Professor Peter R.L. Brown’s autobiography, Journeys of the Mind, takes the reader from his family background and childhood memories across his gradual evolution as a scholar to reveal how his career contributed so fundamentally to our understanding of the history of the Mediterranean. As expected from the premise of a scholar’s autobiography, we are kindly invited into Brown’s research and thought world which produced such works as the biography of St. Augustine, the rara avis of his field-forming book The World of Late Antiquity, the articles and monographs on the formation and the rise of the cult of saints, and his writing of a major “textbook” in The Rise of Western Christendom (first as part of the series “The Making of Europe” but later revised into quite a different look into the same matter), and his most current volumes which deal with poverty and wealth in early Christian society.

Brown’s autobiography will naturally be received as a testament to the transformative power of historical study. Through personal anecdotes, reflective insights, and vivid descriptions, this tome is a delightful treasure trove in its rich and nuanced portrayal of his intellectual journey. It is not only a valuable contribution to the field of historiography but also an inspiring account of a particular scholar’s lifelong quest for knowledge and understanding. Across the book, the reader can trace how Brown’s understanding of the ancient world evolved pari passu with his personal appreciation of his own time, place, and the particular communities which shaped him as a scholar and a human. For example, Brown’s aunts, Mai and Teedah, make recurring appearances in Journeys of the Mind as the embodiment of his intended wider audience, educated readers beyond the world of academe.

The first half of Brown’s autobiography presents detailed descriptions and explanations of his own religious and denominational identity within its social setting in Ireland and abroad. This early part of the book, where Brown re-visits his childhood and analyses the Irish Protestant society of which his family was a part, provides us with a lens through which to understand Brown’s scholarly interest in the ethnicities and religious minorities of the Roman world and early Christendom. As a long-time student of Brown’s who had heard many of his offhand comparisons of the Irish and the British with late Roman society, this section revealed that what might have seemed on the surface to have been “P.B.’s family anecdotes” were actually fruits of a serious, multifaceted, life-long gestation of Brown’s approach to the issue of identity – a level of scholarly reflection germinating in his childhood but discovering echoes and similar situations in chronicles and hagiographies from the ancient and medieval Mediterranean. This childhood experience of identity became a leitmotif which no doubt helped direct him to, and keep at, historical ethnic studies in an era in which Greek and Latin were viewed as the only “serious” languages for Roman historians. Brown utilized this consciousness as part of a prism through which he could ask new questions of old material and usher in new perspectives.

In the second part of the book, the reader finds much more than mere background information for the scholarly mind that wrote the books mentioned above. Brown’s narration of many travels for research (and conferences) is a key thread to his narrative. Arguably, the most crucial of his international travels and sojourns was the one to and within Iran in the late 1970s. Brown had embarked upon a study of the conflicts between the Roman Empire and the Sasanian Empire and to that end he had acquired a good level of Farsi and had connected with academics who would receive and host him during his visit there. We read that in Iran, Brown not only cherished the great opportunity of visiting well-known sites but also prized his interaction with academic circles. Such intellectual encounters, at one point at least, gave him a “sharp lesson” that “to understand a regime on its own terms … could all too easily seem to others to come dangerously close to appearing to legitimize it.” In these words, Brown offers an insight that current scholars of late antiquity would do well to learn even today.

Journeys of the Mind also makes the reader wonder about a tantalizing counterfactual. What if the Islamic Revolution had not closed the borders and Brown had continued working on that project on Rome and the Sasanians? Ultimately, Brown did come to argue that the history of the Mediterranean is best understood in conjunction with the history of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau. But if he had reached that insight in the early 1980s instead of at the end of the century, we would, perhaps, have been deprived of Brown’s other rich analyses of the history of Christianity in the Mediterranean world as he eventually came to this understanding. The second half of the autobiography traces the many steps as Brown found his own way eastward, cobbling together languages, recipes, prayers, and cultural spolia with a view to demonstrating that the Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity was inseparably dependent on its interaction with neighboring regions, including Iran.

So frequently in Journeys of the Mind, I was struck by how much Brown’s foreign travels and his way of relating them produce a potent corollary and response to the historian’s dictum “The past is a foreign country”. In Brown’s narrative, we see that the historian visits these “foreign countries” with the purpose of discovering and re-establishing sources of a civilization through scholarly training in that civilization – hence to redefine “the Past”. But in the end, the historian experiences an irreplicable encounter with culture and history. It is not the “the Past” that is rediscovered, but it is the historian se ipse who is transformed during this encounter and thus enabled to “see the Past”.

A prime example of this transformation is found in Brown’s depiction of his visit to the Armenian Cathedral at Esfahan narrated in Chapter 63. At a memorial service in that cathedral not only does Brown “see” biblical motifs like the figure of Moses and the burning bush in the celebrant priest and his chalice at the altar but also the lifting and the lowering of the altar curtains offer him of glimpses from the Sasanian throne-room protocol and their at least partial transference to the courts of Diocletian and Constantius II in the West. Brown presents a cogent reminder that while technological advances (such as using satellite imaging) may augment our preparation for our journeys, the first-hand experience of traveling to these locations is still needed for the tasks which the historian seeks to accomplish.

