The Acts of Nicaea II

Hard to believe just a couple short weeks ago Byzantine Christians were celebrating the Sunday of Orthodoxy with its thunderous commemoration of the triumph of icons and defeat of iconoclasts. That seems another lifetime now, or perhaps several.

What exactly was this "triumph?" What was iconoclasm, and its response at the seventh ecumenical council of Nicaea in 787? A new paperback edition of a book first published in 2018 will remind us of what was decided and dogmatized: The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), trans. with commentary by Richard Price (Liverpool University Press, 2020), 752pp.

I've heard of some academic presses in England suspending publication pending the conclusion of this pandemic, but I don't know if Liverpool University Press is one of them. They list a release date of next week for this book, part of their ongoing and valuable series, Translated Texts for Historians.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Second Council of Nicaea (787) decreed that religious images were to set up in churches and venerated. It thereby established the cult of icons as a central element in the piety of the Orthodox churches, as it has remained ever since. In the West its decrees received a new emphasis in the Counter-Reformation, in the defence of the role of art in religion. It is a text of prime importance for the iconoclast controversy of eighth-century Byzantium, one of the most explored and contested topics in Byzantine history. But it has also a more general significance - in the history of culture and the history of art. This edition offers the first translation that is based on the new critical edition of this text in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum series, and the first full commentary of this work that has ever been written. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers from a variety of disciplines.