Peter Robert Lamont Brown (born 26 July 1935) is an Irish historian. He is the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. Brown is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity, and is often regarded as the inventor of said field. His work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and the relation between religion and society.
Early life and education
Peter Brown was born in Dublin, Irish Free State, in 1935, to a Scots-Irish family who were members of the Church of Ireland. Until 1939, he spent winter and spring each year in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his father worked as a railway engineer based at Khartoum. For the rest of the year, he would return with his mother to Bray, in County Wicklow, near Dublin. Following the outbreak of war, Brown and his mother remained in Ireland, though his father did not return finally until 1948. Brown has a stutter and came later in life to be noted as an example of a successful public speaker with a stutter.
Brown has written and spoken about the influence of the Sudanese connection on several occasions. Speaking to the Daily Princetonian, he has remarked: After his father had returned to Ireland, a "handbook of Sudanese Courtesy Customs, containing delicate Arabic phrases of greeting and polite enquiry, was prominent on his bookshelf, as was a deluxe edition of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I would read, from cover to cover, every time that I returned home on holiday from my school in England." Such influences, with "roots deep in my childhood, already ensured, perhaps, that both religion and the 'exotic' (the non-European and, by implication, the non-classical) were both too large, too ever-present and too rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as unambiguously negative symptoms of decline. The power of both had begun to puzzle and intrigue me. The collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all I knew; but it was unlikely to be uninteresting.
Brown was initially educated at Aravon School – now closed but, at that time, a distinguished preparatory school in Bray, County Wicklow, where he first studied Latin and French.James Howard-Johnston, 'Introduction', in J. Howard-Johnston & P. A. Hayward, The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford, 2000), 1-24, at 1 Brown was then educated at Shrewsbury School and New College, Oxford. At Shrewsbury, Brown expected to concentrate on sciences, but first studied Ancient Greek and turned in earnest to the study of history:
When asked to comment on his intellectual formation, Brown has also indicated that he completed his public schooling a year early, returning to Ireland (as he had done for school holidays) in 1952, the year he turned 17. It was then in Dublin that he read Michael Rostovtzeff's (1926), which he borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The academic year 1952–1953 was a "hiatus" for Brown, between school and university, during which he learned to type at a secretarial school, and received German lessons from an academic at Trinity College Dublin who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany.
In 1953, Brown took up a scholarship to read Modern History at New College, leaving in 1956. Most of his degree was "devoted to English History in its entirety and to the European High Middle Ages, from 919 to 1127", but in his final academic year, he undertook a Special Subject on The Age of Augustine, and was particularly influenced by the writings of Marrou and Piganiol., quoting 10. That Special Subject had a profound influence on Brown:
Career
Employment and professional memberships Following his graduation Brown began, but did not complete, a doctoral thesis under the external supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano (at that time professor of ancient history at University College London). The potential he had shown as an undergraduate was recognized by the award of the Harmsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, and a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.See Who's Who, "Brown, Peter Robert Lamont". At a time when it was normally possible to remain in the college after the Prize Fellowship, All Souls College subsequently elected him a research fellow in 1963 and a senior research fellow in 1970. The Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford appointed him a special lecturer in 1970 and a reader (ad hominem) in 1973. From 1972 to 1975 he held a lectureship at Merton College. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. Brown left Oxford to become professor of modern history and head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway College in the University of London (1975–1978). He subsequently left Britain to become professor of classics and history in the University of California at Berkeley (1978–1986) and then Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University (1986–2011). He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979, a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1988, and a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.See Who's Who, "Brown, Peter Robert Lamont".
Before joining the tenured faculty at UC Berkeley and Princeton, Brown held visiting professorships at both institutions: at UC Berkeley in 1975, and at Princeton in 1983–1986. He has also held visiting professorships at UCLA and in Italy. Other engagements as a visiting teacher have taken Brown to Toronto in the 1970s and, since 2000, to Hungary and Iceland. At Princeton, Brown was given the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2000.
