The Rise of Western Christendom (10th Anniversary Revised Edition)

Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000

By: Peter Brown

Narrated by: Tom Parks

Length: 26 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power.

- Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe

- Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as "late antiquity"

©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2023 Tantor

Mind-expanding book

This breath-taking book demolishes much educated ignorance about ancient and medieval history and the spread of Christianity, and I would hope that it has become a standard work in the field. The narrator reads fluently and well, but, oh, some of his mispronunciations. Aachen. Vosges. Braudel. Ancien régime. Luxeuil. Chef d'oeuvre. Thessaloniki. What he does this with these will shock you.

Amazing—my second read through

First, I’ve never felt comfortable regarding this period in our history. Never found an overarching sense of the period until now. Lots of reasons, but one stands out—including the Eastern Empire, giving context to the Europeans as only part of a larger story. Brown is a master For myself, I’m always been intrigued in how we think and believe-and the roots of how we got here. Brown’ssense of the ongoing story of change, belief, and how we thought…rings true,almost like we are now the ripple in the rocks thrown by these early Christians. Not one rock, but a continuous throwing resulting in the very choppy waters we live in today. As a serious Catholic youth including schooling, Brown’s sense of what is a Christian(plural) rings true. Today, I have a great sense of spirituality but the religious side of me was left on the side of the road decades ago. Personally, I wonder how great our culture would be without Christendom. This book somehow adds thoughts to that question. Someone shared with me a cartoon showing a bountiful future until the prime character said, no that’s not the future, that is what our world would be without Christianity. My thoughts, not Doctor Brown’s, a wonderful book-thank you with great gratitude.

Philip Belangie

Must read for Western & Church history

The Book and its Author: This third edition of Peter Brown's introduction to the "Dark Ages" is much more scholarly than the previous editions. Peter Brown himself is, perhaps, the leading historian of the late Antique West. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Church history or European history.

Scope of Book: This book really covers the first 1000 years of European history (or if you prefer, of Church history in Europe) with lengthy and surprisingly detailed excursions into the Christian cultures of the Byzantine empire and of the lands that would be conquered by the Arabs. The range of the book within European history is astonishing. It doesn't just focus, as one might expect, on Italy, France, Ireland, and England, but gives attention also to central Europe and Scandinavia.

What's Unique About this Book: While you'll find several histories of the Dark Ages on Audible, this one is unique for its novel (even shocking) interpretation of those events and scholarly (as opposed to popular) approach.

Contrary to the usual narrative coming from Edward Gibbon, Peter Brown argues that there was no fall of Rome due to barbarian invasions. The "barbarians" were hardly different culturally from the frontier Romans and much of what is taken to be "barbarian" culture is really Roman military culture applied to the general population through the mediation of Germanic peoples who had taken on Roman military culture; the "invasions" were not invasions, but minor disturbances mostly coordinated by one Roman faction against another; and the net result of the "barbarian invasions" was next to nil. In place of Gibbons "fall of Rome," Brown offers a great decentralization of Romaness due to the breakdown of the Roman tax collection system during the long civil wars; the centralized Romaness was followed by a period of local Romaness, which gradually and mostly voluntarily transformed into idiosyncratic local cultures.

Contrary to the Catholic historiography of Christopher Dawson, he argues that papal Rome did not function as a centralizing governing force in preserving the political-religious unity of Europe after the fall of Rome. Rather, Italy functioned as a sort of cultural epicenter from which, in a decentralized way, common cultural and religious customs were preserved through traveling holy men and cultural exchange across Europe—much as the Aztecs provided a cultural epicenter for distant American tribes not politically under their control.

Performance: The narrator, Tom Parks, does a great job reading this book. The quality of this audiobook performance is vastly better than that of Peter Brown's study of patristic perspectives of wealth, Through the Eye of a Needle, which is unfortunately and dramatically marred by an astoundingly bad narrator.