Besides accounts of his travel, Brown’s reflections on teaching also offer valuable insights into his historiographical approach. His Oxford lectures on Byzantium, Persia, and Islam were, for him, an exciting journey into new intellectual territories. He recounts the thrill of exploring these interconnected worlds through a series of eight lectures, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between different cultures and empires. Readers are also happily treated to the joys of language learning in Brown’s depiction of his Hebrew instruction (Chapter 48), which also leads – somewhat inevitably – to Brown’s realization of the importance of Syriac for the study of Late Antiquity, alongside Greek and Latin. In that chapter, Brown gives us fair warning about the importance and value of the “old style” of learning a language, which today’s champions of artificial intelligence and internet translation devices cannot essentially fathom:

Granted, Brown has elsewhere expressed enthusiasm for the wonders of advanced search engines and their outputs but, obviously, as he put it in the following page, a simple translation of texts, however masterful, would fail to form more than a superficial understanding of the cultural material at hand:

Hebrew, we learn, helped him discover so many crucial dimensions of ancient society which Greek and Latin sources frequently missed. Later, he added Syriac to these three, and it was from his discoveries in Syriac sources that he had embarked upon the study of the cult of saints. Most recently, Brown’s attention has turned to Classical Ethiopic. The reader hopes that from this latest stage in the widening of cultural horizons, Brown may yet find it pleasing to re-visit Christianization in northern Africa and the formation of Christian sectarian identities (699).

At the close of the book, Brown reveals that he has written Journeys of the Mind as the culmination of a private desire or even necessity to be reminded of “the tragic blindness of those we study in the past” (685). This endeavor has led Brown to travel through so many diverse “institutional settings, of scholarly backgrounds and of individual intellectual trajectories” (698). His autobiography is a practical demonstration of the plethora of influences in the formation of an historian. The narrative flows so smoothly that readers may aspire to finish the whole text in two or three days, but it is best to be enjoyed at different sittings in different environments in order not to miss many subtleties. Like the story of late antiquity itself, Brown’s intellectual journey had many potential trajectories, and the places he has taken us as an historian are worth visiting all over again.

Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History by Peter Brown is a subtle and profound reveal of the personal intellectual journey of the most eminent scholar of late antiquity, his life-long wandering around the world, moving the academic boundaries, cultivating meaningful scholarly discourses, and promoting the ultimate joy of listening, questioning, and learning. Masterfully written with passion and compassion, with personal and intellectual integrity, the entire manuscript is approachable to both specialists and the general audience. Although substantial, the book can be read in one sitting. The text reveals Brown once again as the master of storytelling in his native English, as well as an impeccable command of numerous modern and ancient languages. This review highlights a few key aspects of this multifaceted book, which focuses on the relevance of Christian architecture and visual arts, as well as the role of gender in shaping the field of late antique studies.

To a scholar mostly writing about architecture and visual arts in the eastern parts of Europe and the Mediterranean, Journeys of the Mind brings a joyful surprise to learn how the visual opulence of Christian architecture articulated a pivotal moment and Brown’s decision to study the medieval world and its relevance today. He traveled widely and visited many architectural sites across the globe. Yet, the beauty of medieval and neo-medieval architecture played a critical role in his intellectual journey. Brown records, “I became a medievalist through my eyes” (111). Such a light-hearted, simple, and explicit reason. Almost religious and certainly spiritual, this love of Christian architecture is intimately connected to Brown’s personal identity as an Irish Protestant, his great respect for humanity and biblical culture, and his career-long studies of the ancient world anchored in the Middle Eastern region.

The paradox of why Byzantine or Eastern European architecture and visual arts are recurrently left on the margins of dominant academic discussions can be summarized by the following facts: Byzantium did not have the Renaissance; Eastern Europe never had the Classical. Brown emphasizes his discontent with “a miserable story of misunderstandings, of high-handed bullying, and, eventually, the sack of the city of Constantinople in 1204” that pivots Byzantine studies (151).Footnote ¹ While scholars continue to engage with critical questions in understanding complex identities of Western civilization bound to the values established in classical antiquity, it is Brown’s massive contribution that brings to the fore relevant intellectual questions about classical antiquity and how it is studied. As a researcher, intellectual, teacher, and human being, Brown in this latest book fully unveils the relevance of “late antiquity” that marks his professional standing. Telling are the visual representations of Roman emperors from Augustus in the first century CE and those from the time of Diocletian and Constantine I in the fourth century. The social messages of the imagery perplexed many, prompting questions about the idealized depictions of eternally youthful emperors of the first century Augustan Rome and equally idealized, but with large-eyed heads and anatomically disproportional bodies, representations of emperors of the fourth century, that articulated the so-called Early Christian and Byzantine realm. Masterfully explaining in a couple of pages, that we may easily use in a variety of classroom settings, including student novices, Brown details how he adopted the term “late antiquity” without pejorative meanings for his own studies of late antiquity that are focusing on time, space, embodiment, and ultimately people.Footnote ² I will use Chapter 31, titled “Decadence” or “Late Antiquity”? (180–185) and 54, titled “The World of Late Antiquity” (367–372) in classes I teach. Suggested initially as spätrömische Kunst and then Spätantike by German-speaking art historians more than a century ago,Footnote ³ debated by French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou,Footnote ⁴ but fully articulated within wide intellectual discourse in the last four decades, late antiquity (roughly from 200 to 700 CE) as a vital historical period successfully brings together classicists, medievalists, and humanists of various kinds at the table.Footnote ⁵ The book additionally confirms that in heart and mind, despite his impeccable training in classical studies, Brown is a “medieval” scholar.

