PETER BROWN
Princeton University Press
£38
9780691242286
REVIEWED BY Thomas O’Loughlin
I cannot think of any book comparable to this, and so, while reading it was an immense pleasure, writing this review is rather difficult. There are at least three possible starting-points and I cannot choose between them: Peter Brown in writing an autobiography has produced a literary once-off that will both intrigue and attract you. In being able to defy the bounds of the autobiography genre, Brown has rivalled Augustine in his Confessions—a work that has been approached for more than half a century through his Augustine of Hippo (1967).
One theme that comes up in almost every chapter of this book—and there are 99 of them, plus a postscript—is what is it to be a historian: why do we study history, what difference does it make? Clearly, curiosity is an essential part of our make-up that asks ‘What happened here?’, but there is also an instinctive belief that in knowing about the past we are enriched in our present: history is good for us. Moreover, there is an unspoken assumption that understanding the past gives us an understanding of the present: historians are more than wanderers around a museum, expressing the odd gasp of delight when they see a beautiful golden artefact or an incredulous ‘Fancy all that hassle’ when they see a saddle quern and are confronted with the foreignness of the past. History is something serious, it draws us, and we know that if we do not look into our past we cannot understand our present.
But if that—history as context and background—is the case, why look more than a few decades or even a century or two before the present? Why engage with cultures that are long past (and Brown’s work is focused on the distant past of ‘late antiquity’ and rarely moves closer to the present than the ninth century AD) and in a sparkling variety (he is as expert on Persia before the rise of Islam, and on Islam and Byzantium, as he is on Augustine)? Indeed, why concern ourselves with the whole range of cultures and languages—and Brown learns to read the texts he works on in their originals—from around the Mediterranean basin whose most startling common characteristic is that they are foreign to us? So, for example, why worry about the role of the holy man in Syria in late antiquity, which was the focus of Brown’s 1971 article that changed how historians have used hagiographical sources ever since (‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 80–101)? There is no simple or short answer to this—and it is to state the obvious that it reminds us that history is a ‘humanity’ par excellence; we discover who we are as humans by looking at ourselves in situations and societies whose differences from us allow us to use them as our mirror. This ‘big question’ simmers just below the surface throughout A life in history and every so often comes to the surface:
‘History, for me, has always been something more than a discipline—more than a set of problems to be solved, a narrative to be put together from bits and pieces of evidence about the past. It is, rather, a perpetual awareness of living beside an immense, strange country whose customs must be treated by the traveller from the present with respect, as often very different from our own; and whose aspirations, fears, and certitudes, though they may seem alien to us and to have turned pale with the passing of time, must be treated as having once run in the veins of men and women in the past with all the energy of living flesh and blood’ (p. 104).
Few historians can claim to have offered that respect to distant and different cultures with as much sensitivity to the nuances of their worlds as Brown.
On 30 April 1945, when Brown was ten years old, he went on the No. 8 bus along Northumberland Road with his aunt. As they passed the German embassy with its swastika flag at half-mast, his aunt whispered to him (since ‘in neutral Ireland, one never knew what others thought about Britain and the Reich’): ‘“You know where he is” … “Indeed I do, Auntie”. It was my first lesson in spiritual geography: Hitler was in Hell’ (p. 69). This vignette tells us a great deal about Peter Brown and this book. He was born into a south Dublin Protestant family who were both Irish and part of the larger British Empire. His father was an engineer on the railways in the Sudan and the young Peter recalls being brought there for his holidays just before the Second World War. He tells us in great detail how, as he was growing up, there were in Dublin two societies overlapping but hardly connecting, sharing one urban space, and they were identified by religious labels: ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. For him, there was a different school scene, social scene and outlook, while at the same time there was an affirmation of being Irish. Then there was school in England at Shrewsbury and then Oxford—we are told of only one interaction: he studied typing with some local girls in Dún Laoghaire.
