, and Byzantium and Modernism: Britain and Beyond. Despite the multi-authored format, the collection maintains a strong sense of cohesion; recurring figures (Robert Weir Schultz, Sidney Barnsley, William Lethaby, Walter George, and the third Marquess of Bute) link chapters that might otherwise read as discrete case studies, and the BRF Archive itself runs through the book as a unifying thread and as both a repository of material and a site through which Byzantine forms and ideas were filtered into the Arts and Crafts movement.

The opening section places the British case within a broader European context. J.B. Bullen, whose 2003 monographFootnote ² was the first sustained study of the revival of Byzantine taste, opens fittingly with a chapter mapping parallel national constructions of Byzantium in Germany, France and Britain for distinct political and cultural ends. Robin Cormack follows with a study of British visitors to Greece, identifying three patterns of engagement: literary responses shaped by classical taste, visual documentation through drawing and photography, and, finally, the incorporation of Byzantine forms into architectural and artistic practice. Eleni-Anna Chlepa closes the section with an account of restoration practices in nineteenth century Greece (including the controversial restoration of Daphni) and the role of institutions such as the Christian Archaeological Society in redefining Byzantine monuments as national heritage.

Pioneers and Patronage, the longest section, turns to the key actors. Ruth Macrides traces the third Marquess of Bute’s engagement with ancient, medieval and modern Greece, his Greek collaborators, and his patronage, including the first Byzantine Revival building in Scotland, Hagia Sophia at Galston. Julian Holder’s essay on William Richard Lethaby discusses The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building (1894) and makes a persuasive case for Lethaby’s influence on a whole generation of architects and designs in major English metropolitan centres, such as Birmingham and Manchester.

Dimitra Kotoula’s contribution is especially valuable for its close analysis of the recording practices of BRF architects. By examining their notebooks, drawings, and photographs, Kotoula shows how their methodology – grounded in a strong interest in nature and landscape, as well as a close, in situ study of materials, techniques, and decorative programmes – reflected the broader ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement. Kostis Kourelis discusses Walter S. George’s unpublished 1909 drawings of houses at Mistra, highlighting his stratigraphic approach to medieval secular architecture and his sensitivity to diachronic change, which sat uneasily with the Greek archaeological establishment. Gavin Stamp closes the section by revisiting and correcting his own earlier account of Schultz’s chapel commissions for the Bute family and for Westminster Cathedral.

The final section, Byzantium and Modernism: Britain and Beyond, turns to the material and artistic realisation of Byzantine Revival ideals. Mary Greensted traces Sidney Barnsley’s path from his study of architecture in Greece to furniture-making in the Cotswolds, and the Byzantine motifs and techniques he carried into his designs. Claudia Tedeschi turns to the most material form of reception, the mosaic decoration of Westminster Cathedral’s chapels. Richard J. Butler follows Walter Sykes George from Greece to India, where his BRF training in working across cultures proved formative. Annette Carruthers and Simon Green close the volume with a study of Scottish Byzantinists (Rowand Anderson, Schultz, Sydney Mitchell and others) and the institutional networks, such as the Edinburgh Architectural Association, that sustained them; Scotland emerges as a recurring locus across the book.

Individually authored, the chapters nonetheless cohere into a genuine narrative; some overlap and repetition is inevitable in a collection of this kind and does not detract from the whole. Originating in a conference held in 2013, the volume inevitably reflects a certain time lapse before its publication in 2023, but several contributors have evidently updated their chapters to engage with scholarship published in the interim.

The volume also opens up a number of fruitful avenues for further research. The role of photography in BRF practice is touched on only briefly and warrants more sustained analysis, especially given its importance in mediating Byzantine forms for British audiences. Equally, the role of women in the Byzantine Revival, only glimpsed here through references to Aglaia Coronio and Lena George, suggests an underexplored network of participation, patronage, and intellectual exchange. Most significantly, the volume treats the BRF Archive as the central, stable object around which the whole enterprise is organised, but says comparatively little about the archive as an act of reception itself: a selecting, framing and fixing of what counts as ‘Byzantine’. A more reflexive engagement with the archive’s own mediating role would have sharpened the volume’s central argument.

Indeed, the volume gestures clearly towards future research: as Kakissis notes, the BRF Archive ‘still has many stories to tell’ (p. xix), and this publication demonstrates both the richness of that material and its capacity to generate new lines of enquiry. Byzantium and British Heritage, much like the BRF Archive itself, is an indispensable resource for scholars of Byzantine reception, architectural history, and the Arts and Crafts movement alike, while also pointing to the many stories that remain to be uncovered within this evolving field.