Journeys of the Mind

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 endeavour" to reimagine a decisive historical moment.

[Brown] delivers an insightful and detailed chronicle of his life and academic career...A rewarding combination of the personal and the scholarly, this is a valuable resource for students of the ancient world and the early Middle Ages. - Publishers Weekly

This meticulous and lively account of [Brown's] intellectual development lovingly acknowledges all the scholars—from his school days onward—whose work helped shape his own...This book offers no less than a template for how to live, in an uncertain world, while surrounded by death and the unraveling of all we know: that is, in generous recognition of our teachers, with boundless curiosity, and buoyed by the delight of lifelong scholarship. - Claire Messud, Harper's

No historian has evoked more vividly the strange waltz between a transcendent faith and earthly powers in the centuries from Constantine to Muhammad (a period the book's author named "late antiquity") than Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History is a gripping new memoir about how he came to do it...A sustained and moving meditation on how historians of any faith cope with the strangeness of its past. - Michael Ledger-Lomas, Los Angeles Review of Books

An enthralling account of an eminent scholar at work...Journeys of the Mind may well be the most romantic book of the year. - Michael Dirda, Washington Post