Drawing on a range of philosophical and theological writings produced in eleventh-century Byzantium, this book offers a reading of the icon and Byzantine aesthetics that not only expands our understanding of these topics but challenges our assumptions about the work of art itself.

Given the enduring importance of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it is remarkable to find that there is no extensive surviving commentary on this text from the period between the second century and the twelfth century. This volume is focused on the first of the medieval commentaries, that produced in the early twelfth century by Eustratios of Nicaea, Michael of Ephesus, and an anonymous author in Constantinople. This endeavor was to have a significant impact on the reception of the Nicomachean Ethics in Latin and Catholic Europe. For, in the mid-thirteenth century, Robert...