Conclusions

The essays in this volume all contribute to a deeper understanding of ‘vision and meaning’ in the Byzantine world, and, potentially, outside it as well. The phrase is Leslie Brubaker’s, and it is the title of her until now most substantial work (it was a last-minute, but happy, substitution for her preferred title, Image as exegesis).1 It is also a common theme of much of her work for the last 25 years, for she was already wrestling with the issue in the mid-1980s. What preoccupied her then, and has preoccupied her ever since, is the difference between the way that visual images (and, more widely, material culture) transmit meaning and the way that words do. She never thought that images were just like words; the semiology of images is not to be seen as a simple doublet of linguistics. (‘Words give resonance to the images, and the images nuance the words’ – to quote Kallirroe Linardou quoting Brubaker.)2 But the way the difference works for us, and the way it worked for the Byzantines, has preoccupied her in a large number of separate publications. It also underlies her other major interests, notably the significance of the Iconoclast period, the period in which how images worked was the locus of a huge conflict, and, not least, her interest in gender. As she argued in ‘Memories of Helena’, texts are overwhelmingly wriĴen by men in our period, and reflect (élite) male norms and ideas; the major form of public communication available to (élite) women was the commissioning of buildings, and an analysis of the communicative role of material culture is thus important for any gender analysis in late Antiquity and the middle ages (east or west). It is not the only one, and Brubaker has indeed given us gender analyses of texts, but it is an important

1 L. Brubaker, Vision and meaning in ninth-century Byzantium (Cambridge, 1999). I am very grateful to Liz James for a critique of this text.