Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680-850: A History

Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon are historians of Byzantium, and this Cambridge University Press book is their standard scholarly history of the Byzantine Iconoclast controversy, covering roughly 680 to 850 and its eventual resolution at the Second Council of Nicaea and the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Its strength is that it critically re-examines the surviving sources for Iconoclasm, many of which were written by the eventual iconodule victors, correcting a historiography that had often taken those hostile accounts at face value. Its limit is that it is a critical academic history rather than a devotional or doctrinal account, so a claim about how the Triumph of Orthodoxy is understood theologically within Orthodox Christianity today needs a source addressing that tradition's own doctrinal reading alongside this historical study.