The English Historical Review 

Abstract: The enormously energetic working-class reading cultures occupying the core of Jonathan Rose’s magnificent study grew up from rather unpromising roots. For long periods, reading, like publishing, could be a dangerous business. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Cranmer had ‘proposed to confiscate heretical texts and prosecute bible readers’; and, as Rose informs us, ‘at least twenty people were burned for discussing heresy between 1539 to 1546’. We can see where Cranmer was coming from: just like Carlo Ginzburg’s Mennochio the Miller, in The Cheese and the Worms (Routledge & Kegan Paul; London, 1980), those who could read might develop critical, political views or levelling tendencies. Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (W.W. Norton; New York and London, 1995) shows that the authorities, fully in awe of the power of the word, worked themselves into frenzies about books, burning dummy tomes and imprisoning booksellers. In these early times, publishing and reading might have carried a health warning.

Abstract: Based on the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire forged Europe as far as the rivers Rhine and Danube - and, for lengthy periods, extensive lands beyond those boundaries - together with North Africa and much of the Near East into a unitary state which lasted for the best part of 400 years. The Huns were very much a new factor in the European strategic balance of power in the late fourth century. For the Roman imperial authorities, the first consequence of the arrival of Hunnic tribes on the fringes of Europe was the appearance in 376 of two substantial and separate Gothic groups, Tervingi and Greuthungi, on the banks of the Danube asking for asylum. The available sources are obviously fragmentary, but do nevertheless provide a coherent picture of the intrusion of Hunnic power into eastern Europe. Olympiodorus is the only historian likely to have provided essential information.

Abstract: Generally, the study of the Iconoclast controversy has tended to become a study of the origin of Iconoclast ideas, and this study has, in turn, been incapsulated in a search for a local, provincial setting for such ideas. A consideration of the attitude of the early church to images and the discovery of an Iconoclast movement in the totally Christian environment of seventh-century Armenia have led almost all scholars to regard Iconoclasm as endogenic: it was a crisis within Byzantine Christianity itself. Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation. Indeed, the only two men in the Dark Ages whom we know to have been deeply interested in art–the Emperor Theophilus-and Bishop Theodulf of Orleans–were Iconoclast or at least, anti-Iconodule. It became brutally plain for the first time that either the bishop or the holy man must be the moral arbiter of Byzantium.