Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion

Connecting art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian studies

A stark divide lingers between the themes and problems addressed by art historians and those explored in historical accounts of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanian Persian Empire (224–651). Although shaped by numerous intertwined investments and catalysts over the centuries, the divergence in the attentions of the two fields crystallized during imperial and anti-imperial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, active both within Iran and without. Art has been framed as irrelevant for the history of Zoroastrianism, demonstrating the absence and avoidance of religious themes; at the other end of the scale, art has been seen as, containing innate sacred significance in its composition. Certain narratives central to the development of Sasanian studies - of continuity, exceptionalism, and eurocentricism, in particular - have shaped approaches to how iconography and art can be incorporated into discussions of Sasanian religion. Convergent interests have promoted the continuity of iconography’s sacred meanings from earlier in antiquity through the Sasanian period to the modern day, diminishing the contemporary contribution and context, and see the visual evidence as demonstrating the distinctiveness and exceptionalism of Zoroastrianism from other religions, and of Iranian culture from others