Faith and Community around the Mediterranean: In Honor of Peter R. L. Brown

Permanent URI for this collection

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/16320
Contributions to the volume Faith and Community around the Mediterranean: In Honor of Peter R. L. Brown, edited by Petre Guran and David A. Michelson, in the series Études Byzantines et Post-Byzantines Nouvelle série Tome I (VIII). Bucharest: Académie Roumaine, 2019.

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Table of Contents
    (2019) Guran, Petre; Michelson, David A.
    Table of Contents and Abstracts for the volume "Faith and Community around the Mediterranean: In Honor of Peter R. L. Brown," edited by Petre Guran and David A. Michelson.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Introduction: Dynamics of Faith and Community around the Mediterranean
    (Académie Roumaine, 2019) Guran, Petre; Michelson, David A.
    Over the past century, the work of Peter R.L. Brown has repeatedly broken new ground as a model for understanding the centrality of religion in the Mediterranean cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This article is the introduction to a special issue of Études byzantines et post-byzantines in honor of Peter Brown. The article summarizes the findings of essays by an international group of scholars whose work both refines and challenges Brown’s legacy.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    “Salutary Vertigo”: Peter R.L. Brown’s Impact on the Historiography of Christianity
    (Académie Roumaine, 2019) Michelson, David A.
    This article examines the impact which Peter R.L Brown’s half century of scholarship has made on the historiography of Christianity. This article surveys five recurring motifs or theoretical approaches to Christianization which epitomize Brown’s interpretive method as an historian of Christianity: Christianization as social change, Christianization as continuity, Christianization as revolution, Christianization as simultaneously diverse and universal, and Christianization as unfamiliar. Individually, these themes challenge monolithic interpretations of “Christianization” in Late Antiquity. Taken as a whole, these themes reflect Brown’s emphasis on the paradoxical aspects of Christianity in Late Antiquity. As Brown himself has put it, his goal in constantly overturning scholarly assumptions about Christianization was to achieve “a sense of the salutary vertigo” in which the historian encounters ancient Christianity with “the same combination of wonder and respect that makes for fruitful travel in a foreign land.”