Stewart, Michael Edward

University of Queensland eSpace

Motions of Late Antiquity: Essays on Religion, Politics, and 
Society in Honour of Peter Brown eds. by Jamie Kreiner, and 
Helmut Reimitz (review) 
Michael Edward Stewart
Parergon, Volume 34, Number 2, 2017, pp. 227-229 (Review)
Published by Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies (Inc.)
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Queensland (13 Feb 2018 09:41 GMT)
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Parergon 34.2 (2017)
227Reviews
a knowledge of Czech. The bibliography of printed editions and secondary 
literature runs to twenty-eight pages and includes no fewer than forty-
eight items by Krafl himself, attesting to his command of every aspect of 
this material. There is an extensive subject-person-place index and a detailed 
thematic-topical catalogue for the critical edition. The subject entry on 
clerical behaviour, for example (de vita et honestate clericorum), takes us to 
the specific paragraph appearing in both the 1349 and 1413 statutes. Textual 
annotations then distinguish which reading is preferred from the multiple 
available sources (manuscript and printed) transmitting this paragraph. If we 
wish to find more general coverage of clerical respectability, we can turn to 
the index under ‘honestas clericorum, clericalis’ and there we find an additional 
five references to this topic across another sixteen documents in the edition.
Equally as impressive as his scrupulously prepared critical edition are 
Krafl’s detailed cross-referencing and emendations of the many (error-
strewn) pre-existing published editions of this material, many of which 
date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In every respect, Krafl’s 
monograph and edition is a splendid publication, to be welcomed afresh in 
its revised edition.
robert curry, The University of Sydney
Kreiner, Jamie, and Helmut Reimitz, eds, Motions of Late Antiquity: 
Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society in Honour of Peter Brown (Cultural 
Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 20), Turnhout, 
Brepols, 2016; pp. x, 353; 2 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 
9782503549118.
It has been nearly fifty years since the publication of Peter Brown’s trailblazing 
The World of Late Antiquity (1971). It is fair to say that this work — which 
emphasized cultural germination in a period (200–800) long remembered 
for decay — played an essential part in establishing late antiquity as its own 
unique historical epoch. Yet, late antiquity has experienced some recent 
growing pains. Detractors have countered Brown’s more optimistic vision 
of the break-up of the Western Roman Empire. Establishing clear spatial and 
temporal boundaries for the field also continues to spark debate. Into this 
contested arena arrives a second festschrift for Brown. Based on a conference 
held at Princeton to honour Brown in 2011, the seventeen essays in this 
volume offer readers keen insights into an assortment of regions, time-
periods, and methodological approaches.
Following an Introduction by the editors recounting Brown’s vast 
contributions to the field, the opening chapters respond to some of the 
criticisms discussed above. Ian Wood maintains that late antique scholars 
should focus less on the ‘creation’ of modern Europe, and take a global 
approach by turning their attentions eastward to developments in Byzantium, 
228
Parergon 34.2 (2017)
Reviews
Persia and the Muslim world. Leaning heavily upon Brown’s Through the Eye of 
the Needle, Walter Pohl downplays the economic and political ramifications of 
‘Rome’s fall’, positing instead that economic decline and social transformation 
in the period is better explained by shifting attitudes amongst Roman and 
non-Roman Christians towards wealth. In the post-imperial West, money 
flowed away from the secular elites and into the coffers of a Church more 
interested in salvation than finance.
As is to be expected in a volume dedicated to Brown, numerous 
contributions deal with late antique religions. Philippa Townsend uses 
Brown’s The Body and Society as a pivot to question the standard contention 
that the Manichaeans’ cosmological dualism was matched by their ‘social 
dualism’. Utilizing the fifth-century Life of Hypatius by Callinicus as a window 
into late antique views on class, Jaclyn Maxwell scrutinizes the author’s 
attitudes towards a wide social spectrum of guests who visited his rural 
monastery. Callinicus, Maxwell concludes, did not favour rich or poor, but 
judged people as distinct individuals. Daniel Schwartz uncovers a similarly 
even-handed approach in his source, the metrical homily On the Fall of Idols 
by Jacob of Sarug (c. 451–521). Schwartz concludes that Jacob preferred 
‘persuasive and moral approaches to Christianization’, rather than the violent 
approach frequently condoned by more rigorous Christians. Volker Menz, 