But these recollections are not merely an evocation of a past world in Dublin or Ireland which formed him as a historian. Not for him the happy easy identification of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that bedevils historians who never have to negotiate the complexities of their own identity. Only those who are aware that identity is never simply ‘us’ can avoid the linear progress of a historian whom I heard recently saying: ‘When we were fighting at Waterloo …’. Peter Brown has done more than most to alert several generations of scholars to that sort of anachronism and its concomitant colonising of the past. Augustine of Hippo lived in his world; it is not our world, and addressing him as ‘Saint Augustine’ does not change that fact. Whether Brown was in Bray or Oxford or the USA, he seems always conscious that identity is a delicate matter—and he can even laugh at the occasion when he was travelling in an Arab country and suspected of being in the IRA because he was travelling on an Irish passport. He draws a lesson from this fact that identity is complex when he writes that, after hearing conflicting views of history from two of his schoolmasters, ‘[it] had already laid the foundations for me of a robust sense of historical relativism. I saw that it was possible to look at the same historical events from very different angles. This was a lesson that I would carry with me, after 1945, when I left Bray for the less sheltered, more troubled world of Dublin’ (p. 63).
Peter Brown has, through 50 years of scholarship that has always been shifting in its focus and method, done more to change the face of history than any other English-speaking historian. I would put him alongside the likes of Ranke and Bloch as one who has shaped us as the historians we are today. This is never more the case than in the way he has shown that religion is a key factor in identity and historical understanding. He tells us that having grown up in Dublin, where one’s religion was a key to one’s world, he was amazed at how in Britain the religious factor was simply ignored with incomprehension. But in books like The world of late antiquity (London, 1971) and a string of major articles he has shown that, whether it is some brand of Christianity or Islam or Judaism (and he accesses each religion’s texts in the original), the historian who does not take religion seriously fails to take the culture seriously. Though he does not draw a direct link, one senses that it was his own experience growing up a Protestant in ‘Protestant Dublin’ who lived cheek-by-jowl with ‘Catholic Dublin’ that he discovered this truth about humanity and the historian’s endeavour. ‘To recover the weight of Islam meant working against the grain … of entrenched … historical scholarship … [y]et it struck me that religion would not go away. It had a weight of its own that we had to learn to appreciate’ (p. 522).
The book is also a history of how history has changed over his lifetime. When he went to Oxford, the history syllabus was great men and their deeds—with politicians, foreign policy and wars being the kernel of the discipline. One has only to think of some of the volumes of the Oxford History of England and the theoretical work of E.H. Carr to see its values—and he acknowledges that it was the ideal background for the bright Oxbridge students preparing for a life as imperial civil servants. But the human journey is far more complex than the view from Whitehall. Brown worked with anthropologists (the book is a case-study on why historians should speak with their first cousins in anthropology in order to understand cultures), art historians, geographers and many others to forge a new view of history that is built around the cultures in which humanity lives. With every decade, Brown sets off into a new dimension of his scholarship—he is the antithesis of the dour Ph.D graduate spending a lifetime repackaging chapters from his thesis—and this is, in effect, an account of the evolution of early and medieval scholarship from the mindless date-collecting of ‘ecclesiastical history’ to the vibrant discipline of today.
One also realises that Peter Brown is a truly collegial scholar—always engaging in conversation and generous with his time towards students. This is a lovely aspect of the book, for we get little pen-pictures of so many scholars whose works we know: Arnaldo Momigliano, Mary Douglas, Robert Markus and many more, and including Jacob Weingreen (TCD) and Denis Bethell (UCD) (pp 602–4), who opened this new vision of medieval scholarship to undergraduates in the 1970s. Lovely reminiscences, but also keys to understanding how the modern discipline has emerged.
‘I wanted to challenge my readers to think and feel their way into societies and value systems very different from their own’ (p. 577) is a statement that every historian should make their own! One word of note—after 685 pages taking him from Dublin to Princeton, we find that Peter Brown has only reached 1987! The next 36 years are covered in just ten pages entitled ‘since then’. There has been little slowing down in his journeying, so perhaps we may look forward to a second volume. Should it be written, I shall read it, for I know of no better apologia for our profession. Brown holds up to us a mirror in which we can see ourselves anew.
Thomas O’Loughlin is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham.