Judith Herrin is one of the most distinguished historians of Byzantium writing today, and it is a joy to see the publication of her essays in two volumes: the collection being reviewed here and the collection in Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). As a historian of Byzantium, I was especially intrigued by the autobiographical introduction and by the brief introductions to each essay. One of the early students in what has become the famed Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies program at Birmingham University, Herrin knows a great deal about the history of the field, and her introductions provide a kind of outline of its development.

For the readers of Church History, the chapters of interest are likely to be 11, 12, 13, 14, and 16; the rest of this review will therefore be devoted to those. One crucial context for these articles is Herrin's ground-breaking and comprehensive study of early medieval Christian societies, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Historians of late antiquity, of early medieval western Europe, and of early medieval Byzantium know that this work has become fundamental to our understanding. Herrin argued that we cannot understand any one of the societies of early medieval Europe and western Asia without understanding its interactions with the others, and her thorough investigation of those relationships convinced scholars in several fields. Chapter 11 is one of several articles that elaborate upon themes treated more briefly in Formation: “Constantinople, Rome, and the Franks in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries” explores the decades before and after the famous moment when Pope Stephen II (752–757) turned to the Franks for protection. The conclusions Herrin reaches about the impact of this turn on the history of the churches have become basic tenets of early medieval history. For example, she argues that every step of the process by which the popes turn away from the emperor in Constantinople and toward the kings of the Franks must be understood as a triangular process. In other words, this is not about “East” and “West”; it is about popes, Franks, and Byzantines. On some subjects, the popes and the Constantinopolitans agree; on others, the popes ally with the Franks; the Byzantine iconoclast emperors try to go around the pope to make an alliance with the Franks. This idea of a triangle of relationships has become so basic to early medieval history that it is hard to remember how we thought of these things before Herrin's work. Nevertheless, it is her work that moved us from a dualistic model of East versus West to a more subtle understanding of early medieval Weltpolitik, and this article is an excellent short introduction to the basic idea.

Chapter 12, “The Pentarchy: Theory and Reality in the Ninth Century,” is a lucid account of the development of ideas about where the ultimate authority in the church lies. It is a story of the papacy and the Constantinopolitan patriarchate adapting to the world that emerged after the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. In that world, the earlier idea of authority residing in a pentarchy of patriarchs (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) was an anachronism. With three of the patriarchates under Islamic rule, the real story for the churches of Rome and Constantinople was a story of bilateral relations. Herrin elucidates the transition in what could, again, be a short introduction for anyone interested in the topic.

Chapter 13, “From Bread and Circuses to Soup and Salvation: The Origins of Byzantine Charity,” an essay originally written in the 1980s but never before published, details the transformation in ways of providing for “the poor” from Late Antique Constantinople with its traditionally Roman bread dole to later Byzantine food distribution, medical care, and other charity, generally under the auspices of the church. While much of the information in this article has been elaborated upon and some of it has been updated in later work on Byzantine charity, hospitals, and orphanages, this article again serves as an excellent introduction that has stood the test of time. Chapter 14, “Ideals of Charity, Realities of Welfare: The Philanthropic Activity of the Byzantine Church” is similarly useful.

Chapter 16, “Book Burning as Purification in Early Byzantium,” is an eye-opening analysis of a familiar phenomenon—one of those rare treatments of a subject that changes the way we see a whole series of episodes. Starting from the basic point that it was possible and perhaps common to destroy the text written in a manuscript and re-use the parchment, Herrin notes that it was therefore both unnecessary and profligate to burn a manuscript if the only purpose of book-burning were to censor the text. Instead, she argues, book-burning was not fundamentally about censorship, but rather about a symbolic purging, a purification of the body politic or the body of the Church.

I have often been told that scholars of other fields do not read the work of Byzantine historians because it is inaccessible or overly specialized. Even for western medievalists, the alien culture of Byzantium sometimes seems irrelevant; for scholars of church history it may seem to be important only for those who study the Slavic or Greek churches. Herrin's essays are the best possible answer to such myopia. For church historians interested in a range of issues—the locus of authority in the church, the history of ecclesiastical charity and its relation to state welfare, purificatory rituals of all kinds, and more—this collection of essays provides a stellar example of what Byzantine historians can contribute to several broader fields.