Peter R.L. Brown

Peter Brown portrait, courtesy of Peter Brown

Scholarship and Imagination: The Study of LateAntiquity

Peter Robert Lamont Brown's concept of late antiquity recognizes few academic

boundaries or disciplinary barriers. His writing cannot but stir the blood of youngscholars. It promises a bazaar of possibility. Late antiquity, as defined in a recenthandbook co-edited by Brown, is a distinctive and decisive period of history betweenaround 250 and 800 C.E.:

It is not as it once was for Edward Gibbon, a subject of obsessive

fascination only as the story of the unraveling of a once glorious and"higher" state of civilization. It was not a period of irrevocable Decline

and Fall; nor was it merely a violent and hurried prelude to better

things.... Not only did late antiquity last for over half a millennium; muchof what was created in that period still runs in our veins. It is, for

instance, from late antiquity that we have inherited the codifications ofRoman law that are the root of the judicial systems of so many states in

Europe and the Americas. The forms of Judaism associated with the

emergence of the rabbinate and the codification of the Talmud emergedfrom late antique Roman Palestine and from the distinctive society of

Sassanian Mesopotamia. The basic structures and dogmatic formulationsof the Christian church, both in Latin Catholicism and in the many forms

of eastern Christianity, came from this time, as did the first, triumphant

expression of the Muslim faith.[1]

When the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Brown its 2001 Distinguished

Achievement Award for scholars in the humanities, the foundation noted:

Beginning with his broadly influential biography of St. Augustine,Professor Brown has demonstrated a remarkable range of talent. He is

Professor Brown has demonstrated a remarkable range of talent. He is

credited with having created the study of late antiquity, that crucial

historical period in which paganism yielded to Christianity, and withopening up other new fields of inquiry. His own studies have been

remarkably diverse, covering such subjects as the cult of saints,

conceptions of the body, rhetoric and power, sexuality, and the rise ofChristendom. In the process, his writings have illuminated distinctive

features of late antiquity, while shaping the studies of successivegenerations of classical and medieval scholars.[2]

Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Brown's first book, hadappeared in a new edition a year before the Mellon award.[3] When

originally published in 1967, it received immediate and widespread attention, garnering

notices in London's Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books,and the New York Times Book Review. Richard Southern called it "moving and

absorbing" in the New Statesman. Brown's study also prompted consideration from awide variety of academic journals. Among these was Robert M. Grant's review in

Church History, which concludes: "This is a study which, both because of its learningand because of the clarity of its style, can be read by anyone but must be read by all

who are concerned with the past and present of Christian life and thought. For me it

has made Augustine come alive. He has become a real person living in the real world

of the late Empire and facing the difficulties inherent in it." Brian Tierney, writing in the

American Historical Review, called it a "sort of old-fashioned life and times."[4]

Brown's success stems from his mastery of and zest for source material, compoundedwith social insight, carefully digested historiographic and social theory, and a sharp eye

for human beings, according to Oxford Don Robin Lane Fox.[5] Lane Fox continues:

Brown's books, articles, and lectures have spoken inspiringly to those

who wished to find more in late antiquity than the exploitation of the

"humble" and the in-jokes of unidentified senators. This audience has

wanted more than [A.H.M] Jones' superb anatomy of how things wererun [Later Roman Empire, 1966] and more than Syme's [1939]

masterpiece, The Roman Revolution.... Into this vacuum, Brown

brought a masterly sense of the workings and social relations of small

societies and related them to the religious imagination and practice that

had eluded older materialist historians.... Brown's wide but unobtrusivestudy of social anthropology sharpened his sense of which questions to

ask. In 1969 he isolated precisely this use of anthropology for the

purposes of the historian and exemplified it in a remarkable paper on

sorcery... which attempted to relate accusations of it to the conflict

between two social models - between traditional power vested in atraditional class and the new power attained by upwardly mobile

courtiers.[6]

Since then, Brown's methodologies have varied, drawing on thework of social theorist Ernest Gellner, anthropologist MaryDouglas, and, by the 1980s, Michel Foucault, as his interestsshifted to power, sexuality, and the self. These themes aredeveloped in Brown's 1988 book The Body and Society: Men, Women,and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, where Brown onceagain refocuses our attention on Augustine. Of The Body andSociety, Brown writes:

In that book I came to Augustine last of all. I firstfollowed the theme of sexual renunciation and its

followed the theme of sexual renunciation and itsimpact on the relations between men and women... fromthe time of S. Paul onwards. I had taken the reader ona journey around the entire sweep of the Mediterraneanand the Middle East before I returned, at last, toAfrica, to view the once familiar figure of Augustinewith the eyes of a traveler returned from strangelands....[7]

Brown's casting himself as a tour guide with travelers' eyes ismore than a mere literary device. Influenced by anthropologistsand anthropological theory, Brown explores the geographicalsites of the events he describes, making fieldwork an integralpart of his historical method. Lane Fox, one of Brown's mostable protagonists in the interpretation of Late Antiquity,comments on this aspect Brown's work in his review of The Riseof Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000(Blackwell, 1996):

With his talent for social observation, Brown has an incomparable feelfor place, language, and people. It has often been hard to resist the

suspicion that great medievalists, describing the "age of spirituality," were

preparing at any moment to go off and pray in retreat. Peter Brown has

preferred to travel to the sites which his subjects once occupied. Travel

adds to his understanding of their context, at Lérins, opposite Antibes,for example, the training ground of ascetic Gallic bishops in the fifth and

sixth centuries, which he understands as an "outpost of the wilderness of

Egypt placed within sight of the sun-beaten slopes of the Alpes

Maritimes... a Circe's Isle from which young men of noble family

emerged transformed." At Nisibis, in Persian Mesopotamia, by contrast"unmarried young men, distinguished by a semi-monastic style of life and

dress, settled in the cell-like rooms of a former caravansary."[8]

Brown, the rambler, born in 1935 in Dublin into a Protestant Irish family, was

educated at Aravon School, Bray, County Dublin; Shrewsbury School; and New

College, Oxford. A fellow of All Souls, Oxford, where he wrote Augustine of Hippo,Brown subsequently taught at Oxford, the University of London, and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley before coming to Princeton in 1983, where he is Philip and

Beulah Rollins Professor of History. During those three decades he played a majorrole in the creation of the historical specialty of late antiquity, stimulating numerous

colleagues, students, and interested readers by his "vivid expression and penetrating

intuition that fire the imagination, put the familiar in a totally new light, and giverelevance to the unfamiliar."[9]

Revealing of Brown's scope of interests and the vivid insightand intuition with which he approaches them, consider thefollowing passages from what many rank among his mostinfluential writings, the 1971 article "The Rise and Function ofthe Holy Man in Late Antiquity." [10]

Here Brown surveys the holy man at work in Syria, the "wild andwoolly West" of Byzantine society:

First we must find our holy man. There was littledoubt about this for Late Roman men: Syria was thegreat province for ascetic stars.... The holy men who

minted the ideal of the saint in society came fromSyria, and, later, from Asia Minor and Palestine --not from Egypt.... [T]he ferocious independence, theflamboyant ascetic practices, the rapid rise and fallof reputations, and the constant symbiosis with lifeof surrounding villages--these are distinctly Syrianfeatures.... They were virtuoso cadenzas on the soberscore first written by 'The Great Men' of Egypt....[11]

Brown, characteristically, does not leave the matter there, precisely because he visitedthose places. He adds significantly, "This difference is written into the landscape andclimate of the two areas...." Brown continues:

We may come a little closer to the appeal of the holyman if, like the inquisitive layman in the HistoriaReligiosa, we climb up the ladder to Symeon Stylitesand pose the crucial question: 'Are you human?' Theanswer for the sociologist was quite definitely, 'no.'In Late Roman society, the holy man was deliberatelynot human. He was the 'stranger' par excellence... thechurchman in a chapel village in Wales, thedissociated medium in an African tribe." [12]

Among all his other attributes, the holy man is essentially aman of power, whose force springs from his ability to exorciseevil spirits:

Exorcism takes us into deeper waters. When littlegirls played games in fourth-century Syria, theyplayed at monks and demons: one dressed in rags, wouldput her little friends into stitches of laughter byexorcising them. The history of exorcism in theancient world has been carefully studied. Modernanthropological studies may help the historian see thewood for the trees. These studies have recentlystressed the relation between the possessed and thecommunity, represented, in this case, by the exorcist.Highly individual though the experience of possessionmay be, its handling tends to be acted out as a

duet... each side has a role; each unconsciouslyfollows a score. The dialogue between the possessedand the community, therefore, tends to have thestylized, articulated quality of an operetta.Possession and its working through is a way in which asmall community can both admit and control disruptiveinfluences by playing them out. [13]

