This ambitious book by Glenn Peers explores five case studies of framing. These frames delimit various aspects of Byzantine visual culture: pectoral crosses, manuscript illumination, church decoration, and icon revetments all figure here. “Frames” thus is not being used to signify the tidy border of an artwork, and not necessarily even a material or represented entity, but instead bespeaks a larger, conceptual paradigm. We have seen a wealth of studies in recent years looking at frames of both a literal and more notional sort, but less work in this vein has addressed the premodern era. Peers’s frames are heuristic devices, lenses through which to come to terms with five fascinating vignettes about the way Byzantine art was viewed and functioned within the alterities of the past.

The first chapter interprets small pectoral crosses mostly of the sixth and seventh centuries. It is a challenging opening study, for Peers argues that in this example the frame is “coexistensive with the object itself” (13). This seemingly counter-intuitive claim opens up the question of his use of the term, which seems to posit the frame as a conceptual structure that mediates the viewer’s experience of the object. In the case of the pectoral crosses, the “frame” is the zone of experience in which the worshipper’s body might assume an anagogical assimilation with the crucifixion rendered on the pectoral cross. Authorities such as the seventh-century Syriac monk Dadisho guided the worshipper through a series of devotional practices that honed this mimicry of the divine, and focused the early Byzantine worshipper’s devotions on the crucifix as a crucial tool in this spiritual ascent. Peers’s choice of the book’s title, Sacred Shock, punctuates this way of relating to the crosses. Taken from Derek Walcott’s poem, “Tiepolo’s Hound,” “sacred shock” is the “frame, and one epiphanic detail [that] illuminates an entire epoch.” Peers’s discussion of these small pectoral crosses extends our understanding of how Byzantine art could “aid this movement of the mind from the physical to the immaterial” (26).

The next chapter then analyzes the representation of blood in a series of manuscript illuminations following Iconoclasm. Here the limitations of the black-and-white illustrations of this book published by Pennsylvania State University Press are most strongly felt: the blaring red pools of blood evoked by Peers in his descriptions are merely grey smudges in the reproductions. Blood served as a frame because it “determines and expands meaning” by serving as a catalyst for the viewer’s cognition of the imagery connected with Psalm 25. This blood that so vividly marked the ninth-century Chludov Psalter disappears from the imagery of its closely related eleventh-century epigone, the Theodore Psalter. Interweaving themes that appear throughout the book, namely the phenomenon of pilgrimage and the renowned acheiropoietos Mandylion icon, we see how art and the body become conflated in this realm.

Chapter 3 interprets a manuscript of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus in which architecture serves as a frame that constructs meaning on several levels. Within the troubles of twelfth-century Byzantine monasticism, documents such as the Pantokrator Monastery typikon stand for a monastic ideal. Just as monastic society was meant to offer a perfected parallel to secular society, the architectural frame refers the medieval viewer to both historical and present realities. It becomes a bulwark in the defense of a monasticism under siege, by showing the way in which paradise is generated within that alternative sphere.

The study of Saint George that follows in chapter 4 also struggles with determining a meaning for frames of the saint’s vita icons. This chapter seems less developed than the other portions of the book; for example, the discussion of various hypotheses of the visual origins of a thirteenth-century George vita icons feels out of place among the rich theoretical framework of the book’s larger undertaking. Here we see the figure of the orans reemerge, because of its resonance with the cross, “the most basic sign that infiltrates every aspect of Christian experience” (92).

In the final chapter, readers coming from medieval studies will find a subject that might more closely approximate their assumptions about the topic of Sacred Shock: icon revetments, especially those of an Annunciation pair in Ochrid but also for the Mandylion copies in Genoa and the Vatican. Rightly noting the dearth of scholarship on revetments, Peers aims to explicate these objects rendered almost invisible by their near ubiquity. Perhaps revetments have been so neglected because they were relegated to a merely decorative status, as being incidental to the “true” meaning and value of Byzantine icons. As he notes, even the play of light on the gold surface “generates meaning” and poses a fundamental distinction to the manipulation of light in Western painting.

Though I read an early version of one chapter, the sum of the completed study offers a far different and richer opportunity to come to terms with these illuminating moments in Byzantine visual culture that initially seem so disparate. This book develops some of the insights of Peers’s prior monograph, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Like the immaterial angels, Peers’s rather abstract frames mediate the viewer’s experience beyond the facile, more tangible realities of the surface meanings we encounter elsewhere.