Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown (review)

It is hard to imagine any publication doing justice to the author of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1967, rev. 2000), The World of Late Antiquity (New York, 1971), The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981),The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Cambridge, MA, 1996; rev., Maiden, MA, 2003)—to name only the most imposing of the works of his that in the course of the past half-century have revolutionized the study of late-classical, early Christian, early Byzantine, and early-medieval Western culture (bibliography for Peter Brown to 2005: pp. xv-xx).We may therefore be grateful to the editors of this volume for settling on an "intimate" and not too "declamatory" mode for their tribute (p. x), and to its publishers for issuing an old-fashioned Festschrift of the sort that hardly any university press will entertain nowadays.

Alerted in the preface that "it would be foolish to force the essays in this collection into a simplistic straitjacket" (p. x), the reviewer must steer clear of the lunatic asylum whose isolated late-antique prototypes are the subject of Peregrine Horden's essay, itself an elegant instance of the main subgenre of the volume—namely, the strategic sampling of sources in quest of possible narratives of historical continuity and change over the longue (or at least moyenne) durée, such as Brown has elaborated. Thus we have an annotated translation of a chapter excerpted from a ninth-century legal compilation in Syriac by Bishop Gabriel of Basra, adduced by Sebastian Brock as "a link between professional associations of Late Antiquity and those of the Islamic world" (p. 52).A neighboring piece by Sidney H. Griffith tracks convergences between early Byzantine and early Islamic iconophobia, hinting at an affinity between the development of "text as icon" among Muslims and "a hitherto unaccustomed role for textual display" among Eastern Christians (p. 84). In three notably wide-ranging and resourceful studies, Charlotte Roueché pursues the interrelated theatrical lives of classical myth and biblical story in the public entertainments of the Roman Empire; Claudia Rapp expounds the role of handwritten documents in the protocols of confession and absolution reflected by early Byzantine monastic and hagiographical literature; and Judith Herrin plots the history of book burning as an instrument of Christian censorship down to the Council in Trullo of 692. With a sharper focus and tone, John Matthews uses a series of vignettes ("Four Funerals and a Wedding:This World and the Next in Fourth-Century Rome") to expose the common ground and idioms shared by pagan and Christian aristocrats—and the willful eccentricity of the "blundering careerist" Jerome (p. 140). Rita Lizzi Testa's "breve lavoro" on the emerging pagan historiographical tradition concerning Emperor Constantine (pp. 85-128) is a very substantial piece of source-criticism.

Other essayists take individual figures or authors for topics and, more or less explicitly, for paradigms. Claude Lepelley reconsiders St. Augustine's misgivings about the fashion for embellishing records of the martyrs; his comments (after Serge Lancel) on what the Church thereby stood to lose "in terms of spectacle" (p. 151) set the stage for a deft analysis by Philip Rousseau of the same bishop's approach, especially via texts of Varro in the City of God, to Christian cult and spectacle as media for defining "a differing species of citizenship" (p. 175). In Susanna Elm's essay on St. Gregory of Nazianzus, it is the person of the bishop that becomes a plastic medium for the modeling of a new kind of spiritual family. Gregory's "self-made" holy (family) man then finds a female counterpart in the virginal figure of Radegund of Poitiers, as cut and successively recut by herself and three sixth- and early-seventh-century writers studied here by Julia H. Smith. In what...