By the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East, Brown examines these changes and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East.
The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history: how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. The late Roman revolution. The boundaries of the classical world : c AD -- The new rulers : -- A world restored : Roman society in the fourth century -- II.
The new mood : directions of religious thought, c. Divergent legacies. The West. The western revival, -- The price of survival : western society, -- II.
The new participants. With suggested specialized reading, it should already be an essential item on the reading lists of classical studies and archaeology students. Leading scholar Averil Cameron focuses on the changes and continuities in Mediterranean society as a whole before the Arab conquests. Two new chapters survey the situation in the east after the death of Justinian and cover the Byzantine wars with Persia, religious developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the life of Muhammad, the reign of Heraclius, the Arab conquests and the establishment of the Umayyad caliphate.
Using the latest in-depth archaeological evidence, this all-round historical and thematic study of the west and the eastern empire has become the standard work on the period. It contains a new introductory survey of recent scholarship on the fourth century AD, and has a full bibliography and extensive notes with suggestions for further reading. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD continues to be the benchmark for publications on the history of Late Antiquity and is indispensible to anyone studying the period.
The book looks at the history of Medieval Europe in relation to its links with the rest of the world, exploring the interaction of western Europe with Islam, the Far East, Africa, and such outlying areas as Scandinavia, Iberia, and Eastern Europe.
It considers the genesis and shaping of distinct western ideals, social affairs, economic patterns, and new cultural forms in relation to Islam and Byzantium--two other great civilizations that deeply influenced the growth of western Europe's unique history. Placing emphasis on medieval Europe's social and economic transformations and the diversity of social orders, the book analyzes the ways in which these elements interconnected during the formation of medieval society.
It also gives special consideration to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an era that serves as a bridge between the cultural developments of the early and central Middle Ages and the emergence of new patterns of thought and social organization in the late medieval period.
Featuring nine maps, numerous illustrations, a chronological table, and a detailed list of suggested further readings, this brief but comprehensive narrative is an ideal text for undergraduate courses in medieval history. In recent years, a wide-ranging historiographic debate on Late Antiquity has also begun.
As I re-read the book, I am struck by the raw electric "charge" that runs through it, generated by the sud- den onrush of new ideas, new problems and new methods, in the very years in which it came to be written.
The book itself marked a new departure for me. Put bluntly: the completion of my biography of Saint Augustine, in , had left me emptied and suffering from an acute feeling of crampedness. I had lived in harness for too long with the greatest mind in Latin Christendom.
I wanted out. This painful numbness eventually ebbed, find- ing me at the other end of the Mediterranean. By early , I was learning classical Hebrew and had begun to read deeply, for the first time, in the Greek pagan literature of late antiquity. A few years earlier, a rare decision to bend a little the immemorial rigidity of the Oxford examination system had led to the creation of an optional subject on "Byzantium and its Northern and Eastern Neighbors: A.
It is the sudden emergence of a sense, on my part, of the geo- graphical dimensions of late antiquity which should be stressed. Despite my long engagement with NortJi Africa, it was the social structures of later Roman empire that had held my attention. Seen, now, from Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, it was the Mediterranean itself which seemed truly distinctive.
It was time to turn to Pirenne. But Pirenne's Mohammed and Charle- magne, we should remember, was taken for granted in the s. But it was Braudel's intense, almost poignant, awareness of the distinctive nature of a Mediterranean climate, ecology and life-style which suddenly bathed the coastlines of the late an- tique world, endowing them, for me, with a warmth, with a concreteness and with a tenacity that seemed rooted in the long rhythms of the landscape it- 12 See esp.
Brown a and The inner frontier within the Roman empire, between its Mediter- ranean and non-Mediterranean regions, now seemed to be a more significant dividing-line, along which to align the history of the later empire than were RostovtzefFs stark divisions between town and countryside, solider and civil- ian.
At the end of the period, the triumph of the Abbasids over the Ummayads could be seen as the long-prepared triumph, in the Middle East and within Islam itself, of a Mesopotamian and Iranian version of empire at the expense of a Mediterranean option that still lay so close to the Umma- yads of Damascus.
The criticisms offered by historians of early Islam struck me as the most convincing contributions of all to the debate on the Pirenne Thesis Brown They ensured that, in The World of Late Antiquity, Charlemagne had to step down in favor of Harun al-Rashid, the true heir to the end of the ancient world. I was in the right place for such ruminations. It was at Fayence, in the Var, where I would regularly spend my holidays, diat I received the invitation of Geoffrey Barraclough to contribute a volume to die Thames and Hudson Library of European Civilization.
