It is characterized by its avoidance of the traditional narrative of decline and fall, its emphasis on transformation as an alternative, its refusal to privilege the classical, its readiness to include religion in its scope, and its roots in social history. It is based on a conference held at Princeton in 2011, when Brown held his last graduate seminar there, and testifies to the extraordinary influence he has had during his career at Oxford, London, Berkeley and Princeton.īrown's late antiquity is generously conceived, both chronologically and geographically, ranging across the Mediterranean and as far as Sasanian Iran, and extending from the high Roman empire of the second century to the emergence of Islam. Brown is one of the most honoured historians of our day, and this is not the first volume to be dedicated to him. Since he moved to Princeton University in 1986 many of Brown's own students have taken up positions in North American universities and elsewhere, and they form the majority among the contributors to the present volume. The term 'late antiquity' appears in countless article and book titles and has inspired the foundation of several new academic journals. As it has developed in the following decades, his model of late antiquity has become so established that there are now positions in late antiquity in many universities, especially in the English-speaking world, and a generation or more of scholars have made it the basis of their own work. Averil the publication of The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad in 1971, Peter Brown has been the inspiration for a whole new academic field.

Brown the world of late antiquity