“He is one of very few scholars now alive who have, in effect, invented a field of study”
Peter Brown: A Life of Learning – American Council of Learned Societies; Haskins Lecture, 2003
I remember the occasion when, in 1988, I had to perform the sad duty of writing the obituary of my friend and mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano. In order to do this, I found that I had to read myself into the intellectual and academic background of the Italy in which the young Momigliano had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, I had to study something of the life and thought of the great Neapolitan philosopher, Benedetto Croce, whose Idealist philosophy of history had played a formative role in the historical culture of Italy at that time. You can imagine my surprise when I read, in a short memoir on Croce, written by a contemporary, that, sometime around 1900, the philosopher had challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysical philosophy. This was the sort of information which makes one turn the page. I turned the page. No further information was provided. Plainly, the author of the memoir considered that, for his readers, the event was so normal, so much part of the academic life of Naples at the turn of the century, as to require no explanation. The sentence stood there, unashamed, unglossed. It was like coming upon an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – “This year were dragons seen in the sky.” I realized, with a shock, that Momigliano was a man deeply familiar to me… From Brown’s Hoskin’s Lecture
Download Peter Brown’s Hoskins Lecture, 2003
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Distinguished throughout the world, Professor Brown has received Honorary Degrees at Fribourg, Switzerland (1974), the University of Chicago (1978), Trinity College, Dublin (1990), Wesleyan University (1993), Tulane University (1994), Royal Holloway College, University of London (1996), the University of Pisa (2001), Columbia University (2001) and Harvard University(2002). Brown is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the American Society of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Medieval Academy of America, the Royal Netherlands Academy, and the Academia de Bones Artes, Barcelona. He has received the Arts Council of Great Britain Award (1967), a MacArthur Fellowship (1982), the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award (1989), the Vursell Award (1990), the Heineken Prize, Amsterdam (1994), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Lettres et des Arts (1996), and an Andrew Mellon Fellowship (2002). Professor Brown also held an ACLS Fellowship in 1980-1981
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“He is one of very few scholars now alive who have, in effect, invented a field of study,” wrote an eminent scholar nominating Peter Brown to be the Haskins Lecturer. That field, the “burgeoning one of late antique studies,” has since become “an expanding galaxy of scholarship in history, religion, literature and much more for which Brown’s work provided the initiating Big Bang, and in which he continues to function as a benevolent and generous Providence.” Before “Brown’s Big Bang,” late antiquity, the period between 250 and 800 C.E., was viewed through the lens provided by Edward Gibbon, which saw a half millennium of Decline And Fall plunging the Western World into a darkness unrelieved until the Renaissance.
Peter Brown has led the way to a new understanding of a period of enduring social, cultural and religious importance. During this period Roman Law, the basis of much of contemporary jurisprudence, was codified. The Christian Church in both its Latin Catholic and Eastern forms settled on basic structures of organization and belief. The rabbinate took form in Judaism, and the Talmud was codified. Islam was founded. Peter Brown captures the sweep of these tumultuous changes and invites us to experience them. J.E. Lendon called Professor Brown’s Power and Persuasion one of those rare books, accessible, important, interesting, and well-written, that students of antiquity should be eager to thrust out from the dark cave of their arcane discipline and into the gaze of a wider scholarly/ public.”
Twenty years ago, Professor Brown delivered the ACLS Lectures in the History of Religions, lectures that became The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Let me share with you one brief passage from the epilogue of that magnificent work. The following selection demonstrates, I feel, that Peter Brown yields nothing to Gibbon in literary mastery, yet is able to deploy historiographic precision in service of the reader’s imaginary and humane understanding. Peter Brown writes:
To modern persons, whatever their religious beliefs, the Early Christian themes of sexual renunciation, of continence, celibacy, and the virgin life have come to carry with them icy overtones. The very fact that modern Europe and America grew out of the Christian World that replaced the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages has ensured that even today, these notions still crowd in upon us, as pale, forbidding presences. Historians must bring to them their due measure of warm, red blood. By studying their precise social and religious context, the scholar can give back to these ideas a little of the human weight that they once carried in their own time. When such an offering is made, the chill shades may speak to us again, and perhaps more gently than we had thought they might, in the strange tongue of a long-lost Christianity.
We were fortunate to have Peter Brown speak to us directly from and about his life of learning on May 9, 2003, and we are pleased to bring his Haskins Lecture to a wider audience now.
Francis Oakley, Interim President; American Council of Learned Societies
Source: A Life of Learning
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Christianity, Violence, and the West
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Socrates, the soul and the cosmos
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The New Associationist Movement
After the truth-shower 