The geographical writing of late Antiquity was as complex and multi-faceted as the historiography of the same period. The De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, Isidore's Origines and the work of the anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna all provide snapshots of the state of geographical learning between ad400 and 750, but to regard their surveys as typical of contemporary responses to the world would be a gross oversimplification. In the absence of any formally defined geographical discipline, descriptions of the world were fitted into the literary moulds provided by a host of different genres. Works of exegesis and poetry, hagiography and political rhetoric all incorporated geographical themes, and all proved to be invaluable to the transmission of geographical knowledge.

It was within historiography that geographical thought in late Antiquity found its most natural medium. The long description of the world which opened Orosius' fifth-century Historia both represented one of the most influential geographical compositions of the post-Roman period, and established a precedent for the inclusion of such prefaces within works of Christian historiography. The relationship between historical and geographical thought has always been a close one, and in presenting his own description of the world so prominently, Orosius merely highlighted the symbiosis between the two disciplines. Yet the significance of Orosius' innovation should not be underestimated. In the aftermath of the Spanish presbyter, descriptive geography, quite as much as narrative history, became an essential tool of the historian's craft.