The intellectual setting at Oxford in the 1950s is especially vividly described in the book. While a student at Oxford University, Brown, genuinely a medievalist, had a chance to study with C. S. Lewis, who was, as Brown writes, the embodiment of the “very ‘Oxford’” (143–151). The thin presence of Byzantium at Oxford is intensely described by a recollection of lectures on Byzantine-Russian relations given by Dimitri Obolensky (158–159). Only a Chinese female student and Brown came to listen to Obolensky. The Chinese student left after the first lecture. Peter Brown stayed for the entire series of Obolensky’s presentations that later became the core of the classic book, The Byzantine Commonwealth. Footnote ⁶ In 2025, Byzantine studies remain on the margins of wider scholarly debates, and this remarkable episode from the early 1950s is telling.

The book also reveals Brown as a kind of true feminist-scholar with a peculiar nonactivist agenda. In contrast to many scholars, both women and men, who came to the very top but rarely acknowledge their mothers, aunts, wives, and other women, including students and colleagues, Brown’s book abundantly credits them for his intellectual and personal development. Mary Douglas and Michel Foucault are among several scholars today widely recognized and whose thought-provoking studies Brown credits for his studies of men, women, and sexuality in late antiquity. Anthropologist Mary Douglas and her vigorous studies of religious societies strengthened him in his investigations of late antiquity without the melodrama and self-imposed superiority typical of Enlightenment intellectuals (294, 327–334).Footnote ⁷ When philosopher and collocutor Michel Foucault actively engaged with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,Footnote ⁸ Peter Brown decided to write about those who did not practice sex, above all focusing on monks and holy men (579–590).Footnote ⁹ Many women who did not fully succeed in their professional quests remained memorable in Brown’s book. Telling is the career of Roberta Bondi (Roberta Chesnut), who was cut off at Oxford for asking a question on the meaning of the Book of Job, arguably the most difficult and emotionally straining of all in the Scriptures (312–315). She did find her intellectual comfort by establishing herself as a scholar of Church History teaching at the Catholic University of Notre Dame and eventually becoming a professor emerita at Emory. Equally inspiring are stories about successful women scholars like Kimberly Bowes of the University of Pennsylvania, whom Brown acknowledges not only as a brilliant former student but also as an intellectual who propelled a new field of archeological studies of the Roman poor (693).Footnote ¹⁰

The book is a testament to unpredictable intellectual and professional paths in many ways. Such intellectual integrity and honesty are seldom publicly presented. We all can empathize with academic ups and downs, practice knowledge, reading positive and negative reviews of our work with passion and commitment, and the ultimate joy when doing something intellectually meaningful. Brown acknowledges that he applied for but never received a National Endowment for Humanities Grant. Then again, unexpected funds from the MacArthur Fellowship (1982) and the Mellon Foundation (2001) allowed him to start from scratch the interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University (638–644). Brown directed the Center and collaborated closely with the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton under the stalwart stewardship of executive director Dimitri Gondicas. These two vibrant centers continue to map the pivotal scholarly hubs for historical and transdisciplinary research of everything Mediterranean from classical antiquity to the present. Many scholars benefited on multiple occasions from grace, humanity, and intellectual vigor steered by Brown and Gondicas at these two centers for the studies of late antiquity and the Hellenic world.

I was taken by Brown’s deep family ties and emotional realities of life of the scholar crossing and moving the academic fields, searching for a professionally receptive and fulfilling place, but ultimately physically leaving the place of origin in his native Sandycove, Ireland. Settled in “high gravity” Princeton, USA (638–644) Brown developed a magnificent professional career, yet he never forgot how he had to leave his nuclear family and loved ones behind. Despite frequent financial and health hardships since his early childhood, his family unconditionally supported him to live and fulfill a spiritually and intellectually rich life. The book recognizes the work and life of Brown’s father, mother, and aunt Freda, in particular. These personal, intimate stories justify this book as a memoir closely intertwined with the narrative about the scholarly fields of history and late antiquity.

Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History is a genuine, motivational, empathetic, and encouraging book of interest to aspiring and established intellectuals, including scholars interested in early Christianity and Church History.

In a very interesting and entertaining book, I found the Irish section most interesting of all. I used to dismiss Professor Brown’s Irish background as a mere picturesque detail, a conversation piece. How Irish could a man be who had never learned Irish and had left Ireland at 13 years old? Now I see how wrong I was. It is clear that this precocious teenager took Ireland with him everywhere he went, and this includes his “journeys of the mind” to the ancient and medieval worlds. Professor Brown grew up in what to me is a very strange, distant world. He belonged to a social and religious group that had been made to feel homeless at home.Footnote ¹ The Protestants of Ireland had once been the British-backed ruling elite of the island. They had controlled much of the land, trade, and all the cultural institutions. They did not see themselves as only Irish, and they had given generations of their offspring to serve in the British Empire. Now, however, their villas were gone, burnt by Catholic peasants. The new Irish nation-state had no place for them: it defined itself as Gaelic and Catholic and saw the Protestants as the remnant of the British garrison in Ireland. It even attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive the moribund Irish language.

The result was a dramatic demographic decline of the so-called Anglo-Irish. Protestants such as Brown’s family became a small and anxious minority who kept their head down and only talked to each other. A mutually accepted form of apartheid divided the country. The social life and identity of Protestants were now organized around their declining churches. The result of this depressing situation has been defined as “low-intensity unhappiness.”Footnote ² Yet these Protestants still controlled most of the cultural institutions of the country. Irish Protestants have produced an extraordinary number of internationally famous writers. Books, literature, and good writing were clearly an important part of their identity. One only has to read Professor Brown’s letters to his parents to be convinced of this. Young Brown would not have been out of place among the sophists of 2nd-century Asia Minor! In any case, nobody who reads about the history of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century can fail to see the connections between this world and the debates between Frend and Brown on the nature of Donatism in late Roman Africa. Issues such as religious coercion and intolerance, the relationship between ethnicity and religion, the issue of local and cosmopolitan languages, and the use of violence and boycotts to intimidate your religious rivals – all of these were of more than academic importance for an Irishman.

