The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000 by Peter Brown (review)

BOOK REVIEWS745 tended discussion of the influence ofJohn Cassian. Cassian gets more attention for his brief personal presence in Italy than for the pervasive influence of his books both directly (Benedict, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great were all smitten with him) and indirectly (through the texts he influenced, notably the "rules" of the "Master," Benedict, and Eugippius). On the other hand, the patient elucidation of Jerome's and Rufinus's ideas and their influence constitutes the most important contribution of the work. It is in those leading figures that Jenal sees the lines of opposition laid down and played out between a western style of monasticism (Rufinian, less ascetic) and an eastern (Hieronymian, more austere) in which the texts and ideas of Origen were deployed by all sides to their advantage. If we knew more of some of the shadowy figures whose names appear so briefly in the early section of this work, it would be a pleasure to draw lines of influence more clearly, but in the absence of anything comparable to the centraUzing influence of the Merovingians , that is far from possible. That the story ends, as well, with Gregory the Great leaves the reader eager for more, because it is in the history of the mediation ofhis ideas to Italian and western monasticism generally that the next great untold story of early monasticism will be found. Jenal lays foundations and supplies detailed information that will be of immense use to scholars in many areas of late antique and early medieval history. James J. O'Donnell University ofPennsylvania The Rise ofWestern Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000. By Peter Brown. [The Making of Europe.] (Cambridge, Massachusetts: BlackweU Publishers. 1996. Pp. xvii, 353. $24.95.) No historian has been more apt to surprise his readers than Peter Brown.Always concerned to strip away the "patina of the obvious that encrusts human action" (as he once put it in an essay), he has done more to rescue the past from the tyranny of stereotypes than any living historian. The variety of the means whereby he has been able to achieve this defy specification. In his hands the wayward and idiosyncratic can become more revealing than the typical: some smaU incident, a phrase, or a scene, portrayed from an unusual angle, under an oblique light, presented with the artistry and in the bewitching language of an Irish wizard, with vast learning able to draw on revealing and unfamiUar evidence , combines to stop his reader in his tracks. Brown challenges our imagination to "ask ourselves whether the imaginative models that we bring to the study of history are sufficiently precise and differentiated, whether they embrace enough of what we sense to be what it is to be human" (as he said to his students in London in his Inaugural Lecture in 1977). His work has not so much changed the way we see a crucial period of European history, but enlarged our sense of what historical understanding is about. 746BOOK REVIEWS His new book aims to "tell in its own way a story that is already well known . . ." (p. x). It. is, indeed, very much in its own way.That the book is perhaps less surprising than so much in Peter Brown's writings is in very large measure the result of their success in shaping a generation's view of the history of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.That we have come to give weight to the religious and cultural assumptions and expectations ofLate Roman persons in their history and that we are far more sensitive to the ways in which these determined their approach to the administrative and poUtical developments in their societies, we owe mainly to Peter Brown's work. The air of familiarity about his account of the formation of western Christendom is a measure of his achievement. It is hard to single out any among the many muminating discussions.The redescription of "barbarians" (pp. 8-12), the marveUously lucid and humane account of the christological debates of the fifth century (pp. 70-75), the treatment of"paganism" as the power of the past to re-emerge in the Christian present (pp. 98-99), the...