The Making of Late Antiquity: 1976 (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures) - Tapa dura

A provocative book. -- Robert L. Wilken "Religious Studies" Brown's interpretations are sensitive, vivid, and strongly persuasive. He offers a fascinating sketch of the distinctive configurations and interactions of religious, cultural, and social factors which gradually came to define life in the Mediterranean world of the late fourth and early fifth centuries...he has, by judicious use of analytic concepts and graphic vignettes, captured the "feel" of the religious life of the period. -- Eugene V. Gallagher "Theological Studies" No summary of its contents can do justice to this complex and fascinating book, written with all Peter Brown's refreshing panache. We are presented with an age of vitality, where historians used to find a creeping paralysis; the canvas comes alive with the spectacular successes of individuals who belie the conventional wisdom of the stifling oppressiveness of late Roman institutions...In a book devoted to human beings it is the portraits of individuals, perceptively located in their social and religious surroundings, which are naturally to the fore. "The Making of Late Antiquity" is most successful, I think, as a study of shifts in the religious imagination... Brown is sensitive to the multifaceted quality of the Late Antique view of the soul, and some of his most creative work is in discussions of demons and angels as imaginal faces of the self and its changing relation to the holy. From the private dreams of Aristides to the public withdrawal of Anthony, Brown has sketched a remarkable shift in a culture's vision of itself. His argument is as persuasive as it is eloquent. -- Patricia L. Cox "Church History" complex and fascinating book, written with all Peter Brown's refreshing panache. We are presented with an age of vitality, where historians used to find a creeping paralysis; the canvas comes alive with the spectacular successes of individuals who belie the conventional wisdom of the stifling oppressiveness of late Roman institutions; and the cautious uncertainty of the "age of anxiety" disappears in a vigorous emphasis on the recognition and display of power... Brown has shifted the emphasis of late roman studies from institutions to individuals, and to the discernment of what made late antique men "tick"--a task which he is without equal. -- E.D. Hunt "Classical Review"

Peter Brown presents a masterly history of Roman society in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Brown interprets the changes in social patterns and religious thought, breaking away from conventional modern images of the period.