I almost missed the commission. I found Barraclough's letter weeks later, after it had been placed in the hole in the dry-stone terracing that served as a mail box, blown by die force of the mis- trat into the prickly undergrowth of a neighbor's olive-grove.
The Mediterranean had already given it a shape in my mind. As for "Late Antiquity" itself, the term was relatively new to me. I had usually been content with "late Roman". It was the new geographical spread of my interests that eroded the traditional, political definition of the field. The cultural and religious phenomena that had come to concern me crossed widi ease the political boundaries of die Middle East. They also emerged and developed according to rhythms that were not direct- ly related to the political history of any one empire.
Marrou But, above all, die new width of the horizons against which the changes of die period occurred led me to favor the term "World of Late Antiquity". But one could hardly describe the haunting echoes of late Hellenistic and Iranian themes in the frescoes of Turfan or the Manichaean and Nestorian fragments discovered in its caves as the relics of a "Buddhist Later Roman Empire".
Then I found that I had to become, for the first time in my life, a histori- an of religion. From the recent author ofAugustine of Hippo this may seem a strange admission. But I had studied Augustine still very much as a renegade medievalist—in Latin and with particular attention to those aspects of his thought that would endure, in the Latin West, until modern times. His no- tions of grace and freewill and the distinctive outlines of his views on the re- lations between the Catholic church and Roman society were what had held my attention.
Of the themes that came to preoccupy me in the s and s, such as monasticism, sexuality and the cult of saints, there is singular- ly indeed, shockingly little trace in that book. Rather I had grazed on the high ground of an unequalled theologian and master of words. Religionsgeschichte, as the Germans defined it—the study of the interrela- tion of the various forms of religious belief and practice current in the an- cient Mediterranean world—was an altogether different matter.
I had touched upon it, but only in passing, in my studies of Manichaeism and so as to understand the wilder hopes of personal transformation, connected with conversion and baptism, in Pelagian circles. Coming down from the articu- late heights of Augustine, I now found myself in a vernacular Babel, sur- rounded by innumerable dialects, mostly dispersed and fragmentary, deeply unverbalized compared with the voice of the master; but yet endowed with an explosive charge of meaning that was rendered all the more unsettling, psychologically as well as intellectually, through lacking a convincing social context and a clearly defined aim and audience.
Violent shouts in the dark from a distant past, they bruised me at a time when I was, in any case, bruised. They were joined, in my reading at that time, by many editions of magical texts and by all the appro- priate monographs of the Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten.
It was with some relief that I found the ground rising again, as I encountered Arthur Darby Nock's extraordinary introduction and edition of Sallustius' Concerning the Gods and the Universe Nock , the de Mysteriis of Jam- blichus Jamblichus and began to savor, for the first time in my life, the epigraphic commentaries in Louis Robert's Hellenica. The World of Late Anti- quity marked only the very first stages of what was an entirely new agenda. Parts of the book, indeed, marked a welcome, somewhat old-fashioned rest from the new concerns that troubled me increasingly at that time.
It is im- portant not to read back too much of my later agenda into the years when The World of Late Antiquity was conceived and written. What needs to be stressed is that I had been led into a strange and troublingly unmanageable world by one memorable book and by one crucial intellectual encounter.
The book, of course, was E. Dodds' Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety, which appeared in , and of which I had already written a review for the English Historical Review of Dodds , Brown b. The book came, in many ways, as a surprise to me.
I had drawn gratefully, at every stage of my work on Augustine, on Dodds' uncanny sympathy for the thought of Plotinus and the late Platonic tradition, in both its darkest and its most serene aspects esp. Dodds , i His The Greeks and the Irra- tional I regarded as a model of psychoanalytically sensitized history, of the sort which I considered, at that time, to be essential to any examination of the nature of religious change in any period of history Dodds I ad- mired, if from a shy distance, which Dodds' own unfailing courtesy to a young person did not fully succeed in bridging, the resolute, almost impish individualism of a fellow Protestant Irishman in an Oxford environment.
When Dodds gave his Pagans and Christians originally delivered as the Wiles Lectures at Belfast as a course of special lectures at Oxford, it was possible to glimpse for a moment, in this small man with his protruding, bald head and silvery, almost disembodied voice, what a late antique pagan might have seen—that in his serene detachment, the wise man had already, indeed, be- come a god.