Brown's work is filled with metaphor, literary allusion, and vivid expressions, drawing

from exact detail of people, places, sights, and sounds. Another influential work, TheCult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981), opens:"This book is about the joining of Heaven and Earth, and the role, in this joining, of

dead human beings. " Brown then introduces us to Ambrose of Milan, an early churchepiscopal impresario who appropriated the cult of saints to serve the local church, its

communal liturgy, and the community as a whole, including women and the poor.Brown writes:

Ambrose had not introduced the cult of the martyrsinto Milan, still less had he merely acquiescedpassively to previous practices. His initiatives had

passively to previous practices. His initiatives hadbeen firm and in many ways unusual: he had beenprepared to both move bodies and to link themdecisively to the altar of a new church. Rather, hewas like an electrician who rewires an antiquatedwiring system: more power could pass through stronger,better-insulated wires toward the bishop as leader ofthe community. [14]

Brown is looking for the mental and social constructs as well asthe imaginative boundaries that characterize late antiquity. Hehas sought various means, perspectives, and approaches in orderto see the wood for the trees. He has written, "Plainly, somesolid and seemingly unmovable cultural furniture has piled upsomewhere in that capacious lumber room, the back of our mind.If we can identify and shift some of it, we may find ourselvesable to approach the Christian cult of saints from a differentdirection." [15] This shifting of lumber, of course, applies toall the objects of Brown's investigations. It is aboutimagination and scholarship.

Prolific author and influential historian, Brown is also abrilliant lecturer. In the Princeton student guide "Full List ofAwesome Courses," an anonymous reviewer writes of History 343:The Civilization of the Early Middle Ages:

Peter Brown is a God, folks. I reserve that term for avery select few.... This guy speaks more than 15languages.... I didn't bother testing him on how goodhis Old Norse is, but he's fluent in that too....Brown has his preceptors act as Vandals and Visigothswhen describing the fall of Rome. He's hilarious andbrilliant, simultaneously. Take this course.

We invite you to attend his public lecture and shift somecultural baggage.

NOTES

[1] G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar, editors. Late antiquity: a guide tothe postclassical world (Harvard University Press, 1999), ix-x. For a fuller excerpt:Late Antiquity / Transformation of Empire.[2] (2) The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. "Recent Announcements," Nov. 7,2001. http://www.mellon.org/DAA%20announcement.html[3] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, New ed. with an epilogue(University of California Press, 2000). The main text is unchanged. [4]Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, reviews by: Robert Grant, Church History37 (March, 1968):110; Richard Southern, New Statesman 74 (September 22,1967):360; Brian Tierney, American Historical Review 74 (October, 1968):126.[5] Robin Lane Fox, "How it Grew," New York Review of Books (April 24, 1997).Lane Fox is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a reader in Ancient History. Hisbooks include Pagans and Christians (Knopf, 1986), reviewed by Peter Brown inthe New York Review of Books, March 12, 1997. [6] Peter Brown, "Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity: From LateAntiquity into the Middle Ages," in Religion and Society in the Age of SaintAugustine (Faber and Faber, 1972), 119-146.[7]Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, New ed., p. 500.[8] Robin Lane Fox, "How it Grew," New York Review of Books (April 24, 1997).[9] J.F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and the Imperial Court, A.D. 364-425(Oxford University Press, 1975), xii.

(Oxford University Press, 1975), xii.[10] Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,"The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 61. (1971):80-101 (available from JSTOR tosubscribers).[11] "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," 82.[12] "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," 91.[13] "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," 88.[14] Peter Brown, The cult of the saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity(University of Chicago Press, 1981), 36.[15]The cult of the saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity, 13.

Text by John Rawlings, Medieval Studies Bibliographer, Stanford University Libraries

(c)2002.

Site maintained by Ever Rodriguez

ARCHIVES || CALENDAR || LECTURERS || SYMPOSIA || HUMANITIES AT STANFORD

Top of Page || Home Page || Stanford University Libraries || Stanford University