Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
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A beautifully written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity by one of the world’s most influential and distinguished historians
The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium” now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.
Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new and influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues that include the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the French theorist Michel Foucault, and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the “grand endeavor” to reimagine a decisive historical moment.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Princeton University Press (6 Jun. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 736 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0691242283 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0691242286 |
| Dimensions | 16.51 x 4.45 x 24.13 cm |
by North Yorkshire
Peter Brown’s career is both successful, and constantly innovative. He is known for his work on that bit of history between the Roman Empire and the Medieval period (let’s say around 300CE to 800CE). He was part of a generation of scholars that made this transitional period interesting, precisely because it was so muddled, dynamic, and well, transitional. He brought social anthropology into play to explain why they did such odd stuff and had such odd ideas back then.
This was not a historical mirror in which we could recognise ourselves, like when scholars thought they could reach back and shake hands with classical Greeks and Romans. These late antique guys were different: they believed in holy men, ate anniversary meals in graveyards, developed odd ideas about money, and sexuality. And Peter Brown made it clear that we could learn a lot about history and social meaning from all this.
So, I was keen to read this intellectual biography. He tells it, in his trademark elegant style – and with his trademark collegial good manners (no academic points-scoring here). The book is constructed through a series of (many) micro-essays, starting with the author’s Irish ancestors and then on to his successful career. Like all successful folk he meets lots of mentors, helpers and able students. He seems to just pick up a wide array of languages (including Latin, Greek, French and German – obviously – but then Italian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Coptic, Persian, Hebrew ‘so I could learn Syriac’, and son on, all while having a busy schedule doing other things). In the final few chapters he mentions he is starting to learn Turkish.
But it is not self-congratulatory; he comes across as very modest and eager to record debts to a range of others. The pleasure of the books comes in his pen-portraits of books and ideas (as much as individuals). He is constantly learning (which is really the tale he told of St Augustine in his 1967 biography) and eager to find new ways of thinking, seeing and engaging. For me, it had a bit of the vibe of Dylan’s other-absorbed biography, Chronicles.
This is a (another) book (by the author) that conveys a lot of information without feeling at all teachy or preachy. It is easy to dip in and out of, and, in many ways, is a history of how the modern academic system came about. But most of all, it is the story of a someone being fascinated and absorbed by something his whole life. I can’t recommend this enough.