But it was just that which jarred on me in Dodds' book. To put it briefly: after they had passed beneath his searching, psychoanalytic gaze, the persons whom we met in The Age of Anxiety were left so isolated from each other, so alienated from the world around them, so indifferent to the future that it was quite impossible for the medievalist in me to recognize in them the same per- sons whom I knew to have been the reformers of empires, the leaders of churches, the founders of institutions that would endure for millennia throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Plainly Dodds and I did not agree as to how, exactly, "serious minds" func- tioned: what had caused them to express the religious sentiments that they did and what were the actual consequences for those around them of these experiences? From a strictly psychoanalytic viewpoint, I found that the judgements expressed by Dodds and by similar authors were old fashioned and, for that reason, lop-sided.
I carefully annotated the passages cited by Dodds. Those that spoke so insistently of feeling "a stranger" and "alien" seemed haunted, also, by an incipient sense of "newness".
Could it be that a language which generated a "desolate sense of not belonging" Dodds , 21 might function, also, on a less explicit level, as an idiom of change, with cultural and social implications which a modern reader might not pick up at a first reading? Certainly, I could not square the impression given by Dodds, and the principal authors whom he cited—to the effect that this was a time when "daylight reality was ceasing to be trusted" Dodds , 45 —with the manner in which persons whose careers I had followed, in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, had drawn on mighty visions to leave their mark on empires, churches and learned traditions.
What was at issue was a need to decode an alien language of the psyche, that spoke, in reality, not of escape, so much as of the unex- pected welling-up, in disregarded persons and neglected regions, of a new, fierce sense of agency. It simply shocked me, at that time, that precisely those persons who could enter with such authority and fascinated curiosity into the religious world of the second and third cen- turies A. It seemed almost as if the religious changes of the early centuries of late anti- quity provoked, even in their most learned exponents, a form of religious voyeurism.
It seemed sufficient to peep, with repelled fascination, as if over the edge of a great chasm, at the strange forms taken by the irrational, as it slowly gathered desperate force even in the sunlit days of Marcus Aurelius. I had come to wonder whether it was possible, rather, to write a history of re- 13 Dodds , Indeed, I thought that I could.
That first, deci- sive encounter with Mary Douglas occurred because I had received an invita- tion from the Association of Social Anthropologists to present a paper at their annual meeting for , to be held in honor of E. Evans-Pritchard and devoted to the theme of Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. I had origi- nally been asked to write on some aspect of the thought of Augustine on evil and freewill. A reading of Evans-Pritchard s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among theAzande and of Mary Douglas' own Purity and Danger had already tipped the balance of my interest towards a more strictly social account of late Roman sorcery—an account that relied heavily on my notions of social fluidity in the upper reaches of Roman society.
I now saw the religious impli- cations of aspects ofthat fluidity in a new light, thanks to the anthropologi- cal insights with which I had just become acquainted. Such works did not circulate among ancient historians; but they already spoke directly to those who stud- ied the small, face-to-face societies that had always been the delight of English historians of medieval law and government. Religious statements could not be understood without reference to the structure of the society in which they occurred.
They were tightly-encoded messages that regulated social interaction. They reflected social structures by the manner in which they determined forms of personal interchange, as much with gods as with men, and regulated, with a silent but firm hand, the possibilities of action on every level, including the seemingly intimate options of isolated individuals, such as the ability to speak with a god in dreams, to command a demon, to emerge as a new per- son from a transforming ritual.
I never totally succumbed to Mary Douglas' demand for utter consequen- tiality. It always seemed to me that something was lost in the lightning speed with which she would make connections between ritual, social structure and possible varieties of religious experience in the charmed bell-jar of her rigor- ously neo-Durkheimian vision of society. I notice, with a certain shame, how 14 Brown ; Evans-Pritchard ; see Douglas , Douglas But what I took from her at the time was the thrill of finally having found a way to overcome the dualism between text and context that had haunted the study of religion and society in the ancient and medieval worlds.
Likewise, what we had come to know of the social conditions of the post-Antonine Roman world needed no longer to be treated as a distant "background" to religious change, of significance only when some mighty crash stirred sensitive souls to flight from reason and the world. A more dar- ingly holistic vision of the age might dare to entertain the notion of the con- stant presence of the social order in the religious world itself, as a mute re- flection of fluctuating social structures, some rigid, some increasingly fluid, that characterized Roman society as a whole, as that society developed, with- out notable catastrophe, from the age of Marcus Aurelius to that of Justinian.