An Irish protestant such as Brown is a hybrid, liminal character, a perpetual outsider. He is neither fully Irish nor fully English. Granted, he had a very privileged British education and spent years at All Souls College mingling with the elite of Britain. Yet one gets the impression that he never felt quite at home at Oxford. For all intents and purposes, he seems to have educated himself, and he seems to have met like-minded persons only when international Patristic conferences brought together scholars from all over Europe.Footnote ³ The feeling may be mutual. His work has had less influence on English scholarship than in the rest of Europe and America, and his most outspoken critics are all English. One reason for this seems clear to me: Professor Brown has always been a profoundly religious person. Being myself of the same persuasion as Pierre Hadot and Arnaldo Momigliano – that is, non-religious – I refused to accept this for a long time. But reading his memoir leaves no doubt. I do not know whether one has to be personally religious to understand ancient religion. What I do know is that Brown has a sensibility and appreciation for religious matters that is very unusual, not to say unique among both modern and ancient historians. In his works, religion, and especially Christianity, always holds center stage. Of course, historians of Christianity are a dime a dozen. What sets Brown apart is that he studies religion in its social and cultural context in such a way that the reader always gets a total history, not a religious history.

In any case, the fact remains that, more than anything else, Peter Brown is the historian of Christianization, and this made him to some degree an outsider to mainstream scholarship. It is remarkable how many of the scholars who have been highly influential on his intellectual development were deeply religious persons themselves: Norman Baynes, the Baptist preacher; William Frend, ordained as a priest in his old age; Derwas Chitty, an Anglican clergyman; Henri Marrou, the French Catholic intellectual; Mary Douglas, a conservative Catholic anthropologist; Robert Markus a convert to Catholicism; Claude Lepelley, a Catholic admirer of Anglicanism, and many others. These are all great scholars, but none of them is among the celebrities of historical scholarship of the 20th century. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s of the last century, a serious historian was a social historian. He had no doubt that what he did was the right way of doing things. He engaged in high-level theoretical discussions and grand-standing declarations of what history should or should not be, all of which Brown has always avoided. In England, one also has to keep in mind the powerful legacy of Gibbon, who gave intellectual legitimacy to the “polite disregard for religion” that the English were taught to show.Footnote ⁴ Remarkably, Gibbon is barely mentioned in this book. We do not even learn when Brown read this, the greatest of all books on the fall of the Roman empire, nor what influence it had on him.

It is all too easy to connect Brown’s passion for religious history with his Irish background. As he mentions several times, in the highly sectarian world of Ireland, his identity was simply that of a Protestant. But Brown has been a very strange Anglo-Irish Protestant. A Protestant who loves ancient and modern Catholics and Catholic things: monks and holy men, relics, ritual, sexual renunciation, Christian art, and domineering bishops. Even worse, he eventually came to also love Muslims and – to Moses Finley’s dismay – late antique pagans. The move to Oxford as a young man seems to have triggered in him a revolt against the sectarianism of Ireland that has marked his personality ever since. He has always been uncomfortable with distinctions that imply judgments of value. He has seen it as his mission to rescue the past from the prejudices and judgment of posterity. Distinctions such as Roman vs. Barbarian, Christian vs. Pagan, western vs. eastern, popular culture vs. elite culture, high empire vs. low empire, religious vs. secular, and even public vs. private are often regarded as suspect or misleading in his works. He is an incorrigible optimist and will always see the glass half full rather than half empty. This is true not only of the way he treats ancient individuals, groups, and historical periods as a whole but also the way he treats his students.

This leads us to the last aspect of his work I want to highlight: his anticlassicism. From a young age, Professor Brown has seen it as his goal to decenter ancient history, both chronologically and geographically. Most famously, he did this in his World of Late Antiquity with its revolutionary eastern emphasis. We see the same in this book. There are no loving descriptions of Mediterranean food and landscapes, of Roman ruins or of the excitement of learning the Greek and Latin languages. He takes all of this for granted. Only incidentally, for example, do we learn that he has been in Spain. Most surprising of all, he seems to have been in no hurry to visit and re-visit Rome itself. He also shows little interest in German scholars and the New Testament. I can hear an angry Moses Finley once again complaining: Brown is “overlooking the core of classical civilization.”Footnote ⁵ I had of course been familiar with this side of professor Brown’s scholarship for a long time. After all, I went to Princeton to work on the history of Christian Egypt using Coptic literary texts, and I took courses in Syriac and Arabic. But I had never suspected the extent of Brown’s interest in Iran and Islam since it has left so little trace in his published work. This is perhaps the most surprising part of this book to me. His journeys to Iran loom very large in this memoir and we learn of his truncated plan to write a history of Iran à la Braudel. I would give my right arm to have that book.

