Peter Brown (historian)

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935. He is an Irish historian who reshaped how scholars think about an entire era. He is widely credited with bringing coherence to the study of Late Antiquity, and many regard him as the person who invented that field. His work has centered on the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and on religion's relationship with society. What in his path led a historian to carve a wholly new period out of centuries other scholars had already claimed? And what made him argue that an age long dismissed as decline was in fact a period of invention? The answers begin with a childhood split between two very different worlds.

• 2. Between Dublin and Khartoum

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  Until 1939, young Peter Brown spent every winter and spring in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his father worked as a railway engineer based at Khartoum. For the rest of each year, he returned with his mother to Bray, in County Wicklow, near Dublin. Brown's family was Scots-Irish and Protestant. When war broke out, Brown and his mother stayed in Ireland, and his father did not return for good until 1948. Brown also has a stutter, and later in life he became known as an example of a successful public speaker who lived with one.

  Speaking to the Daily Princetonian, Brown once described his Sudanese years as filling him with "a love of the Middle East" and memories of a "sunny world" staffed by "large, dark Sudanese servants in long white robes." He also recalled "hippopotami, crocodiles, and camels under starry skies." After his father returned to Ireland, a handbook of Sudanese courtesy customs remained prominent on the family bookshelf. Beside it sat a deluxe edition of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Brown has said he read that book cover to cover every time he came home on holiday from his school in England.

  Reflecting on those years, Brown said the pull of religion and of what he called the "exotic" was always "too large, too ever-present and too rich" to be dismissed as a symptom of decline. The power of both, he said, had begun to "puzzle and intrigue" him. "The collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all I knew," Brown said, "but it was unlikely to be uninteresting."

• 3. From Gunpowder to Greek

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  At Aravon School in Bray, once a distinguished preparatory school that has since closed, Brown first studied Latin and French. He then moved to Shrewsbury School, where he expected to concentrate on the sciences. By his own account, Brown had become a keen amateur astronomer. He had also reinvented gunpowder, ruining an aunt's carpet in the process. His housemaster summoned him and, between puffs of a pipe, announced: "Brown, you did too well in the Entrance examination to do Science. You shall do... Greek." Brown studied Greek for a single year, sat the Junior Certificate, and then moved from classical scholarship into the study of history.

  Brown finished his schooling a year early and returned to Ireland in 1952, the year he turned 17. In Dublin that year, he read a 1926 book by Michael Rostovtzeff, borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The 1952-1953 academic year became a hiatus between school and university. During it, Brown learned to type at a secretarial school. He also took German lessons from an academic at Trinity College Dublin who had fled Nazi Germany as a refugee.

  In 1953, Brown took up a scholarship to read Modern History at New College, Oxford, leaving in 1956. Most of his degree covered English history in full and the European High Middle Ages, from 919-1127. In his final year he took a Special Subject on the Age of Augustine, shaped above all by the writings of Marrou and Piganiol. Brown later said he was "thrilled by the glimpse" the two scholars gave him of "the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture" at the very moment Christianity triumphed within the Roman Empire. He added that ideas he had known only from the medieval and post-Reformation periods, ideas that still hung over any Irish boy, Catholic or Protestant, turned out to have begun in a much older world.

• 4. A Career in Three Countries

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  After graduating, Brown began, but never completed, a doctoral thesis supervised externally by Arnaldo Momigliano, then professor of ancient history at University College London. Oxford recognized his promise with the Harmsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton College. That was followed by a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College. All Souls elected him a research fellow in 1963 and a senior research fellow in 1970. Oxford's Modern History Faculty made him a special lecturer in 1970 and a reader in 1973. He also held a lectureship at Merton College from 1972-1975. The British Academy elected him a fellow in 1971.

  In 1975, Brown left Oxford to become professor of modern history and head of the history department at Royal Holloway College, University of London, staying until 1978. He then left Britain altogether, taking a professorship in classics and history at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1978-1986. In 1986, Brown arrived at Princeton University as the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, a post he held until 2011. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. He became a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1988. In 1995 he joined the American Philosophical Society as a resident member.

