While generally the focus has almost invariably been on the fall of the Rome Empire and what was lost, Brown's focus was more on what survived, a Roman world that endured in parts of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean until the rise of Islam.Ī strength of this book is its accessible format, a comfortable sized font and wealth of illustrations. Peter Brown's book proved hugely influential in creating the idea of late antiquity as a distinct period and asserting its importance as the beginning of Christian Europe. We still live with the results of these contrasts. became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. Brown, Professor of History at Princeton University, examines these changes and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East. By 476 the Russian empire had vanished from western Europe by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East. 750 A.D., came to differ from 'Classical civilization.'These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deeply rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time.

This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c.

Brown the world of late antiquity