Her fame is such that books of hers are reviewed in the popular as well as academic press. We present here a recent example-- the reception of her Byzantine Matters (2014). We learn about an interesting topic as a way of introducing Averil Cameron.
For many of us, Byzantium remains "byzantine"—obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. In this book, renowned historian Averil Cameron presents an original and personal view of the challenges and questions facing historians of Byzantium today.
The book explores five major themes, all subjects of controversy. "Absence" asks why Byzantium is routinely passed over, ignored, or relegated to a sphere of its own. "Empire" reinserts Byzantium into modern debates about empire, and discusses the nature of its system and its remarkable longevity. "Hellenism" confronts the question of the "Greekness" of Byzantium, and of the place of Byzantium in modern Greek consciousness. "The Realms of Gold" asks what lessons can be drawn from Byzantine visual art, and "The Very Model of Orthodoxy" challenges existing views of Byzantine Christianity.
Throughout, the book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a forthright and compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination.
Averil Cameron is professor emeritus of late antique and Byzantine history at the University of Oxford and former warden of Keble College, Oxford. Her books include The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, The Byzantines, and The Later Roman Empire.
Reviews:
"Byzantine Matters is a fighting book. It may well be that the title was chosen to echo Cornel West's Race Matters. In a more restrained and academic vein than West--but with no less tenacity--Cameron points to an injustice: the absence of Byzantium from the historical consciousness of Western Europe. . . . Seen from the mean streets of university and state policies in the United Kingdom, Cameron's book makes depressing reading. But seen as a program for Byzantine studies in themselves, it is a crackling description of an intellectual trajectory."--Peter Brown, New York Review of Books
"No one has written about the history and culture of Byzantium with such luminous intelligence as Averil Cameron."--Peter Thornemann, Times Literary Supplement
"This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation. . . . Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry. . . . Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow."--Christopher Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
Here is another book of interest: Images of Women in Antiquity was edited by Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt. The first edition was 1983. We quote from her book:
A well known ritual practitioner in Hittite texts is the "Old Woman"....She performed a wide variety of purificatory and healing rituals, and operated under the aegis of the royal court a divinatory technique which cannot apparently be derived from any Mesopotamian source....
In magical contexts "Tongues" and 'Binding' refer to sorcery...[for example] the binding by the Great River of its flood, the fish, the mountains, road, and valley and by the Stormgod, of the clouds, the cord, the eagle's wing and the bearded snake in its coil; the wildsheep, the panther, the wolf, the lion, the antelope, the milk of the antelope and the Throne of the Protector god.
Averil Cameron married in 1962 Alan Cameron, another scholar of the ancient world. The marriage ended in 1980; they have a son and daughter.
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