Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He is credited with having created the field of study referred to as late antiquity (250-800 A.D.), the period during which Rome fell, the three major monotheistic religions took shape, and Christianity spread across Europe. A native of Ireland, Professor Brown earned his B.A. in history from Oxford University, where he taught until 1975 as a Fellow of All Souls College. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1986 after teaching at the University of London and the University of California, Berkeley.
The Best Books to Read on Late Antiquity — a Five Books List
Not everyone who has chosen books for our site has given an interview (yet). If you’re a historian based in the US and know Peter and would like to interview him about the books he’s chosen above, please let us know. In the meantime, we present a snippet about Peter from our interview with historian Simon Yarrow:
About Peter Brown:
“To say that Peter Brown had a huge effect on me and my intellectual formation would merely repeat the testimony you’ll get from dozens and dozens of people more eloquent and intelligent than I am, who have also been hugely inspired by this man. It’s not really an exaggeration to say he invented a whole new historical period and place—the world of late antiquity—which historians have since been comfortably working away within and recognised that it’s here to stay. It’s being expanded upon, it’s being nuanced, but it’s still, recognisably, his world.
One of Peter Brown’s first books was a biography of Augustine in 1967. He then wrote a book about late antiquity in the early 1970s. He’s an example of someone who wears his learning very lightly.
What he brings that’s new is interdisciplinarity—before we even knew what that word meant—between history and anthropology, and history and psychology, as well as an openness to breaking down some of the partitions between different types and areas of historical studies.
For example, the Roman aristocracy are a subject here; the early church and the church fathers is a subject there; the late Roman state and socio-economic conditions of the late Roman world and the Mediterranean are another subject over here. There was very little attempt to synthesise these different areas of enquiry, and to understand how one might inform the other. This is something he’s done: he’s broken down those barriers that are, in some ways, an accident of our historiography.”
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Peter Brown
Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He is credited with having created the field of study referred to as late antiquity (250-800 A.D.), the period during which Rome fell, the three major monotheistic religions took shape, and Christianity spread across Europe. A native of Ireland, Professor Brown earned his B.A. in history from Oxford University, where he taught until 1975 as a Fellow of All Souls College. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1986 after teaching at the University of London and the University of California, Berkeley.