Journeys of the Mind was, to me, a bittersweet read. I met Professor Brown long after most of the events described in these pages. Yet the book made me think of my own past, of how I discovered his work, how I came to meet him, and the impression he made on me. As Augustine says, time takes no holiday.Footnote ⁶ That clueless Argentine student who arrived in Princeton in 2002 is now dead, and I am alive. But some things I will never forget. I recall, for example, sitting in a small classroom more than 20 years ago. It was my very first semester, and this was a class on “Purity and Pollution in Ancient Religions” led by Professor William Childs and inspired by the work of Mary Douglas. The reason I remember this particular session, however, is that Professor Brown had decided to join us and was sitting near me among other students. To my left was my friend Dan Schwartz who was giving a presentation on eunuchs in late antiquity. As Dan started speaking, Professor Brown took out a small notebook and started anxiously taking notes. He was the only one doing so. I remember feeling shocked, almost offended. As far as I was concerned, this man literally knew everything. What was he writing down? What could he be learning from us beginners? Was this false modesty? Was he trying to teach us a lesson? No, it was none of these things. I eventually figured it out: this is who he is. He has a fool-proof faith in the capacity of all humans – ancient and modern – to think for themselves. Everybody – even his first-year students – has a story to tell, and every story is worth listening to.

So many of the pleasures of Peter Brown’s Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History lie in the author’s revisiting encounters that helped shape him as a scholar. We watch him as an undergraduate, reading Henri-Irénée Marrou’s book on St. Augustine as the centerpiece of a dying, classical world and his delight at Marrou’s Retractatio, a subsequent change of heart, which concluded instead that the later empire of St. Augustine was “a vigorous organism, still evolving” (181). We hear of his work at All Souls in the late 1960s and his exchanges with Mary Douglas, whose anthropological work helped him reexamine the character of religion in late antiquity, to uncouple belief in demons from the decline of classical civilization (335–7), and ultimately “to tell a new story about the later empire” (338). We see his research on sexual renunciation in early Christianity taking shape while he taught at Berkeley in the 1980s, several intense meetings with Michel Foucault, and his conclusion that Foucault’s idea of human sexuality as “a time-bound creation” (582) “set historians free to do what they had always done: to study the past on its own terms” (583). In short, we follow the establishment of Late Antiquity as a distinct field of study and its lively expansion.

But the opening chapters, which are devoted to his growing up in Dublin as a member of the minority Protestant community, spending summers in Ireland and winters in Sudan for his father’s engineering work, and schooling in Shropshire among the English, were just as essential in his formation as a scholar. They suggest that qualities that have made his books not just foundational for those in the field of Late Antiquity but also compelling reading for wider audiences were developed equally outside the classroom. During a gap year back in Ireland, for example, after graduating from Shrewsbury School, and before going on to Oxford in 1953, we see Brown taking shorthand and typing at a technical college. For the first time, he is in a classroom with girls his own age, welcomed by Catholic girls from the neighborhood, “good-natured, talkative, and shrewd.” He notes that, though the students all typed their exercises in English, they did so on machines with Irish characters in a nationalistically Celtic font, “designed for the bureaucracy of the new Ireland” (125–6). His sensitivity to details of ordinary life in revealing distinctions of national, religious, and social background made him alert to the pull of those loyalties in his Late Antique subjects (7), distinctions parsed in these pages with curiosity and open-minded civility.

Peter Brown’s lectures on the early Middle Ages routinely drew graduate students in Art and Archaeology across the lawn toward Princeton’s justifiably famous History department. (History also excelled in esprit de corps: successful undergraduate majors turned in their senior theses and walked away with a commemorative tee-shirt that said on the front, MY SENIOR THESIS… and on the back… IS HISTORY). We in the history of art sat in on those lectures not just to take advantage of one of the lights of the faculty, but frankly, for the joy of listening.

The things I most enjoyed about his lectures at Princeton, his publications, and his conversation, also animate this most recent book. If I can talk about just four, one is his immersion in the physical world of the cultures he studies. In Journeys of the Mind, we hear about Brown’s youthful stint in the archives, researching a local election in 1796—a singular project, as classicists usually deal with texts but not individual documents. That project was certainly a great success, but despite the lure of intriguing eighteenth-century documents tied together with pink tape and affixed by pins (112), archival research apparently was an experience that did not really take, professionally. Instead, we see him drawn into history by literal journeys. We get to see, early on in his school years, evidence for the benefits of being where it happened, when one of the masters at Shrewsbury School, Laurence LeQuesne, has his students bicycling to explore medieval sites such as a thirteenth-century bishop’s castle. “Here,” Brown writes, “was a truly distant world ruled by its own values and committed to its own sense of time and beauty. Whether we liked it or not, the modern world was flanked by a majestic presence that would not go away” (115). His decision to become a medievalist was a conversion experience brought on during his initial visit to Oxford, where he admired the stained glass and stone carvings and was enchanted by the Gothic atmosphere. “I resolved, at that moment, that I would study the Middle Ages. I would enter into the minds of the architects and craftsmen who produced such masterpieces…. I became a medievalist through my eyes” (110–11). Much later on, he spends time traveling across Turkey, along the route of a seventeenth-century Ottoman gentleman author, Evliya Çelebi, to understand through archeological remains and surviving social structures how the Ottoman Empire was superimposed over the Roman Empire in the East (690–1).

