Ale’s Reviews > The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 > Status Update

"...the Iconoclast debate was about the location of the holy in society, not a small matter... the aim of the Iconoclast emperors, in the face of the Arab threat, was to streamline the whole of Byzantine society and culture, and focus it on a few central symbols, the cross, the eucharist, the capital, the emperor himself, rather than face 'a haemorrhage of the holy... into a hundred little paintings'."

Justinian II "Rhinotmetos" 🫅👃❌️

"The intervisuality of architectural style is one of the most powerful conveyors of meaning and visual effect. Material culture tells us more about the use of space, the function of spatial relationships, as well as, of course, stylistic and technological changes; written culture tells us more about human relationships. But the construction of visual meaning, by emperors and peasants alike, links these two worlds."

"We can track some systematic feuding, as with the case of Tournai in 591 in which a man killed his sister's husband for adultery, was killed by the husband's kin in return, and the feud spread steadily outwards to other relatives, never diminishing. (Queen Fredegund solved the difficulty, Gregory of Tours claims, by killing all the survivors.)"

What a buzzkill