The classicist and historian Averil Cameron, who has died aged 86, reshaped our understanding of the Byzantine empire. Long overlooked as having nothing new to offer, a stagnant society strangled by pointless bureaucracy, preoccupied with religion and doomed to fail, the period had been held in magnificent contempt by the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, an opinion that persisted.
His view of the Byzantines as weak, superstitious and effeminate bears more than a little responsibility for the mainstreaming of this stereotype. More than any other scholar, Averil demonstrated Gibbon’s prejudice to be unfounded. Her Byzantines were sparky, dynamic and innovative in a society that was a melting pot for ideas, languages and cultural influences, and her scholarship of the period – beginning with the emperor Constantine’s dedication of the Greek city of Constantinople in AD330 – opened the door to a largely unexplored historical territory for a new generation of historians.
Averil’s early books on the Byzantine writers Procopius (1967), Agathias (1970) and Corippus (1976) made sixth-century Constantinople bloom miraculously before your eyes, as one reviewer put it. She excavated the complications and crises of Byzantine society before the modern scholarly field of Byzantine studies, as we know it now, existed. She asked fundamental questions that we are still finding answers to – was Byzantium an empire? Was Byzantine society Orthodox?
Applying modern critical theories and looking outwards to other disciplines such as art history, archaeology and the history of religion made her contribution distinctive and enduringly useful – her publications from the 1970s and 80s are strikingly relevant and still influential.
Averil, who spent most of her career at King’s College London before becoming pro-vice-chancellor at Oxford University was, unusually, a classicist and a Byzantinist. Her expertise, therefore, covered a wide swathe of history, from classical antiquity (around 800BC to AD300) right through until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (now modern-day Istanbul). It bridged the polytheistic world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Christian world of medieval Byzantium.
Averil treated the transition from the Mediterranean-centred Roman empire to the Greek-speaking Byzantine empire not as a fall, but as a continuous, evolving narrative. Before the now familiar trend towards more globalising historical approaches, this was pioneering, as was her work on early Christian historiography.
For the modern reader, the cultural force of Christianity resonates with seeming antique permanence. But Averil established that the religion’s place in the ancient and medieval communities around the Mediterranean was, in reality, unstable, undefined and open to debate.
In her 1991 work Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of a Christian Discourse, she argued that a large part of Christianity’s effectiveness in the Roman empire lay in its capacity to create its own imaginative universe. She showed that, rather than being inevitable, the rise and dominance of Christianity, as well as “the fall of Rome”, was, in many ways, the result of a successful rebranding, a battle of words and ideas centred on texts that would create a new medieval reality.
Born in Leek, North Staffordshire, Averil was the only child of Millicent (nee Drew) and Tom Sutton, who worked in a paper factory. The family lived in a typical two-up two-down terrace house with no bathroom and no hot water. Averil’s parents were encouraging and she passed the 11-plus, attending a local girls’ grammar school. Arriving unannounced at the house, her headteacher instructed that Averil must go to university. At the age of 18, Averil went to Oxford and to Somerville College, commenting in retrospect that for all she knew about either, they might as well have been the moon.
Following graduation in literae humaniores (classics), Averil married a fellow Oxford classics student, Alan Cameron, in 1962. They moved to Glasgow and Averil began a PhD on Agathias.
Moving to London in 1964, Averil completed her PhD under the supervision of the historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and submitted her thesis in 1966 for examination by the historian Peter Brown. The prevailing attitude that men needed the jobs more than women made it unlikely that she would get a university appointment, and indeed she was removed from a shortlist because her husband already had a job.
Nevertheless, she was appointed as assistant lecturer in classics at King’s (when the faculty dining room still did not admit women), before promotion to reader in ancient history in 1970. Her teaching load changed to encompass much later periods, following the University of London syllabus set out by the historian of the later Roman empire, AHM Jones, and it was to this period that Averil attributed her development into a historian.
She and Alan spent 1967-68 at Columbia University, New York, living through the shootings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Already pregnant with her first child, Avril was advised to leave the baby behind with a “compliant aunt”. Maternity leave did not exist then, and Averil ignored the suggestion, taking her four-week-old baby to New York and beginning teaching soon after. She returned to the US as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (1977-78), and a single parent of two young children, having separated from Alan. They divorced in 1980.
In 1978 she became the first woman to hold the chair of ancient history at King’s, and in 1984 the first female head of the classics department, which in 1979 had appointed Mary Beard to her first job. She co-founded the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies in 1983 and was the founding director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s in 1989 before her move back to Oxford in 1994.
There she served as warden of Keble College, the first woman to head the traditionally all-male college, as well as professor from 1998 and pro-vice-chancellor from 2001. Keble was one of the largest colleges in the university, with female students admitted only from 1979, and so Averil swapped teaching for administrative wrangling, an exchange she did not entirely welcome. She was appointed CBE in 1999 and DBE in 2006.
On her retirement in 2010 she took on the chair of a new research centre, the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, a position she held until 2023, and she continued to mentor, research and publish until prevented by ill health. I got to know her through her support of the Women’s Classical Committee UK, formed in 2015, and two years later she gave its keynote speech.
In 2020 she was only the second woman to be awarded the British Academy Kenyon medal. Privacy was important to Averil throughout her career, but in 2024 she published Transitions: A Historian’s Memoir, and donated her archive to the Bodleian.
She is survived by her children, Daniel and Sophie, and her grandson, Silas.
• Averil Millicent Cameron, historian, born 8 February 1940; died 7 April 2026
• This article was amended on 27 April 2026. Averil Cameron was made head of classics at KCL in 1984, not in 1978 as an earlier version said. Also, Cameron encouraged Mary Beard to apply for a lectureship there in 1979, but the appointment was made by the department in which she was a professor, rather than by her personally.
