the fall of rome and the end of civilization by bryan ward perkins

Now two British scholars who have been of the generation of Reformers have written almost identically-titled books (and both will be published in this country by Oxford University Press) that make the case for the resistant views to a general audience. The Counters focus their attention on the western empire, prefer military and political history to religious, have an Eeyore-like preoccupation with declines and falls, and are in the main untouched by “theory” and other broader academic projects. The Reformers speak more often of the eastern empire than of the western, show more interest in religious and cultural history than other streams, speak of rises rather than falls, and are at home in dialogue with similar strains of interpretation in other humanistic disciplines. The main lines of difference between the New and the New-Old are straightforward. The Bible of the Reformation, so to speak, will be the revised edition of Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom of 2003. Wolfgang Liebeschuetz has been a leader of the Counters, most recently with the impressive The Decline and Fall of the Roman City, but the manual of the neocon approach is to be found in the splendid thirteenth and fourteenth volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History, for all that many of the old Reformers were among the authors and editors. A memorable conference at Smith College in 1999 brought together the now senior worthies of the last generation in a confrontation that surprised many by the sharpness with which Reformers and Counter-Reformers spoke up for their views. If the Reformation began when Peter Brown pounded twice ninety-five pages of The World of Late Antiquity on the basilica door in 1971 and flourished through at least the 1980s, the 1990s have seen the rise of the resistance. The Counter-Reformation in late antique studies is well under way.

The fall of rome and the end of civilization by bryan ward perkins