  Before settling permanently at Berkeley and Princeton, Brown had already tested both campuses as a visiting professor, at Berkeley in 1975 and at Princeton from 1983-1986. He also taught as a visitor at UCLA and in Italy. Further visiting posts took him to Toronto during the 1970s, and, from 2000 onward, to Hungary and Iceland. Princeton recognized his teaching directly, giving him the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2000. That award came partway through a Princeton career that would continue until 2011, and it only hints at how often Brown has stepped to a podium elsewhere.

• 5. A Lifetime of Lectures

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  Brown has delivered named lecture series at universities across the world, including the Carl Newell Jackson Lectures at Harvard in 1976 and the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1978. He gave the ACLS Lectures in the History of Religion in 1981-82 and the Curti Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1988. He also delivered the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge and Yale, in 1993 and 1996 respectively. Later series took him to Jerusalem for the Menahem Stern Lectures in 2000 and to Vienna for the Institute for Human Sciences lectures in 2012. That same year, he gave the James W. Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia.

  In 2007, Brown gave the inaugural talk at the opening of the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. In 2015, the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosted him in a public discussion with fellow scholar Paula Fredriksen. He has also served as keynote speaker at academic congresses, including the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 1986 and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 1999. Those same congress halls would later hear him lay out not just his conclusions, but the intellectual influences that had produced them.

• 6. Building a New Field

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  In 1957 and 1958, Brown traveled to Italy to carry out research at the British School in Rome. There he was especially influenced by the work of Santo Mazzarino, which shaped the earliest lectures he gave at Oxford after returning in 1958. Norman Hepburn Baynes, William Frend, and A. H. M. Jones were among his other early influences.

  Brown's first research articles, published in 1961, examined the Christianization of Rome's senatorial aristocracy and religious dissent and coercion in late Roman North Africa. He returned to North African coercion again in 1963, then turned to Augustine's own views on the state that same year and on religious coercion in 1964. Italy and Africa in the fourth and early fifth centuries supplied the backdrop for his research into a bishop who had spent years as a Manichaean before his conversion. That research became Brown's first substantial book. Related articles followed on the Pelagian movement in Italy, in 1968 and 1970, and on the meeting of Christianity and local culture in Roman Africa, in 1968.

  Once that project was finished, Brown said he felt "free, at last" to take a wider view of Late Antiquity, turning toward the Near East and Central Asia. A. H. M. Jones's massive survey, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602, had appeared in 1964. Brown wrote a long review of it for the Economic History Review in 1967. His 1969 article on the diffusion of Manichaeism across the Roman Empire was corroborated soon afterward by the discovery of the Cologne Mani-Codex.

  In 1969, Geoffrey Barraclough, general editor of the Thames & Hudson "Library of European Civilization" series, approached Brown to write a book on late antiquity. Brown later suggested it may have been Barraclough who proposed the title The World of Late Antiquity. Around this time Brown engaged closely with the work of Henri Pirenne and the French Annales School, especially Fernand Braudel, and began to see the Mediterranean as "truly distinctive." That Annales influence pushed him toward using anthropology and sociology as tools for historical analysis, drawing on both a British tradition of social anthropology and an American tradition of cultural anthropology.

  By the 1980s, Brown's own views had shifted. He said his earlier work, having deconstructed much of the religious meaning in his subjects, needed reassessment. His later writing shows a deeper appreciation for the specifically Christian layers of the people and texts he studies. His most recent research turns to wealth and poverty in late antiquity, particularly among Christian writers.

  Janet Nelson, a leading British historian of the early Middle Ages, has said that Brown "took the study of medieval history into fields of cultural history and social history, social psychological history." According to Nelson, Brown's central questions were about how people conceptualized God and religious ritual. The cult of the saints, she noted, became the area for which he is best known. Journalist Ruby Shao, drawing on an interview with Brown, has reported that he considers the balance of his scholarship between eastern and western Christianity his proudest accomplishment. That balance required mastering different languages, and pushed him into territory like the Desert Fathers and Syriac poetry, in a body of work built on knowledge of at least 26 languages. That linguistic range fed directly into the books that would carry his arguments to a wider audience, starting with a biography of Augustine of Hippo.

