Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History

The eminent historian Peter Brown has a written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity. Fellow historian Jack Tannous joins him in conversation.

The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and path-breaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium” now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.

Peter Brown is Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD; The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000; The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity; Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity; and many other books. Jack Tannous is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies and Chair of the Center for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University and the author of The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers.