Peter Brown's Journey of the Mind: Autobiography and Historiography. conjoined twins

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Peter Brown

  Peter Brown the well known and     celebrated Historian has just published   his autobiography, Journeys of the   Mind, in which he traces his     intellectual development from an   undergraduate student in Oxford to his   present status as the preeminent historian of Late Antiquity. He arranges his life, as does his alter ego, Edward Gibbon, as though there is a pattern and inevitability to his life and career. His choice of "special subjects" his acquisition of reading ability in foreign languages, the fortuitous presence of teachers and a father who supported all his decisions, morally and financially conspired to charm him along the yellow brick road to academic eminence. 

Cover Journeys

 Born in 1935 to an Irish Protestant family,   Brown never tires of drawing attention to the   discrimination he faced at the hands of the   English. He belonged to a family that   prospered in the colonies as an engineer in   the Sudan Railway. Brown lived his early   years in the Empire and in  his youth saw   the   Empire fade into History. The famines   faced by the Irish epitomised the callousness   of the the English regime and Sir Charles   Trevelyan (1807-1888) presided over the   death of nearly a million people, as the Famine  Relief Authority of Ireland. The collapse of the idea of progress in the historical profession meant the Historians were open to other ideas and in the case of Brown a brave new world of "social science" was opened up as he explored the Roman past with insight from Evan-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, and a French anthropologist whose insight helped Brown as he struggled with the controversies of the Donatist Church in North Africa'

Peter Brown devoted his professional life to the cusp between the end of the Roman Empire and the advent of Islam and its triumph in the Middle East and Africa. And in this he was following the footsteps of Edward Gibbon, who wrote two hundred years earlier on the same theme. Rather than see the Late Empire as an age of decline and decadence, Brown views the period as one of change and transformation characterized by new social classes and new sources of wealth. The newer social classes found Christianity attractive and flocked to the new religion. He does not really address the question of the Great Persecution and the relentless thirst for martyrdom displayed by the early Christians. The Eastern Churches were flourishing until the rise of Islam put an end to the Donatist, Nestorian and Chaldean churches in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. 

The questions raised by Brown are important and there is need to reflect on the stupendous success of the Easter Churches in keeping Christianity alive in the Middle East. Islam did not arise in a vacant desolate land land of jaliliya, as early Moslem historians like to portray the pre Islamic past. His work is of interest to scholars working in the history of the Near East, Mediterranean region and  the Balkans. The intellectual influences on Brown are many but two Historians are important in shaping his understanding of the past: Mikhail Rostovtzeff (1870-1952) and Arnaldo Momigliano, his long suffering doctoral guide. Brown spent his time writing his famous biography of Augustine of Hippo that he did not complete his dissertation. It was a different world then. A successful academic life could still be launched without the doctorate. The only other case I remember is Eugen Weber, the great historian of the Third Republic. 

At some point Peter Brown decided to move to USA where he felt he had better prospects. 

Peter Brown is a prolific writer and his output is impressive and so too is his command over languages: Latin, Greek, German, Hebrew, French and a few more, However, his use of functionalist models fir explaining important social changes in the Roman Empire lead me to wonder if historical change is being misinterpreted as functionalism invariably see static social behaviour. Therefore the appearance of the holy man, a sure sign of social change is interpreted from the standpoint of functionalism, which imposes a rationality to what is in reality a sign or symptom of change in society.

I enjoyed this book and having heard AJP Taylor's autobiography and also E J Hobsbawm's Interesting Times, the Journeys of the Mind is an solid addition to the growing number of autobiographies penned by Historians.