Bissera Pentcheva presents here the work of a highly accomplished Byzantinist: she commands all the necessary medieval and modern languages, including the Slavic sources; she provides careful and extensive translations of the primary texts she adduces; and she interprets those sources with a penetrating eye. She has compiled a very useful apparatus, which has benefited from time in specialized libraries in the field of Byzantine studies. This book provides readers with an extensive range of visual sources, and the press has done fine service with both color and black-and-white photographs that are clean and clear. In other words, it represents many of the strengths of Byzantine studies, in its philological and critical foundations, and it is also a summa of Mariological studies to this point in time [1]. All scholars interested in that field will need to take Pentcheva's arguments into account, for the author provides a wide-ranging and intelligent analysis of Mariology in medieval Constantinople.
The book is divided into two principal sections that deal, to summarize, with the growth of the cult of Mary in Constantinople, including some references to Rome, and with the processional and monastic activities of icons of Mary in the capital in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This summary account does not do justice to the book's range and depth of source work, but it gives an account of the book's main concerns. In the introduction, the author claims that her interest is directed at the "role" of icons and at the study of the "evolution of icon-centered Byzantine visual identity and rooted the discussion in the textual tradition" (1-2). To that end, she studies the civic cult of Mary at Constantinople from the periods before Iconoclasm to the Middle Byzantine, the development of the tradition of Mary's intervention at the Avar siege of 626 and of the active role Mary came to assume in war consequently. In this first half of the book, the author argues for the dominance of relics in the early period that was only gradually superseded by icons in the eleventh century. In this argument, she reveals her skills to good effect, in the careful analysis of written sources that lend weight to this skeptical position.[2] In the second part of the book, she carefully examines the three principal shrines to Mary at Constantinople: the Hodegon, Blachernai and Pantocrator. She treats the complicated question of the iconographies attached to these shrines, the histories of their development and the processional life of the monasteries and icons. In other words, the book deals with essential questions about Mary's proprietary interests in Constantinople and how such interests were manifested in art and ritual in that city.
If this book is an indispensable resource for scholars interested in those questions, it also represents only a provisional statement, if highly accomplished in its own terms. In my opinion, it reveals strengths of Byzantine studies, to be sure, but it also reveals its shortcomings, and it shows those forth most clearly in the (scarcely mentioned) methodological premises of this study. The author rightly undermines any claim for the fifth-century empress Pulcheria to be considered founder of Marian veneration in the capital, and she produces good arguments to that effect, but in the conclusion, she also reveals a telling prejudice (191). Here she states that the reason for the ongoing currency of Pulcheria as founder lies in the scholarly agenda invested in gender issues. She is certainly correct in suggesting that scholarly work is determined in important ways by its own intellectual setting, but this aside also reveals an aversion expressed throughout this book to assuming any scholarly persona other than disinterested, objective analyst, surely as much a construct as a scholar directed by awareness of feminism. Her aside should not be given undue weight, however, and yet it is the only mention of method in the entire work. For this reason, it can entrench further a perception that Byzantine studies lags behind other areas of Medieval studies in its contacts with major intellectual movements of the last fifty years and more.
The role of icons, the vague first assertion of focus, is never fully resolved. It relates to power, clearly, for the title makes that conjunction forcefully. Icons of Mary always relate to power here, from their supercession of personifications of victory before Iconoclasm to their integration into monastic processions in the Middle Byzantine period. But what is the nature of that conjunction? The polymorphous, active qualities of power relations need some recognition, but here socio-political worlds of Byzantium (for more than one had to exist across these centuries) are relatively straightforward: "political minds used her figure [Pulcheria's] to promote the standard concept of imperial power guaranteed by the Mother of God" (191). The icon was, it seems, at the service of an unchanging political concept. To be fair, the author picks up the real narrative of icons and power, as she presents the sources, in the eleventh century as an innovation of the Komnenian dynasty. The specifics of its ideological advantages to that dynasty are not taken far beyond asking for divine intercession for the emperor, however. This eleventh-century move raises questions, too, of public and private expressions of power relations. Processions are a major element in how the author presents the cult of Mary in Constantinople, but in these descriptions, the interaction of these groups never thickens. Public spectacle is imperial in this model, and popular or other devotions seldom figure. A social-history model would appear relevant to this arena, and performance theories could illuminate the "quiddity of symbolic action" in a way that could make Marian processions richer and more problematic than they are presented in this book.[3] Because the book deals with imperial power, it never really addresses the converse, the relationship of Mary's icons with the powerless.[4] Surely, Marian devotion amongst individuals or at different social strata from the elite worked with and against imperial expressions of that devotion. Another power relation that arises in this book is amongst Marian monasteries in the capital. A potentially rich topic, it is treated cursorily, and the historical context of competitive monasteries remains highly evocative.
