The Formation of Christendom, 2nd ed. by Judith Herrin

It takes confidence to reissue, largely unchanged, a book more than thirty years old concerned with a scholarly field that has transformed itself over the intervening decades. But Judith Herrin's The Formation of Christendom was a bold enterprise from the beginning. The book investigated the changes wrought by the rise of Christianity on the Roman world over the course of Late Antiquity, starting in the fifth century and tracking the development of the three successors of Rome identified by the author as Latin Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the world of Islam, down to the middle of the ninth century. Nor was Herrin satisfied with a purely academic viewership for her vast canvas. The Formation was addressed to "the general reader" as much as to professional historians. This audacity paid dividends, with the volume receiving positive reviews in both the scholarly and mainstream press.

Alterations have been kept to a minimum in this reissue by Princeton University Press. The opening chapters of the book follow the collapse of Roman power in the West and the spread of Christian beliefs and institutions through the structure and culture of the empire. The second section examines the slow emergence of separate western and eastern Christendoms, with a particular focus on the seventh century and the impact of doctrinal controversy and the Arab conquests. These trends culminate in the last chapters, with the final sundering of the Roman world into three, marked by the consolidation of the Caliphate, war, and iconoclasm in Byzantium, and the alliance between the papacy and the rising power of the Franks.

Changes to the text itself mostly take the form of minor corrections, allowing the book to retain the same pagination. Occasionally this results in non sequiturs, as on page 226, where the reader is informed, apropos of very little, that "Leovigild was not the first Gothic ruler to put his own name on the coinage," because the first edition said that he was, and removing the sentence entirely would have changed the page number. Somewhat more eccentric is the decision to systematically rename Eusebios as Eusebius in a volume where everyone else goes by the Greek spelling of their name (for example, Arios, Herakleios). Errors remain, ranging from spelling mistakes (page 4: both Eusebios and Eusebius wrote "one hunded years" after Sextus Julius Africanus) to more serious problems (page 301: Cyril and Methodius are no longer credited with bringing Christianity to the Bulgars but still organized it in "the independent kingdom of Moldavia," presumably meant to be Moravia.)

A more substantial addition to the volume is the new preface provided by the author (pages ix–xvi), which provides interesting insights for rereading the book as a whole. Here, Herrin reflects upon some of the absences in the work as it stands. Some of these are a consequence of a planned companion volume concerning the economic structures of the church which never materialized, with the author instead shifting her attention to gender in the period, another topic that receives little attention in The Formation. Any survey of Late Antiquity written today would need to engage with considerable recent scholarship in both fields. As Herrin notes, such a work would also be far more concerned with those forms of belief labelled "heresy" and with non-elite religion more generally.

More provocatively, the author regrets the term "Late Antiquity" for implying a world trapped by the past, preferring instead "Early Christendom" (page xiii) in order to look to the future. This raises difficulties when considering other faiths, most obviously Islam. Heavily influenced by Pirenne, Herrin insists upon the importance of the rise of Islam in shaping Byzantium and the west, but the third heir of Rome receives by far the least attention and is consistently approached from the outside and within a purely Mediterranean context. By contrast, recent decades have done much to examine and integrate the early Caliphate into the history of the period.

Indeed, the geography of The Formation is perhaps one of the most interesting reflections of changes in the field. This is a narrative concentrated on Constantinople and Rome. When written, the book's attention to the eastern Mediterranean was a striking challenge to scholarship still largely focused on the west. As Late Antiquity has pushed further east to include the Syriac world, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian Ocean, Herrin's work looks increasingly western. Somewhat ironically, this is now a major strength of the volume, as her perceptive treatment of Latin Christendom—most obviously in the tour-de-force that is the chapter on the Visigoths, but also evident in her handling of the Carolingians—acts as a vital corrective to the growing view of the west as an irrelevant backwater in more recent scholarship. The chapters concerned with the author's primary area of study, Byzantium, continue to be of great interest, with her discussion of the Three Chapters controversy and Monotheletism remaining particular highlights. The treatment of iconoclasm, much celebrated upon first publication, now needs to be read in light of more recent debates on the subject, but Herrin's electric depiction of an embattled people turning to drastic measures for salvation retains its ability to grip the reader.

One of the few hints of doubt in this otherwise confident reissue is the replacement of "the general reader" by "the persistent general reader" (page 13) as among the intended audiences for the work. Any anxieties thus revealed about the accessibility of the work can swiftly be put to rest. Herrin's enviable talent for taking challenging material and making it clear and exciting is on full display, enhanced by her eye for memorable and telling detail. The sheer readability of the book is to the benefit not just of an interested public or of struggling undergraduates, although it will continue to be appreciated by both. Professional historians also require overarching narratives to navigate the vast time and space encompassed by Late Antiquity. Sweeping, provocative, and vivid, The Formation continues to provide readers, general or otherwise, with plenty of reason to persist.