Customer Reviews

Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Harvard University Press Reference Library)

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Frankly, I have a concern that this book's subject, length, and (perhaps) cost will deter certain readers from purchasing it. I urge those readers to read this and other reviews provided by Amazon.com first before making that decision. The authors focus on the period roughly between 250 and 800, treating it as a "distinctive and quite decisive period of history that stands on its own." The material is organized as follows: first a brilliant Introduction which will convince almost any reader of the unique importance of Late Antiquity to human history; then a series of essays by various authors, each followed by an immensely useful bibliography (more about one of those essays later); and then a comprehensive Alphabetical Guide which combines many of the most valuable benefits of an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a lexicon. The commonly accepted chronological and territorial boundaries of the period -- which encompass Rome, Byzantine, Sassanian, and early Islamic cultures -- are extended by the authors so that "new connections" can be established and "revealing comparisons" (and contrasts) are permitted.

There are eleven individual essays whose titles suggest the scope of Late Antiquity: Remaking the Past (Averil Cameron), Sacred Landscapes (Beatrice Caseau), Philosophical Tradition and the Self (Henry Chadwick), Religious Communities (Garth Fowden), Barbarians and Ethnicity (Patrick J. Geary), War and Violence (Brent D. Shaw), Empire Building (Christopher Kelly), Christian Triumph and Controversy (Richard Lim), Islam (Hugh Kennedy), The Good Life (Henry Maguire), and Habitat (Yizhar Hirschfeld). I think all are first-rate and especially appreciate what I learned from Kelly's essay. Here is how he begins and then concludes it:

"On 11 May 330, Rome ceased to be the most important place in the Roman empire. Five hundred miles east of the Eternal City, on a site occupied by modern Istanbul, a new imperial capital was dedicated and (like Rome before it) named after its founder: Constantinople, the city of Emperor Constantine."

Following Constantine's death, his son and heir arranged for him to be buried ("splendidly and sumptuously adorned with gold") in the Church of the Apostles. Amidst twelve shrines, "in a glittering catafalque, lay the magnificent sarcophagus of Constantine, the self-proclaimed thirteenth apostle of Christianity -- a new official religion capable, when linked to proper reverence for the classical past, of both justifying and sanctifying a striking shift toward a more autocratic and highly centralized pattern of Roman rule."

The quality of thought and expression in these brief excerpts is representative of the entire book. Illustrations (when appropriate) supplement the text. For me, some books based on historical material become "magic carpets" which transport me back in time to places and people to which I might not otherwise have access. For example, Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes. Other books based on historical material enable me to make all manner of direct connections between past and current human achievements. For example, Mokyr's The Lever of Riches and Williams' A History of Invention. I was reminded of works such as these as I proceeded through Late Antiquity. Friends have accused me of what could be called "intellectual wanderlust." I plead guilty. If you are similarly afflicted, you will also thoroughly enjoy Late Antiquity.

This is a scholarly book -- realy an encyclopedia of culture in the post Roman Empire period. It is edited by three scholars associated with one of the worlds most prestigous think-tanks -- the Institute for Advanced Study. So if you are a scholar yourself and interested in this period, this is a book for you. But if, like me, yoare simply interested in this period without true scholarly credentials, don't be fooled by the title -- it is a thoroughly delightful and readable book for browsing. Its authors have an obiously insatiable appetite for human details, they have that rare gift of being able to transmit their excitement to their readers, and even more remarkable, they mix their erudition with frequent and surprising bursts of humor.

I don't usually lay out the cost of such a book, but I could not resist on this one. It was well worth it! It has some of the best discussions of such areas as the Gnostics that I have seen in a a non-specialized work and better than in most specialized works in that they don't continue the early Christian feud with the Gnostics, but merely describe it. The format is roughly 50/50 of essays and encyclopedia. The essays include discussions of Christianity and its problems, military matters, economic matters, etc. and the encyclopedia part is quite complete and very clear in its discussions.

This is really a scholarly encyclopedia edited under the auspices of one of the world's foremost think-tanks -- the Institute for Advanced Study. But it was compiled by three top scholars who are endowed with an insatiable drive for discovering the human details of ancient civilizations, a wonderful style for sharing their excitement with their readers, and, most surpising of all, a sense of humor seldom associated with this level of erudition.

This is a wonderful book, but I want to offer the caveat that if you're looking for a general introduction to the period, or for a comprehensive reference book, this is neither. The essays are somewhat specialized, and the alphabetic section, while it offers many articles on unexpected subjects -- Nudity and Refugees, to name just two -- is by no means encyclopedic. Thus there are articles on the literary figures Ausonius and Sidonius, for example, but nothing at all on Rutilius Namatianus or Prudentius. Horses get a heading, but dogs don't. The emphasis is on social history, not events, so you won't find anything here on the battle of Adrianople.

If you don't know much about the period, I'd recommend first reading Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity, a superbly written and well illustrated introduction.

Late Antiquity is a series of eleven essays covering an array of topics related to Europe and the Middle East from 250 to 800 C.E. Like every collection from a variety of authors, it represents a mixed bag. At its best, like Beatrice Caseau's "Sacred Landscapes," it is eye-opening and provocative. (Caseau describes for us how pagan temples became Christianized, or how Christian holy sites were transformed into Muslim sites - a question that likely would never occur to the lay reader, but once asked demands answering.) Not every article is as enticing however. For example, Henry Chadwick misses a great opportunity with "Philosophical Tradition and the Self." Rather than relate to us just how individuals in late antiquity viewed the self, Chadwick chooses to desribe debates between late antiquity writers; only professors hopelessly lost in academia could possibly care about Iamblichus' criticisms of Porphyry.