While for the most part the visual sources are treated with insightful care, some examples also reveal passages of selective arguments. In the first place, John Cotsonis has published a major, quantitative study on seals that call into question some of the chronologies Pentcheva argues for. While that study is too recent for her to have included in this book, Cotsonis has found that devotion to Mary as indicated by his large data set was particularly intense before and after Iconoclasm.[5] However, as the intensity of that struggle diminished, the number of seals with Mary declined in relative terms, and while maintaining a place of prestige amongst the choirs of saints, Mary was not the sole object of devotion. Occasionally, one does imagine that devotion to Mary operated in something of a vacuum at Constantinople, and Cotsonis's study allows a fuller context of devotion to saints to emerge. And it does permit Pentcheva's claim to maintain, that is, that Marian devotion was gathering strength, amongst elites at least, from the late eleventh century.
Viewership is often an unformulated reality in this book. A striking exception is the description of the spatial deesis created at the Pantocrator monastery. In this passage, the author evokes very nicely the concert of icons traveling a path of light in the church. Here she uses the sources to magical effect. In most cases, however, the "viewer," that elusive entity, is fastened in place. Cited as "the viewer," he or she (this gender identity is never raised) is the neo- platonic adept (150), who is taken to be a typical viewing subject. In most situations, viewing is a fixed and fully-informed activity. Indeed, at time, it looks a lot like an art-historical act. The discussion of the changes that viewers could understand and articulate needed some fuller argumentation. Understanding Byzantine viewers as capable of recognizing minor changes in form, and consequently in meaning, lies at the heart of our approaches to Byzantine art, and yet such an understanding always needs defending. In the discussion of the iconographical changes in the icon type known as the Hodegetria, readers are told that icons made before and after Iconoclasm exhibit less maternal and more intercessory qualities by the ninth century. Those qualities are signified by the unlocking of the embrace of mother and child, which meant that the mother held the child less closely and indicated the child with her now-free right hand. This reading is ingenious and subtle, but its link to processions makes interpretative situations difficult to imagine. Here gestures and gaze are said to be key elements, but seeing the slight shifts in the right hand and in the child-holding balance of the mother takes some careful gazing at still photographs. The situation that is presented to the reader here is far less controlled than that. Not only are processions the context in which these icons are situated for ideal viewers, but this newly-shifted iconography was also "most likely due to the integration of icons into processions" (112). The insight may well be correct, and it has subtlety, but it lacks a well-drawn context for viewing and participation, as well as a good textual basis. No textual support was added to underpin this argument for a new theological and devotional emphasis on intercession.
One final criticism focuses on how processions are represented in this book. The author says that she wants to reconstruct Marian processions using a "new approach": narrative scenes are repositories of processional practices (129). But using manuscript illustrations as windows on the world is not new, and those windows cannot be considered transparent in any sense. The author uses illustrations, however, not only to re-imagine the appearance of processions, but also their typological meaning, in that they relate and perform episodes from Mary's life, namely the Presentation in the Temple. This latter aspect is ingenious but its connection to the Middle Byzantine period is not demonstrated, as the author hopes, for the clinching text is fifteenth century (142-3) and the clinching image belongs, it seems, to the last century of Byzantium.[6]
These criticisms arise in part from a desire to see this field of art history join the rest of the discipline in thinking through its positions and applying those insights to outstanding questions. On its own merits, this book is excellent: it shows very well the challenges of Byzantine studies that set it apart from other disciplines. It shows, too, that bridges need building to re-join related disciplines.
NOTES
[1] The author is a contributor, but she was unable to include a collection of essays that must also be taken into account in this regard: Maria Vassilaki, ed. Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
[2] Pentcheva follows the strong arguments for relics' priority to a later introduction of icons of Leslie Brubaker, "Icons Before Iconoclasm?" in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, in Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo, vol. 45, Spoleto: Presso La sede del Centro, 1998, 1215-54.
[3] Lawrence E. Sullivan, "Sound and Senses: Toward a Hermeneutics of Performance," History of Religion 26(1986):1-33, here 5, and see Catherine Bell, "Performance," in Mark C. Taylor, ed. Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 205-24.
[4] See now Sharon E.J. Gerstel, "The Layperson in Church," and Alice- Mary Talbot, "The Devotional Life of Laywomen," in Derek Krueger, ed. Byzantine Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006, respectively 103-23, 230-2, and 201-20, 237-40.
[5] John Cotsonis, "The Contribution of Byzantine Lead Seals to the Study of the Cult of Saints (Sixth-Twelfth Centuries)," Byzantion 75(2005):383-497, esp. 402-14, 487-8.
[6] The two-sided icon was painted in two phases: the Hodegetria belongs to the early fourteenth century, while the Presentation of the Virgin on the reverse dates to the second half of the century. See Trésors médiévaux de la République de Macédoine, Paris: Ed. de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999, 74-5.