Wed, 17 Oct 2007
A dozen late antiquities
From Peter Brown's lecture:
It was soon apparent to me that each country had its own classical tradition, its own late antiquity and, very much, its own conflict of Christianity and paganism. To pick up the unmistakable tone of a laïc Frenchman in the Empire chrétien of André Piganiol, of a conservative Catholic in an Italian journal or of a Lutheran contributor to the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte was much more than to discover the "bias" of a particular article. It was to add alternative layers to one’s own heart and mind, by seeing one’s own preoccupations with Christianity in the last centuries of the Roman Empire from the standpoint of European cultures very different from one’s own.
posted by Bill White at 01:24 | permalink | email me | | |
Tue, 16 Oct 2007
Late Antique man
Here's Peter Brown's recent inaugural address (pdf) at the opening of the Oxford Center for Late Antiquity. A random bibliophilic quote:
Only recently, I experienced a feeling of strangeness as I sat at home, reading Morin's edition of newly discovered sermons of Augustine, printed in the 1930 centenary collection of Miscellanea Agostiniana. There was good reason for this sense of unease. This massive tome with its generous print and wide margins had its allotted place in the Theology section of the Lower Bodleian. To be precise, it was near to the window overlooking the inner courtyard, to the left as you entered from Classics. To think of removing it from that place was as inconceivable as to think of removing a feature from a well-known landscape - like stealing the Rock of Gibraltar or removing the head of Washington from Mount Rushmore. A few hours later, to place pages of this volume across a xerox machine, so as to make copies of Sermon Denis 24 for the use of a seminar, awoke in me an Oedipal thrill which (in the 1950s) would have kept the Freudian analysts of that distant age in business.
posted by Bill White at 10:46 | permalink | email me | | |
