Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium

...this first-rate study has far-reaching implications for anyone interested in religious language of images. Georgia Frank, Religious Studies Review Brubaker (Univ. of Birmingham, UK) has produced by far the most penetrating study of this key work. Choice Leslie Brubaker has written an important and illuminating book that will be required reading by all students of Byzantine art and culture. It will also be valuable for students of medieval manuscripts in general, who are interested in the ways that paintings in books can be used to construct meanings independent of their accompanying texts. Henry Maguire, Slavic Review No other book in the field of Byzantine art history has been as long and eagerly awaited as Leslie Brubaker's study of the Paris Gregory. She provides the perfect answer to the sometimes unfortunate trend of quickly publishing one's dissertation, the sine qua non of academic advancement. Nuanced, sophisticated, compelling, the book which resulted in this case makes dispatch in publishing the labours of a graduate career unseemly. Brubaker has provided a necessary study for any art historian concernec with the relationship between image and text in a work of art, and, especially for those freshly vindicated partisans, with the ascendancy of the visual over the textual. This book should not be distant from the desk of any medieval art historian; for this reviewer, it will be a touchstone. Word & Image ...Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium will be essential for any library serving Byzantine, medieval, or art-historical studies. The Catholic Historical Review