Peter Brown

The World of Late Antiquity AD 150-750 - Library of world civilization Peter Brown

Publisher Marketing: These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deeply rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Russian empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East. Mr. 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. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. 200 A. D. became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam. We still live with the results of these contrasts. Contributor Bio:  Brown, Peter PETER BROWN, Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, is a leading authority on the society of late antiquity and early Christianity. He is author of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967, 2000), The Rise of Western Christendom (1996), Authority and the Sacred (1995), and The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988).