The World of Late Antiquity is a remarkable study in social and cultural change in which Peter Brown explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c.150 and c.750 A.D., came to differ from ‘Classical civilization’.
These centuries, as Peter Brown demonstrates, were the era in which the most deep-rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East.
The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. 200 A.D. became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam.
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