Linked to that sense of place is his rarer ability to visualize details of the past, almost as if he dreams himself there. It is more than archeological reconstruction; it is wondering what daily circumstances might have been like for someone raised in a distant place and time, and using poignant details not just to ensnare the reader (though it certainly does that) but to remind us that we are dealing with a different world. I was thrilled to discover that we were both introduced early on to the study of the fifteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands by the same classic book: Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, with its depiction of a world equally vivid and strange to our sensibilities. Huizinga describes late-medieval Flanders not by trying to convince us that its inhabitants are “just like us,” but by highlighting its strangeness, writing: “The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.”Footnote ¹ Medieval life, as he describes it, was punctuated by the ringing of church bells, public weeping, five-hour sermons, and frequent processions, whether in service to civic punishment, religious penitence, or the flexing of political muscle. It is brilliant, scene-setting cultural history that includes the senses and emotions, much more effective than introducing an era with a string of dates and dramatis personae. (And an approach apparently quite different from the prevailing art-historical lectures offered during Brown’s time at Oxford, that did not look up from the archives; 162–3). I can see that imagination and empathy in his evocation of individual late-antique lives and his characterization of the historian’s charge as “what was it like?” (xv). And thus, I forgive him for characterizing the cast of the magnificent Burgundian tapestries in Berne (among the late-medieval works I study)—featuring Trajan and Julius Caesar in fifteenth-century dress, with pudding-basin haircuts, sinewy legs, jaunty belted jackets, and pointed shoes—as “opulent frogs” (120). While still at Shrewsbury, he had already noted medieval artists’ habit of representing Constantine, for instance, in the dress of their own contemporaries, and wondered, “What sense of time did late-medieval people have, to enable them to think of distant Romans as contemporaries?”—“to live in a culture with no sense of anachronism” (115). This aim of approaching the study of history not “as if it were a discipline for the mind alone” but with imaginative curiosity “chastened and refined” was laid out in a lecture he gave in 1977, concluding, “The unrelieved tension of learning and imagination is the mainspring of the work of the historian.”Footnote ²

Perhaps because of that disciplined curiosity, he can see patterns running below the surface of historical developments. Describing the riptide pull of “the problem of Christianization” on his scholarly interests, he decides: “I now wanted to understand not what happened but what was said to have happened: how the piecemeal and ambiguous process of change by which a pagan society was replaced, over a period of centuries, by a new Christian order, was represented—written about, talked about, remembered, and celebrated—by Christians themselves” (693). We hear how the Christianization of various regions, the way they saw change, depended on narratives that predated the transition from pagan to Christian, helping us understand how they understood. So that, as he explains, Egypt’s interpretation echoes pharaonic myths—“as a long series of clashes between rival gods,” while Armenia sees it as a Zoroastrian struggle between good and evil, and in Ireland, it is down to individual characters as St. Patrick slips into the role of trickster god and outwits pagan landowners (694). These are enormous historical shifts, made comprehensible because he approaches them with that sympathetic curiosity—as if a daydreamy “what must it have been like?” is always hovering over drier scholarly questions.

Finally, none of his enviable historian’s skills would have anywhere near the impact they do on serious and casual readers alike without his concomitant ability to convey what he taps into, so that we can share it. In Journeys of the Mind, he has turned those habits of imagination toward his own growth as a scholar and toward the emergence of the field of Late Antiquity, documenting from the inside “what it was like.” Now the journey, at least as far as to Princeton in 1987, is (to quote a tee-shirt) history. Journeys provides a generous gloss on the origins of the books he has already given us, to answer questions we did not even know enough to ask. I have to borrow the tribute of Pliny the Younger to his uncle, hoping it has not been overused, because it fits this author and this book so well: “The fortunate man, in my opinion, is he to whom the gods have granted the power either to do something which is worth recording or to write what is worth reading, and most fortunate of all is the man who can do both.”Footnote ³

It is a daunting task to offer brief remarks on a large book that ranges from family history, to biography, to charting the myriad people and places that inspired 1000s of pages of historical analysis. Rather than attempt to offer something resembling a review of the book, the following will instead explore some rather idiosyncratic thoughts that stand out as important themes in the book. These thoughts cluster around the importance of place in Prof. Brown’s life as a historian. The importance of travel and movement stands out as a leitmotif of Journeys of the Mind. Prof. Brown repeatedly returns to the role of place in shaping him as a historian, shaping the questions he asks, and shaping the historical interpretations he finds compelling. At one point, he describes his travel in Turkey as opening up “heart-stretching landscapes” (691). Journeys returns repeatedly to the role of place in stretching Prof. Brown and serves as an invitation to consider the role place has played in shaping each of us as well.

Prof. Brown writes evocatively about landscapes throughout Journeys: the Sudan of his childhood, studying in England, his early trips to the Continent, the Pacific coast that reminded him of Ireland (thus easing his transition to life in Berkeley), and his extensive travels in Iran. He beautifully describes the contrast between landed Persia and the mare nostrum of the Roman Empire. In Prof. Brown’s description, we see the power of viewing Persian iwâns, develop a sense of worship in a Zoroastrian fire temple, and see the importance of viewing imperial reliefs in situ. Reading these portions of Journeys offered me context for Prof. Brown’s encouragement many years ago to travel in Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, and to walk Hadrian’s wall. I’ll never forget his enthusiasm as he insisted I pay careful attention to the change in topography around Batman, Turkey, as I traveled from Van to Mardin. The landscape is important.

Iran offers a poignant example of the importance of place to Prof. Brown and his work. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 required a shift in Prof. Brown’s research agenda (not to mention its various other momentous impacts). Having lost the ability to access Iran, Prof. Brown’s desire to do work comparing Rome and Persia struck him as untenable (479–480). Reading texts would be insufficient without access to the landscapes that shaped those texts, landscapes that shaped what lay within the realm of the possible for a landed empire stretching from Mesopotamia to the edge of India.

