"It is not a work of reference in the traditional sense: Rousseau compares it to a journey in the company of enthusiastic experts guiding the reader through their favorite areas. The contributors have been well chosen. Production and editing are excellent. Richly rewarding,"---Bryn Mawr Classical Review. 734 pages, softcover. Wiley-Blackwell.
An accessible and authoritative overview capturing the vitality and diversity of scholarship that exists on the transformative time period known as late antiquity.
- Provides an essential overview of current scholarship on late antiquity – from between the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the end of Roman rule in the Mediterranean
- Comprises 39 essays from some of the world's foremost scholars of the era
- Presents this once-neglected period as an age of powerful transformation that shaped the modern world
- Emphasizes the central importance of religion and its connection with economic, social, and political life
- Winner of the 2009 Single Volume Reference/Humanities & Social Sciences PROSE award granted by the Association of American Publishers
Philip Rousseau is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Christian Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Early Christian Centuries (2002), Basil of Caesarea (1994), Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (1985), and Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome (1978). He is the joint editor (with Tomas Hägg) of Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (2000).
