The Catholic Historical Review

John Howe
Revisiting the Holy Man
The Catholic Historical Review - Volume 86, Number 4, October 2000, pp. 640-644

The Catholic University of America Press

John (John McDonald) Howe - Revisiting the Holy Man - The Catholic Historical Review 86:4 The Catholic Historical Review 86.4 (2000) 640-644 Review Article Revisiting the Holy Man John Howe Charisma and Society: The 25th Anniversary of Peter Brown's Analysis of the Late Antique Holy Man. Conference Held at the University of California at Berkeley, March 13-16, 1997. Edited by Susanna Elm and Naomi Janowitz. (Published in Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6 [1998], 343-539.) The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown. Edited by James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 298. $74.00.) To launch a thousand ships in academia you need a creative synthetic insight that is only about half-right. Whereas a perfect new perspective would be a dead end, those hypotheses that can be verified, falsified, and supplemented are what give rise to epic scholarly battles. Among the examples that might be invoked are Lynn White, Jr., on medieval technology, Marshall McLuhan on media, Philippe Ariès on childhood, and perhaps Peter Brown on the holy man. Brown, Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, is the most eminent historian of late antiquity. In his Augustine of Hippo (1967), he offered a literarily brilliant and insightful human image of Augustine which has not been displaced by several excellent later biographies. His World of Late...