What we have here is a penetrating critique of the practice of history among Byzantinists, but one that also suggests a new approach to the study of Byzantium. It is prompted by what has been called the ‘explosion’ of late antiquity in the wake of Peter Brown's The world of late antiquity. Averil Cameron does not think that Byzantinists have quite grasped its full implications, which in her view threaten to relegate the study of Byzantium to ‘subaltern’ status. She takes Byzantinists to task for lagging behind their late antique counterparts and suggests that they might do well to be guided by their example. A constant refrain is that the subject is not only understudied but also under-theorised, leaving it exposed to the old charges of negativity and exoticism. It is part of what Cameron calls ‘Absence’ – the title of her first chapter (pp. 7–25) – by which she means that in modern historical discourse Byzantium counts for very little. This she takes to be not only a result of the failure of Byzantinists to adopt up-to-date methodologies, but also a reflection of its uncomfortable position squeezed between Islam and the West and marooned between Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cameron is not happy with those who would treat Byzantium as a distinctively medieval polity. She quite rightly insists that the roots of many features of later Byzantine culture and society can be traced back to late antiquity. But, on this reading, Byzantium was no more than a rump state, the emperors and citizens of which devoted themselves to preserving what they could of their heritage. As Lewis Mumford put it, rather unfairly, ‘For a thousand years Byzantium made a virtue of arrested development.’ It would be fairer to hail its longevity as a testament to immense ingenuity and to considerable powers of recuperation. Cameron considers how this was achieved in three chapters, which she labels ‘Empire’ (pp. 26–45), ‘Hellenism’ (pp. 46–67), and ‘The very model of Orthodoxy’ (pp. 86–111). Her main thrust is that Byzantinists have accepted these labels all too readily as explanations in themselves, instead of subjecting them to proper analysis. She begins each of these chapters with a question: Was Byzantium an empire? Is there a Byzantine identity (or to put it another way, how Greek were the Byzantines)? Was Byzantium an ‘Orthodox’ society? Her answers are that Byzantium was an empire, but should not have been; that the Byzantines were neither Greeks nor Romans; and that while ‘the centrality of Orthodoxy in Byzantium cannot be disputed’ (p. 95), there was no very effective means of knowing what it was. Behind these brisk dismissals there is a rather different way of looking at Byzantium, which emphasises that it survived external pressures and internal divisions because of its ability to negotiate change. Even its very identity depended on circumstance. Cameron is not happy with the Roman identity proposed for the Byzantines by Anthony Kaldellis or with a Christian Hellenic identity, which rests on the notion that Christianity was Hellenism in a new guise. She prefers a more recent view that Hellenism and Christianity have always been opposed systems of thought. She decides that ‘hybridity’ provides the best definition of the Byzantine identity. In other words, it was a matter of negotiation. In similar fashion, Orthodoxy was constantly being contested. By way of explanation Cameron adduces a lack of a clear locus of authority. Never was this more obvious than in the iconoclast dispute, which focused on the status of art. This is a question that is at the heart of the chapter that Cameron devotes to Byzantine art (pp. 68–86), which, she argues, was ‘for Byzantines not only a central topic within the discourse of religious orthodoxy, but can itself actually be said to have constituted Orthodoxy’ (p. 83). She is thinking of the Feast of Orthodoxy instituted to celebrate victory over the iconoclasts, but she draws our attention to the way in which it obscured exactly how contrived that victory was. She wonders whether Byzantine Orthodoxy was not ‘in fact, a continual performance constantly revised and constantly renewed’ (p. 94). This is a thought which applies to most other features of Byzantine culture and society. The weight of Cameron's analysis favours process as key to understanding Byzantium.

The appeal of Byzantium has always rested on its distinctive, if baffling, character, which set it apart not only from Islam and the Latin West, but also from Classical Antiquity. A great virtue of this book is that it emphasises that understanding the character of Byzantium requires engagement with the process by which it was formed. This turned on maintaining, in precarious equilibrium, a series of discordant elements. It is an approach that goes to the heart of the historical process and offers a rather different way of looking at Byzantium. But quite another matter is the efficacy of the prescriptions put forward by Cameron for the investigation of different aspects of this process. They strike me as relying rather heavily on the current orthodoxy, which urges that a theoretical approach provides the key to a proper understanding of the past. If this book teaches us anything it is that orthodoxy is constantly shifting.

The value of this book lies in the acuity of its analysis and the richness of its insights, which not only make it required reading for anybody interested in Byzantium, but also belie its pessimistic premiss. Inevitably some important topics are omitted. Cameron avoids dealing with Byzantine law, which is a field where a great deal of valuable work has been done recently. She has little to say about Byzantine archaeology, except to compare its results unfavourably with what has been achieved for late antiquity. But it has established that in terms of material culture the seventh and eighth centuries saw, if not a complete break, a retreat to a core, raising once again the question of how far the so-called ‘dark ages’ were a watershed separating Byzantium from its classical past.