Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity 200-1000 AD New ed of 3 Revised ed Edition

“The author′s vast learning is evident on almost every page and the book confirms Brown′s status as one of the leading scholars of the early Christian world.” History

“There is no better introduction to what western Christendom became than this fine and delightfully readable study.” The Economist

By establishing itself within the framework of two empires, the Roman and the Persian Sasanian, Christendom inherited from its beginnings their double universalism. The author traces the history of the distinctly Eastern Christendoms, centred first in Byzantium and later spreading to the Balkans and to Russia, and of Western Christendom focused on Rome but with powerfully independent centres in France, Germany, England and Ireland. He recreates the vibrancy of Christian cultures and their claims to be the universal “true” Christianity, and shows how the rise of centralized forms of Christianity were associated with the renewed imperial systems of Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire.

Peter Brown examines the impact of other religious traditions on the development of Christianity. He describes reactions to the explosive rise of Islam, and explains how, especially in North and Eastern Europe, the memories of a pagan past became part of the culture of what was now an officially Christian world. By AD 1000, a distinctive relation between past and present, between profane and sacred, had emerged in Western Christendom, and a civilization that was by then irrevocably different from the Christendoms of the East.