THE WORLD OF LATE ANTIQUITY PB – PETER BROWN

This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c.150 and c.750 A.D., came to differ from Classical civilization . These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deep-rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from 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.