A Companion to Late Antiquity - Paperback

by Philip Rousseau (Editor)

Der Band gibt einen Überblick über die Spätantikeforschung und beleuchtet insbesondere die Rolle der Religion für das ökonomische, gesellschaftliche und politische Leben. Sein Fazit: Die enormen Veränderungen dieser Zeit sind von grundlegender Bedeutung für die Welt von heute.

Back Jacket

The essays collected in this authoritative Companion capture the vitality and diversity of scholarship that exists on the transformative time period known as late antiquity.

For the last generation, late antiquity - the time between the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the end of Roman rule in the Mediterranean - has come to be regarded as one of the most dynamic periods of ancient history. Once seen as a time of decline and fall, late antiquity is now viewed as an era of powerful transformation, in which the peoples and institutions that profoundly influenced the modern world took shape.

In providing a useful overview of current scholarship on late antiquity, the essays emphasize the central importance of religion in this period. Theology and belief are situated in historical context as the book highlights the interconnectedness of religious life with economic, social, and political realms.

Author Biography

Philip Rousseau is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Christian Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Early Christian Centuries (2002), Basil of Caesarea (1994), Pachomius The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (1985), and Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome (1978). He is the joint editor (with Tomas Hägg) of Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (2000).