however, focuses on the more violent Vita of the mid fifth-century presbyter 
and Miaphysite, Barsuma. As a member of a threatened sect, the author 
of the life was far less interested in presenting Barsuma as a converter of 
‘Jews, pagans, and Samaritans, but as someone who purified the Holy Land 
by eliminating his enemies’ (p. 244). David Michelson resituates the Syriac 
writings of the late fifth-century Roman Monophysite Philoxenos of Mabbug 
within an older tradition of Cappadocian theologians. Ariel López applies 
modern knowledge about the Nile’s seasonal currents and flooding patterns 
to shed light on the core ‘truths’ concerning voyages, famine and premature 
death to be found in late antique Egyptian hagiography.
Michael Maas turns to the complicated rivalry between two late antique 
agrarian empires, Byzantium and Persia. Rather than highlight discord, Maas 
examines instead three cases of potential collaboration. Bucking standard 
consensus, he takes seriously the mid sixth-century Byzantine historian 
Procopius’s claim that the Roman emperor Arcadius (r. 395–408) had on 
his deathbed asked the Persian emperor  Yazdgird I (r. 399–420) to act as 
guardian for his young son, Theodosius II (r. 408–450).
Several chapters examine the shadowy rise of post-imperial worlds in 
the East and the West. Drawing on a letter by Sidonius Apollinaris (476) and a 
later inscription from a lesser-known bishop, Zeno of Mérida (483), Damián 
Fernández highlights how these authors’ portraits of the Visigothic king Euric 
(c. 440–478) offer insights into these authors’ attitudes towards the Eurican 
monarchy, but, just as importantly, offer glimpses of how Euric and his 
Parergon 34.2 (2017)
229Reviews
backers saw themselves in a post-Roman Iberia. Philip Rousseau posits that 
while Gregory of Tours inhabited a ‘new’ age, his thought-world and moral 
compass — both as a historian and as a bishop — remained firmly rooted 
in the ‘ancient practices and edifices’ of a vanished Roman world. Shifting 
to the late antique Muslim East, Jack Tannous’s chapter on the Life of Simeon 
of the Olives (c. 750) highlights the difficulties of uncovering accurate details 
about Christians living under Muslim rule when our sources are limited and 
defective. Yannis Papadogiannakis, on the other hand, sees in the seventh-
century erotapokriseis by Anastasius of Sinai a revealing day-to-day guidebook 
for Christians in a freshly Muslim world. Stefan Elders argues provocatively 
that Amandus of Maastricht’s (c. 584–676) missionary activity in the region 
of Ghent in the 620s and 630s must be understood from the wider vantage 
of late antique politics at a time when the Merovingian and Byzantine courts 
allied. Stressing the similarities between Amandus’s forced baptisms with East 
Roman imperial tradition, Elders proposes that the missionary worked under 
the auspices of the Merovingian king Dagobert I (r. 623–638), rather than the 
papacy in Rome as is commonly supposed. Janet Nelson concludes the study 
by revisiting the contested notion of a Carolingian renaissance through the 
historiographical lens of law.
Overall, the disparate approaches found in this stimulating volume reveal 
the fresh perspectives that late antique scholars can offer. Yet, their somewhat 
disjointed vision of the age also points to some continuing challenges. This 
study clearly exhibits Peter Brown’s unique gifts as a linguist, writer, and 
historian. Some of late antiquity’s current malaise may indeed be attributed 
to the difficulty for the new guard to match Brown’s brilliance as both a 
synthesizer and story-teller.
michael edward stewart, University of Queensland
LaGuardia, David P., and Cathy Yandell, eds, Memory and Community 
in Sixteenth-Century France, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015; hardback; pp. xiii, 
267; 3 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781472453372.
This substantial volume brings together both new and leading literary 
specialists of sixteenth-century France to consider questions of memory 
and community. They skilfully apply innovative reading strategies to poems, 
essays, prose works, trial records, letters, and memoirs. There are now strong 
historiographies attached both to early modern communities, their formation 
and practices, and to early modern memory cultures and their consequences. 
Disappointingly, however, the introduction says little about the intellectual 
impetus for the collection in the context of that wider literature or about this 
volume’s contribution to forging new lines of enquiry. Yet the collection as 
a whole does contribute. The intellectual quality of the essays is consistently 
high and they offer many new insights and interpretative techniques that might 


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Review of 'Jamie Kreiner and Helmut Reimitz, eds, motions of late antiquity: essays on religion, politics, and society in honour of Peter Brown'

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