Iconophilia: Politics, Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c.680–880. Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies 27.

Through case-studies related to the concept of the Incarnation, this book will analyse if and how Byzantine iconoclasm or “image struggle” (720s–843 circa) had an impact on the West. The Eastern dispute certainly prompted a papal reaction, testified by two Roman councils (731 and 769) and official correspondence between Popes and Emperors. But essentially the Popes reinforced and laid out a centuries-long policy in favour of the production and veneration of sacred images. Despite the tepid reaction of the Carolingians to Byzantine iconoclasm, and isolated examples of western iconoclastic writings in the early ninth century, soon shunned as heretical, the West seems to have avoided institutional iconoclasm, until the veneration of sacred images was challenged by the Protestant Reformation. In a way similar to what had happened during the fifth-century Christological controversies, the interest in Mary’s contribution to the history of Salvation attracted theological attention during the “image struggle”, and public as well as private devotion. The Mother of God and the vessel for the incarnation, Mary became focal. The key contribution of the book to a series on Byzantium will be its comparative East-West approach on how a number of the most iconic ways of representing the Virgin Mary and the incarnate God – which crystallized over the long Middle Ages and the early Renaissance in Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and western art – were actually conceived or given a strengthened meaning during the period of the iconoclasm.