The final half of the book is taken up with an encyclopedia, whose entries are . . . eclectic. The Emperor Maurice is absent, for example, but Ephrem (a Syrian deacon and hymnist) receives nearly two columns of treatment. Nor is there an entry for Arianism, but the Donatists get an extensive write-up.

There is much to enjoy and learn from in Late Antiquity. The articles by Cameron, Caseau, Geary, Shaw, and Lim alone make a trip to the local library well worthwhile. Whether the book is a must for the lay reader's library is more difficult to say.

This is an odd book that gives the appearance of being a general reference, but in fact it is just a collection of essays in two parts: longer articles such as "Religious Communities" and "War and Violence", and an alphabetic section of short articles on a wide variety of topics. This second part is maddeningly arbitrary: three columns on the Himyar tribe, for example, but no entry for the Alans. Entries for people are particularly spotty, with the emphasis on religious rather than secular figures. Anyone looking for a late-antique version of the Oxford Classical Dictionary will be disappointed. Nonetheless there is a wealth of information here, covering a wide variety of subjects. The scope includes the growth of Islam, which is well represented in both sections.

NOTE: The long essays in this book have been published separately as Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World.

The book 'Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World', edited by G.W. Bowerstock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, is a wonderful collection of essays and encyclopedic articles on the period on a fascinating period of transition and change in the history of the West. This is a period often overlooked and neglected, for it is a period of confusion and uneasy description; the Roman Empire has fallen, but the medieval world has yet to rise. Literature from this historical period is rare, both in terms of history and literary output; the medieval world looms large over late antiquity due to the rise of literature that is more easily accessible to those in the modern world.

The first section of the book consists of interesting essays, as listed below:

Remaking the Past, by Averil Cameron
Sacred Landscapes, by Beatrice Caseau
Philosophical Tradition and the Self, by Henry Chadwick
Religious Communities, by Garth Fowden
Barbarians and Ethnicity, by Patrick J. Geary
War and Violence, by Brent D. Shaw
Empire Building, by Christopher Kelly
Christian Triumph and Controversy, by Richard Lim
Islam, by Hugh Kennedy
The Good Life, by Henry Maguire
Habitat, by Yizhar Hirschfield

To give but one example, in the article 'Sacred Landscapes', Caseau traces the development away from public sacred spaces such as temples to the god to a resacralisation of Christian spaces, which had originally grown up in house-church environments with communal meals short on exclusively sacred spaces, particularly in light of early Christian apologists who saw distinct paganism in the sacralisation of space.

The remaining two-thirds of the book consists of an encyclopedia of late antiquity, including articles on places, events, people, and ideas. This is a wonderful reference, and, sitting next to my Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, a much-valued collection and much-used book.

Sometimes called 'The Dark Ages', in fact the historical period between the classical Roman Imperial times and the Medieval period was a period of transition and disarray, but was far from the uncultured, unlettered and uninspiring period it sometimes seems. This volume will help historians and others reclaim a little more of their own past.

This book contains very little about individuals. For example, Belisarius is not even listed in the index, let alone having an entry. Though that is not my kind of history, I bought the book anyway since late antiquity is one of my favorite periods of history. I hoped the articles would be engagingly written and make up for lack of attention to the interesting personages of the time. But all the articles I tried to read I found rather hard going....

Though I shifted over to American studies in grad school for practical reasons, my original love in the field of history was late antiquity and early medieval and I've maintained that interest ever since. As in all areas of the social sciences, things change, both in methodology and in academic tastes, and this field is no different. Bowersock and his colleagues have attempted to bring together in a single volume a number of tools and resources that will allow someone who has been out of touch for a couple decades to become quickly aware of the present questions and controversies among classicists and medievalists -- and they're about half successful. The latter two-thirds of the volume is a somewhat idiosyncratic alphabetical collection of more or less brief articles (from half a page to three or four pages) on a very wide variety of topics, including Nestorians (and a separate article on Nestorius), Zoroastrianism (ditto for Zoroaster), Fortifications, God, Metalware, Fayum, Moses Khorenatsi, Slavery, Rome (only three columns), Latin (less than that even), Ivory, Fars (the Iranian province), Monasticism, Espionage, Paulinus of Nola, and so on. And yet, there are no articles on Zeno (the emperor, that is), Odoacer, the Council of Tours, or Adrianople. The Vandals are there but not the Goths. It's a very strange selection, as if each contributor came up with his own list of topics he wanted to write on, with no overall plan -- though most of the articles that are included are quite well done. The first third of the book is something else again, consisting of eleven essays, each by an expert (I assume) in the field, and covering (again) an odd disparity of topics. There are the biggies, like "Islam" (though it really only considers the situation in Syria), and then there's "Philosophical Tradition and the Self" and "Sacred Landscapes." (Why not a broad essay on "East vs. West"? How can you study this period without considering that?) All of them are exceeding academic in tone and style, which will leave out the educated-but-insufficiently-specialized segment of the book's potential readership. In fact, these collected essays strike one as the sort of thing one would expect to find in a festschrift -- professors' previously written essays in quest of a publisher. Regarding sources: The essays in the front are heavily footnoted (naturally) while the encyclopedia entries have short lists of sources appended to them. In both cases, many of the citations are to German, Italian, and French publications. Since this is not an inexpensive volume, I can't really recommend it for personal purchase to most students of the field -- even though I enjoyed most of the book, and learned some things from many of the shorter entries. Get this one from the library and read selectively.