Prof. Brown’s engagement with the importance of place also extends beyond landscapes. Indeed, many types of places have clearly stretched him. Prior to meeting Prof. Brown as his prospective graduate student in 2001, I thought of libraries as buildings that housed books. They landed on a spectrum of good to bad based on whether or not they had (or could get) the books I wanted to use. Prof. Brown introduced me to the idea, appearing often in Journeys, that a library is a place with a character, we could even say a personality. The Bodleian nurtured the study of Augustine, the Ashmolian was the place for The World of Late Antiquity, and the Graduate Theological Union Library in Berkeley offered the right place for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity (354, 452, 643). Firestone Library at Princeton offered me an excellent place to work as a graduate student, but Prof. Brown always recommended Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary (hence renamed the Wright Library) as the place that would have every text I might want to lay hands on. If I recall the phrase correctly, it was “Now that’s a REAL library.” Later when I arrived for a year of study in Oxford and could look out the window of my student accommodation, through the back garden, and directly into the Oriental Institute library, I knew I was in the right place.

Of course, libraries only have this kind of character because they are places created by human institutions. Prof. Brown’s interest in landscapes always engaged them as inhabited places, both shaped by and shaping the persons and institutions acting within them. In this way, his experiences in Iran showed him physical landscapes intertwined with imaginative landscapes of religious and political significance. These were landscapes imbued with meaning by their inhabitants. Witnessing Muslim, Zoroastrian, and Armenian Christian worship in Iran rendered the worship of God plausible to Prof. Brown in new ways (444). It fostered an empathy for lived religion and the power of religious ideas and communal practices to create communities. Reading these discussions of place in Journeys drew my mind immediately to Prof. Brown’s concept of “micro-Christendoms” and the highly localized interpretations of Christianity he elicits in the Rise of Western Christendom. Footnote ¹ This emphasis on the power of lived religion is something I have always tried to keep at the forefront of my work, no doubt due in part to Prof. Brown’s example.

Prof. Brown’s sense of place also extends to his institutional and geographic moves. His move from Oxford to Royal Halloway inspired new ways of doing history in the realms of both teaching and research. His move to Berkeley opened him to different ways of being in the world as he engaged with colleagues who thought deeply about ethics and social responsibility in a cultural landscape marked by liberation from traditional expectations (539). This place was the backdrop for much of his interaction with Foucault. Berkeley and the communities that inhabited it fostered Prof. Brown’s ability to imagine radically different meanings of sex and the renunciation of sex in late antiquity.Footnote ² In Journeys, we also see Prof. Brown at tea with Mary Douglas (329), in London and Chicago with Arnaldo Momigliano (661–672), and at the Institute for Advanced Study with Glen Bowersock (474–476; 689). As much as I benefited from the holdings of the Oriental Institute library, I believe I benefited more from coffee in the basement with David Taylor, Fergus Millar, and Alison Salveson. These places of our work sustain and shape the communities that add so much meaning to that work. Prof. Brown clearly writes with genuine affection for so many of the people he has learned with over the years.

At several points, the reader encounters Prof. Brown wrestling with the late antique ideas of the dichotomy between the body and the soul, a concept that loomed large in the ancient Mediterranean world and bears much fruit, for good or ill, in the modern world (eg. 377–378). The title, Journeys of the Mind, suggests that Prof. Brown might have come down in favor of this kind of dichotomy and that this autobiography would offer his reader an intellectual account of his career. While Journeys does indeed chart Prof. Brown’s intellectual trajectories, it also does much more. It shows us that journeys of the mind are embodied journeys. They are shaped by “heart-stretching landscapes,” by places bearing the weight of the longue durée, and by networked communities of family, friends, teachers, mentors, colleagues, and indeed critics who inhabit the places we do. Prof. Brown has given us a lovely picture of how his journeys, both mental and physical, have stretched his heart. Journeys offers the reader the privilege of watching how a deep sense of place, both ancient and modern, has shaped Prof. Brown’s scholarly habitus and the various communities which he has labored in nurturing the field of late antiquity.

I cannot thank Dave enough for having organized this occasion, and nor can I sufficiently thank all the panelists – Jelena, Elizabeth, Dan, Kutlu, and Ariel – for the effort that they have all put into their responses to my book, Journeys of the Mind. What they have given me is far more than random comments and criticisms. It is a more precious gift. They have given me back to myself.

It is easy for an author to get lost in the undergrowth of his or her own work – to barrel along, chapter by chapter, story by story, argument by argument, without looking back. It gets the job done. But what one forgets is that, with any major venture, you do not simply write the book. In many ways, the book writes to you. The preoccupations that drive you to write, in the first place, and that carry you through to the end are very often too large to be seen. They emerge slowly as the book itself gets written – word by word, draft by draft – to form patterns that take one by surprise. It is like looking back over a landscape and seeing that it has been molded by the low, sinuous shapes of ancient mounds.

Each in their different way, Dave, Jelena, Elizabeth, Dan, Kutlu, and Ariel have drawn attention to these long folds in the landscape of my book.

Jelena, with her unfailing eye for the framing of sacred space in the architecture of Byzantine churches, brought back to me the sharp thrill of what she calls “the visual opulence” of their western equivalents – the Gothic cloisters of Oxford and the great cathedrals of France – as I encountered them as a young student. She rightly sees that the pull of such strange beauty has always kept me, in half my heart, a medievalist – perpetually concerned with the fate of the legacy of the ancient world in the medieval West, even when the main effort of my work had drawn me to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East a thousand years before the “dreaming spires” of Oxford were built.