Speaking engagements Brown has delivered several named lecture series. These include the Carl Newell Jackson Lectures at Harvard University (1976);Published as The Making of Late Antiquity (1978). See review in the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago (1978);Published as The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981). the ACLS Lectures in the History of Religion (1981–82);These lectures formed the early basis of what, in substantially revised and extended form, became The Body and Society: Man, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988). the Curti Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1988);Published in a somewhat extended form as Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (1992). the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge and Yale (1993 and 1996 respectively);The Tanner Lectures of 1993, at Cambridge, were published as Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (1995). the Menahem Stern Lectures in Jerusalem (2000);Published as Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002). the Lectures in Human Sciences at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2012);Published in a somewhat extended form as The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (2015). and the James W. Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia (2012).
Brown has also delivered a multitude of named single lectures. These include national academic occasions in the UK and US: the Raleigh Lecture in History in the British Academy (1992); and the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture ("A Life of Learning") for the American Council of Learned Societies (2003).
Other named lectures by Brown include the Stenton Lecture at Reading University (1976);Stenton Lectures, Reading. Brown's lecture was reprinted in his second collection of papers, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982). the Sigmund H Danziger Jr Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago (1997); a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University (2002); the Clark Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge (2004); the Gennadius Library Lecture at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (2007); the Fr. Alexander Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, NY (2013); the Annual Distinguished Lecture in Religion at Rutgers University (2013); the Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture at Queen Mary College, University of London (2013); the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture at the American Academy in Rome (2013); the Burke Lecture on Religion and Society, University of California, San Diego (2014); the Corish Lecture at Maynooth College, Ireland (2014); the Etienne Gilson Lecture at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto (2014); and the inaugural Costan Lecture at Georgetown University (2014).
Brown has also been a named lecturer, usually in retrospect, in all the universities at which he has held substantive posts: lectures include the Magie Lecture at Princeton (1991); the Pritchett Lecture at UC Berkeley (1993); the Hayes Robinson Lecture at Royal Holloway College, University of London (1997); the Ronald Syme Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, and the Dacre Lecture in the History Faculty at Oxford (2006 and 2010 respectively).
In 2007, Brown gave an inaugural talk at the opening of the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. In 2015 he was hosted by the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a public discussion with Paula Fredriksen.
Brown has also frequently been a keynote speaker at conferences and congresses. These include the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (1986); the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (1999); the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium (2012); and the First Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University (2013). He gave the inaugural address at the first Coloquio Internacional "Nuevas perspectivas sobre la Antigüedad tardía" in Segovia (2009).
Editorial work For several decades, Brown has been General Editor of the book series "The Transformation of the Classical Heritage", published by the University of California Press. The first volume in the series was published in 1981. The full published list to date now exceeds fifty-five titles.The Press maintains a series home page. Many of the volumes are also available in an ACLS Humanities E-Book Special Series.
Research grants Following his earlier books, Brown has received some prestigious and substantial research grants. These include the MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 and the Distinguished Achievement Award for scholars in the humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001.
Research overview
Brown, who has a knowledge of at least 26 languages, has been instrumental in the development of the study of late antiquity as a field. Within this broad field, he has also been central in the study of Augustine, monasticism (both the eremitical "holy man" and coenobitic alternatives), the cult of the saints and the practice of sexual renunciation. More recently, he has made fundamental contributions to the study of power relations in late Roman society and to the study of financial giving. He has produced a steady stream of articles (several being classics in the field) since 1961, and a steady series of influential books since 1967.
Janet Nelson, the distinguished British historian of the early Middle Ages, has said: "He took the study of medieval history into fields of cultural history and social history, social psychological history. He was interested in religion but not in an old-fashioned ecclesiastical history, institutional sort of way, but what made people think in this way: how did they conceptualise God? How did they think about religious symbols and rituals in the ways that they did? Why did these things change? That was his agenda. He wrote mostly about late antiquity, the very early period, but he sometimes ventured into the Middle Ages and whenever he did he transformed the scene. The great area he's famous for doing is the cult of the saints."