Peter Brown

“Peter Brown, the historian often credited with creating the field of ‘late antiquity’, has a memoir out, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Born in 1935 in Ireland, this is a snapshot of growing up in the last days of the British Empire (his father worked in Sudan) and what it was like as an Irish Protestant in the UK, as well as a lot of details on Brown’s intellectual formation and influences. The memoir is nearly 700 pages but Brown is a beautiful writer, and he has nice, wry observations about all sorts of things. If you know someone who enjoys intellectual memoirs, this is a rather lovely one.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“it’s very rare that you work in an academic field and there is a secondary work that is just indisputably superior to everything else. An agent once said to me that Brown’s book is known in her field as a “category killer”. No one else dared to write a biography of Augustine, really until the late 1990s. So, for 30 years—for basically a full generation—that was the work on Augustine.” Read more...

The Best Augustine Books

Catherine Conybeare, Classicist

“This is an extraordinary book. It was commissioned by an art history publisher, Thames and Hudson, and was to be an illustrated history of the area that Peter Brown was exploring in the 60s and 70s. Really, Late Antiquity wasn’t much of a concept before that book came out. In very few words he managed to sketch out a whole new geography which taught us that you can’t think about the rise of Christianity without looking at the fate of the old established religions like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheanism; and that the rule of the Roman Empire had to be brought into the context of Persia, the Barbarian north and followers of Islam. That there was a much wider canvas on which to study the period of the third to the sixth centuries A.D. He really put the late Roman period into perspective in a completely new way.” Read more...

The best books on Byzantium

Judith Herrin, Historian

“He sees the materiality, the devotion, the emotional investment as a great lurching forward of a society. It’s not just the elites and the church structures but it’s also the people. It’s a transformation, a moment of radical change that all of Christian society is invested in. This book is looking at the context in which that change is taking place. The book has been criticised on a number of levels but it’s still revolutionary in the way that it offered us a functionalist account of what’s going on with the cult of saints. It’s about, among other things, the way that private customs of veneration of the dead were made public by bishops, how the very special dead were given central positions within civic space in the cathedral. It’s about how bishops acted as the impresarios of this rewiring of patronage networks of friendship, of support, spanning different sections of society in the Roman world. And, of course, heaven and saints as the pivotal figures in these relationships. He’s showing how what might be written off as populist, superficial forms of the cult of saints are actually immensely fundamental to the way that society is working its way through different problems at this time.” Read more...

The best books on The Saints

Simon Yarrow, Historian