If that was so, then it was possible to write about as massive and as decisive a change as the transformation of late classical paganism and the rise of Christianity without disquiet and without shrill value-judgements, in the same way as it was possible to follow, without undue foreboding, the slow emergence, across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, of post-classical forms of government, of social relations, of urban life and of profane culture.
It would be possible, in fact, to write The World of Late Antiquity. It is the nature of every book, and most especially of a work of synthesis such as The World of Late Antiquity, that it should bear the irrevocable im- print not only of the enthusiasms but of the limitations of a specific time and place.
I have outlined the processes that led to its writing in some detail, pre- cisely so that a modern reader should not be tempted to read back into its pages knowledge and interests which I did not possess, indeed, could not have imagined, when I wrote it.
It is unmistakably a book of the late s. It reflects with gratitude how far the scholarly tradition on which I chose to draw had come by that time—so far and no further. We were all, indeed, a full quarter of a century away from My fellow-contributors to this SO Debate—so many of whom inspired me at the time and have continued to do so ever since—will have their own opinions as to what has happened in that quarter of a century. So as "to set the ball rolling", as the English say, let me itemize, very briefly, three princi- pal points on which I myself consider that The World of Late Antiquity falls short of what a synthesis written in might offer.
My decision to place so strong an emphasis on the distinction between the Mediterranean and non-Medi- terranean regions of the empire mirrored, only too faithfully, the hcunae of late Roman scholarship at that time. It was the survival of the civilian elites and the religious ferment of the Mediterranean cities and their immediate hinterlands that concerned us most. We ourselves, and not, perhaps, the Romans ofthat time, are the ones who should be blamed for having turned our backs on the North.
By effectively excluding the Germans from any role whatsoever in the social and cultural evolution of the post-imperial West, Henri Pirenne had given us permission to do so. His perspective was con- firmed by the brilliant, Marxist studies of E.
Thompson stressed throughout the fragility of the northern tribes, the height of the so- cial and economic threshold which they crossed when entering the empire, and, hence, the ease with which their leaders were assimilated into the solid structures of landowning around the Mediterranean. We were less aware than we have now become, of the manner in which the frontier on both its Roman and non-Roman sides had come to form a distinctive social and cultural unit.
It was through the formation of an exten- sive "Middle Ground" to use a term that has recently been generated by studies of the American frontier in the colonial period White , and not through a dialogue between North and South—a dialogue in which the Mediterranean could be assumed to have invariably held the upper hand— that some of the crucial features of the early medieval West emerged.
But it is not only the history of the West that is affected by these considerations. Though hotly debated, Whittakers book on The Frontiers of the Roman Empire has shown that it is essential to recapture the distinctive human geography of re- gions far from the Mediterranean. As Garth Fowden has shown, in his Empire to 15 See esp. Thompson , a, and Along the "Mountain Arena" of the Middle East, from Armenia to Yemen and Ethiopia, and in the steppelands of the Fertile Crescent—a long way from the Mediterranean—we can sense a change in the pace of empire, through the taking on of quasi-imperial status by so many Monophysite regions, that is quite as significant, if less blatant and well known, as that which occurred, at the same time, in the "barbarian" West Fowden Secondly: My notion of "late antiquity", in the late s, dispensed, pre- maturely, with the Roman state.
It is easy to understand why this was so. The scholarship of the s had shown that the later Roman empire was not the totalitarian monster that we had thought it to have been. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. The sense of having cleared up a major historical misconception gave me the freedom, in the s and s, to pursue themes of religious and social history with little reference to imperial struc- tures.
The empire had become a distant presence when I set about a series of studies which revelled, as only a former medievalist could revel, in the role of religion in small, face-to-face communities as far apart as Anatolia, Syria and Gaul. I had installed in the back of my mind the principal assumption of Henri Pirenne, that a defining feature of late antiquity had been the capacity of a sub-Roman style of life to continue long after the political superstructure of the Roman empire had disappeared.
The relative independence of social life from its political framework was a comfortable belief, characteristic of a great cosmopolitan bourgeois such as Pirenne. But I now consider that Pirenne had misled me. Recent studies, from all directions, if with widely differing de- grees of measure or exaggeration, have brought the late Roman state back into the heart of late Roman society.
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