• 7. Five Defining Books

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  Reviewing Augustine of Hippo: A Biography in the Journal of Theological Studies, William Frend called it "a superb book, an intensely personal interpretation of its central figure." Frend, who had once differed with Brown, courteously but critically, over the religious history of Roman Africa, praised the book's fusion of historian, philosopher and psychologist, sustained by deep knowledge of Augustine's writings. Henry Chadwick, another major Augustine scholar, called the book a "biography without the theology," a judgment Brown himself later accepted as "fair." Because of that gap, English-language students have often paired Brown's book with Gerald Bonner's St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, first published in 1963, four years earlier. Historian Richard Southern praised Brown instead for "bringing Augustine out of the tomb of theological doctrine, and setting his mind and emotions working before our eyes." Brown published a new edition of his own book in 2000, adding two chapters, one addressing new evidence and the other new interpretations.

  In The World of Late Antiquity, published in 1971, Brown offered a new interpretation of the entire period between the second and eighth centuries AD. The older view, rooted in Edward Gibbon's 1779 work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, treated the period as decadence from a classical golden age. Brown instead argued that Late Antiquity was a period of immense cultural innovation, not decline.

  In his paper "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," also from 1971, Brown examined the charismatic Christian ascetics known as holy men. These holy men were especially prominent in the late Roman Empire and the early Byzantine world, acting as mediators between local communities and the divine. Brown argued that Christian ascetics had taken over a preexisting Roman tradition of patronage. He argued further that a deeper religious shift, a growing need for more personal access to the divine, drove the holy man's rise across several religions, not only Christianity.

  Published in 1988, The Body and Society examined marriage and sexual practice among early Christians across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focused on permanent sexual renunciation, continence, celibacy and lifelong virginity, in Christian communities from the first to the fifth centuries AD. The book discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine, among other figures. It also considers asceticism in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, monks and marriage in Egypt, and the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem.

  Through the Eye of a Needle, Brown's longest book to date, appeared in 2012 and examines attitudes toward philanthropic giving in the Latin West during Late Antiquity. Its core, Parts II and III, focuses on two generations between about AD 370-430, when a diversity of views gave way to polarization driven by the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians. Parts I, IV and V set that focused study inside the wider social structures of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. Its themes echoed an earlier book, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, published in 2002, and would soon draw the attention of prize committees across several countries.

• 8. Honours Across Three Continents

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  For several decades, Brown has served as General Editor of the book series The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, from the University of California Press. Its first volume appeared in 1981, and the series has since grown to more than fifty-five titles. Brown has also received major research funding, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for scholars in the humanities in 2001.

  Brown has received formal recognition in at least twelve countries across three continents, including roughly twenty honorary degrees. Outside the United States, those degrees have come from Fribourg in Switzerland in 1974, Trinity College Dublin in 1990, and Oxford in 2006, among others. Inside the United States, honorary doctorates have come from Chicago in 1978, Harvard in 2002, Yale in 2006, and Notre Dame in 2008, among others. He also holds honorary fellowships at Royal Holloway College, from 1997, and at New College, Oxford, from 1998.

  Among his prizes is the Heineken Prize for History, awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. In 2008, Brown shared the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, from the US Library of Congress, with Indian historian Romila Thapar. In 2011 he won the International Balzan Prize for the Humanities for his work on Graeco-Roman antiquity. In 2015 he shared the Dan David Prize in the category "Retrieving the Past: Historians and their Sources."

  Augustine of Hippo: A Biography won the Arts Council of Great Britain Prize the year of its release, 1967. The Body and Society won both the Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from Phi Beta Kappa. Through the Eye of a Needle won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Philip Schaff Prize. It also took the R.R. Hawkins Award, the top prize at the American publishing industry's PROSE Awards.

  In 2023, Brown published Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, the newest entry in a bibliography that has carried his account of Late Antiquity from Augustine's Africa to the present day.