ABSTRACT
Leslie Brubaker is one of the most powerful of the contextual art historians to whom historians of Byzantium have been deeply indebted since the 1980s. Her doctoral thesis, wriĴen under the supervision of Herbert Kessler, and published as an important book in 1999,1 had been completed in 1983 and from the later 1980s onwards her work demonstrated the debt to contextual approaches which she has herself identified as influencing Byzantine art history.2 Not only context, but also perception, ‘ways of seeing’, the relation between word and image, and reception are central to her work, and nowhere more so than in her subtle and complex expositions of Byzantine cultural production in the ninth century.3 Cultural history, or cultural studies, is the realm within which many late antique and some Byzantine historians who make explicit use of critical theory now place themselves, and Brubaker has herself seemed to be moving in this direction, especially in her direct confrontation of the problems surrounding the topics of material culture and gender.4 Yet the uncompromising emphasis which she places on material culture – objects as objects – in her book co-authored with John Haldon on the sources for Byzantium in the iconoclast era (not, we are to understand,
1 L. Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory Nazianzus (Cambridge, 1999).