Elizabeth, whose work on the exuberant miniatures of the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and also on the supreme refinement of their antithesis – the grisaille illumination by which entire fairy palaces and high cathedrals lined with solemn statues are conjured up by subtle washes of grey on grey – has rightly high-lighted in me the thrill of a sixteen year old, pedaling for all he was worth through the country lanes of Shropshire, to visit ruined abbeys that spoke “of a truly distant world, ruled by its own values and committed to its own sense of time and beauty.… a civilization as proud as our own and yet so, so different” (Journeys, p. 115). Elizabeth has opened our eyes to the strange world behind the images produced in Flanders at the end of the middle ages. She could not have done better justice to the sense of strangeness that also falls on anyone (but especially on young students of art history) as they follow with their eyes the great sea change that led, across the last centuries of the ancient world, from the exquisite sculpture of the Hellenistic age to the icons of Byzantium.

Dan, whose mastery of the Syriac world in the “heart-stretching landscapes” of what are now Eastern Turkey and northern Syria – lands of refugees and violence, now, but then the crucial bridge between the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and the Syriac East – has rightly seen how much I have owed, as a historian, to travel in foreign lands. For only through long hours on the road is it possible to sense “what lay within the realm of the possible” (to use Dan’s words) for the great empires of East Rome and Iran who dominate the political history of the late antique East – grand affairs, but slowed to the pace of a mule in the day-to-day conduct of war and governance. Furthermore, his deep respect for the intricate cultural processes involved in the passing on of Christianity (by preaching and catechesis) in the Greek and Syriac worlds has led him to see how much I have owed to the vivid “mini-landscapes” of the universities in which I have studied and taught – Oxford, Royal Holloway College, Berkeley, and Princeton.

On the same theme, it is fitting that Kutlu, who has the privilege of teaching history in Istanbul – that modern heir of Constantine’s city, points out the importance of attention to place in my mental and actual journeys. He poses the counterfactual, “What if the Islamic Revolution had not closed the borders and Brown had continued working on that project on Rome and the Sasanians?” I cannot answer that, but I am glad to have helped push the horizons of late antiquity ever eastward. Even more, I am grateful that the circle of scholars studying late antiquity has grown geographically wider beyond the Anglophone and Western European confines of my earliest days. Kutlu’s own publications (including Klasik Süryaniceye Giriş, in three volumes!) have made classical Syriac available to scholars in Türkiye and beyond. Today, it is these scholars, teaching and researching in the universities of the eastern Mediterranean and Eurasia, who are well poised to take us on new journeys with fresh eyes to places we thought we had already visited!

Ariel, whose book, Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty, is a model study of the relation between religion and society in late antique Egypt, has turned his sharp eye to the modern world into which I was born and the family memories with which I grew up. He shares my own surprise at the extent to which my Irish background has determined my attitude to history and the role of religion both in the past and in modern Irish society. Looking back, I am, indeed, struck by the prominence of this particular fold in the landscape of my life. All I can say is that it was not as present to me when I began to write as it became in the later stages of the book. It grew upon me as I wrote.

Serendipity played a part in this. Not everyone receives, from a distant member of the family, along with a set of embarrassingly large pieces of Victorian furniture, an unprepossessing plastic bag which proved to be filled with letters and documents that dated from the days of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and the burning by the British of the White House. This was a temptation to undertake yet another journey to the past, which no historian could pass up. Hence, the writing of the opening chapters of Journeys where I recovered (with the help of my wife, Betsy, as an expert on genealogy and on early modern Britain) the background of my family, was one of the happiest moments in the writing of this book.

But it was only as I wrote those early chapters that I realized the extent to which the career of my own father, and of many other members of my family, had been determined by the same necessities as had ruled the lives of these more distant ancestors. Their careers, also, had followed patterns, like grooves cut deep into the stone of Anglo-Irish society, that took them, always, far from Ireland. As members of the Protestant gentry of Ireland, service in the wide spaces of the British Empire – mainly in times of war – was what gave them wealth and dignity in their native land.

It was, indeed, in Ireland that I learned to respect the role of religion in human affairs. And (as Ariel has pointed out so shrewdly), I learned it the Irish Protestant way, by first attempting to understand the manner in which the way of life of the majority of my Catholic neighbors was penetrated by the teachings of their church. This meant that my early decision to be a historian was shaped by an acute sense of difference not only between the present and the past, between the middle ages and the modern world, but also between myself and the majority of my own compatriots. Both were touched by a salutary sense of strangeness. Both presented a challenge to the heart and the imagination – a challenge to overcome a distance, to climb a wall of prejudice and misinformation so as to come to understand and to respect distant ages in the past and distant religious groups in the present.

What I first learned in Dublin, when confronted with the massive, day-to-day presence of the Catholic church, was how to respect a major religion. I found myself later challenged to extend the same respect, first, to Judaism (in its ancient and modern phases, through the learning of Hebrew) and then, more and more, to Islam and to the Christianities of the East (as I gained some knowledge of Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic). As a scholar, I find that this is the only, tried and true way to understand the role of religion in the past. As a Christian, I am convinced that the effort to scale the walls of prejudice and misinformation, which every true scholar in academia must confront, should also be applied alongside and outside the university. Such scholarship enables us to reach out to feed the hungry soul with hitherto little-known food – taken from the vast store of an ancient, world-wide Christianity – to add to the rich banquet of the Lord.

These are heavy themes, all of which invite discussion. But let me end by thanking the panelists and by introducing them, once again, to the wider audience. Whether by design or by good fortune, they form a distinctive group – they are “the Princeton crowd”, representatives of a singularly happy cohort of young scholars, whom I had the good fortune to come to know in past years.