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“Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation.” Since in his recent article Peter Brown is himself offering an explanation, we need to ask whether he has relaxed one grip only to fasten on another. Brown's analysis is characteristically brilliant. With a few deft strokes he outlines where scholarship is and what culs-de-sac it has got itself into, and he focuses attention on aspects of the evidence that have been insufficiently appreciated. Brown is peculiarly sersitive to the nature of religion, and as a result his article is an excellent account of the complex dynamics of religion in early Byzantium.