Alexander Bevilacqua

It can be hard​ to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: ‘Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.’

The Ark Encounter is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah’s Coffee. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul’s Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches and cathedrals, and married Old Christians. Some sought additional protection by acquiring Old Christian status through forged genealogical documents. Yet despite such efforts, there were suspicions that the new converts still practised Judaism in secret.

Crusius plundered contemporary travel accounts for information alongside chronicles and histories. He recognised the connections between Greeks and Ottomans, seeing them as part of a common tradition of rule and placing Byzantine and Ottoman history on a continuum – unlike some of his contemporaries, who thought that the history of Byzantium had ended in 1453.

From frescoes and printed devotional images to incised amulets, moulded gingerbread and the stamped Eucharistic host, a wide variety of images has, at various moments in Western history, seemed worthy of ingestion. What did iconophages think they were doing, and what can we learn from them about the properties that have been ascribed to images?