Dame Averil Cameron obituary (opens in new tab)

Historian whose sparky, innovative Byzantines challenged the stereotype of a stagnant society with nothing new to offerThe classicist and historian Averil Cameron, who has died aged 86, reshaped our understanding of the Byzantine empire. Long overlooked as having nothing new to offer, a stagnant society strangled by pointless bureaucracy, preoccupied with religion and doomed to fail, the period had been held in magnificent contempt by the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, an opinion that ...