Gerstel urges us to see the people who composed these messages; to read their paintings instrumentally as a reflection of village lives, addressing perennial concerns--as her chapters show--of fertility, labor, health and fragility, continuity, and memory.
Sharon E. J. Gerstel. Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
From The Medieval Review (TMR). Review by Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University