Herrin's Byzantium: Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire
This paper reviews Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008), a panoramic account of the Eastern Roman Empire from its flourishing under Constantinople to its fall in 1453. The review summarizes Herrin's central thesis — that Byzantium played a decisive role in preventing Islamic expansion across Europe and thus fundamentally shaped the Western world — while evaluating her methods, her treatment of iconography and women's history, and her accessible, topically organized narrative style. The reviewer praises Herrin's readability and balance but notes moments where her scholarly advocacy tips into partisanship.
- Introduction and Author Background: Herrin's credentials and scholarly context introduced
- Central Thesis and Historiographical Argument: Byzantium's role shielding Europe from Islamic expansion
- Iconography, Religion, and Politics: Icons as religious practice, iconoclasm movement analyzed
- Women and Overlooked Figures in Byzantine History: Prominent Byzantine women and surprising cultural inventions
- Contradictions, Justice, and Daily Life: Byzantine paradoxes in law, religion, and governance
- Conclusion and Critical Assessment: Praise for readability balanced against partisan advocacy
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What makes this paper effective
- The review accurately captures Herrin's central historiographical intervention — that Byzantium was a "safe-house" of Christian culture that prevented Islamic expansion — and situates it against prior academic assumptions.
- It moves logically from author credentials to thesis summary to thematic analysis, giving the reader a clear sense of the book's scope and argument before offering evaluation.
- The reviewer balances genuine praise (readability, balanced treatment of Islam and Christianity) with specific, substantive criticism (occasional assumption of reader knowledge, partisan tone).
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of targeted textual evidence — direct quotations from the book and outside sources — to support evaluative claims rather than relying on vague description. The iconoclasm passage, for example, illustrates the reviewer's broader point about the book's integration of religion, art, and politics through a specific episode Herrin discusses.
Structure breakdown
The review opens with author credentials and scholarly context, then states Herrin's thesis. It moves through thematic analysis (iconography, women's history, Byzantine contradictions) before closing with a balanced critical assessment. This structure mirrors a standard academic book review format: context → argument → evidence → evaluation.
Introduction and Author Background
After the fall of Rome, all of Europe is often said to have entered a "dark age." Yet the eastern part of the former Roman Empire, known as Byzantium, flourished, led by the great capital of Constantinople. Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) provides an overview of the history of this great empire and its greatest city. She examines why it flourished — and also why it ultimately perished. Herrin's central thesis is that, far from being a mere footnote to history as it is so often reduced, Byzantine civilization played a critical role in preventing the Islamic empire from spreading across all of Europe, and thus played a vital part in making the Western world what it is today, for better or for worse.
Herrin is the author of many popular and scholarly works on this era and geographical region. For most of her academic career, Judith Herrin was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London. According to the King's College departmental website, Professor Herrin retired in 2008 to focus on her writing and to become a Research Fellow in the Department of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the college. Her most current area of research concerns women in the Byzantine Empire and Byzantium's role in negotiating relations between Islam and Christendom in the medieval and modern eras. She originally studied history at the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham. She has also worked and taught in Athens, Paris, and Munich, and held the post of Stanley J. Seeger Professor in Byzantine History at Princeton University before returning to England to take the position of second Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's. She is best known for her books that address a wide audience in the United States and the United Kingdom, including The Formation of Christendom (1989) and Women in Purple (2000) ("Professor Judith Herrin," King's College, 2009).
Herrin has been honored for her historical scholarship as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and also by the President of the Hellenic Republic of Greece, from whom she received a Golden Cross of Honor in 2002 ("Professor Judith Herrin," King's College, 2009). She was recently quoted in The Guardian, a popular British newspaper of record comparable to the New York Times in the United States, on the subject of the prohibitive costs of special museum exhibitions. She urged readers instead to seek out less publicized, free exhibits: "much Byzantine material can already be seen free… Sometimes it is labeled 'early Christian', not Byzantine… the biggest collections are in the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert [Museum]" (Bridge, 2008).
Works Cited
Bridge, Mark. "Who Said This Stuff Is Priceless?" The Times. 23 Aug. 2008, p. 6. ProQuest. 17 Feb. 2009. http://www.proquest.com/
Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of Medieval Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
"Professor Judith Herrin." King's College, London. 17 Feb. 2009. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/bmgs/staff/herrin.html
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