Late Ancient and Byzantine History Today

Abstract

20 Historically Speaking April 2002 Warren Treadgold Late Ancient and Byzantine History Today ? round 1970, when I entered graduate school, mychosen subject oflate ancient and Byzantine history seemed to have a bright future. Though the field had traditionally been strongest in Britain, by then nearly all major American universities and even some smaller ones had Byzantine historians. Harvard's opulently endowed Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., had a half-dozen research professors and sponsored several archeological projects and many publications. The standard history, the revised German edition ofGeorge Ostrogorsky'sHistory ofthe Byzantine State, appeared in English translation in 1969, and important books in English were published everyyear. Particularlynotable were two massive British projects (each over 1500 pages): A. H. M.Jones's The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic, andAdministrativeSurvey (1964) and a new Byzantine volume of the Cambridge MedievalHistory by a team ofBritish, American , and other historians (1966-67). At that time mostscholars still thoughtof Byzantine history, like all ofancienthistory, as part of Classical studies. The Byzantine Empire, though it lasted through the Middle Ages, was after all just the Eastern Roman Empire under a modern name (the Byzantines always called themselves Romans), and its rulers spoke first Latin and then Greek. Most late ancient and Byzantine historians still admired Edward Gibbon's Decline andFall oftheRoman Empire, thought Byzantium represented a decline from the early empire in manyrespects, and mainlywrote political history based on literary sources. Such was Ostrogorsky's excellentHistory, originallyprepared in 1940 as avolume ofa Classical handbook . Yet the field was developing.Jones's subject was how the later Roman Empire's society , economy, and institutions functioned, and his sources were more often saints' lives, orations , letters, papyri, orinscriptions than historical texts. The CambridgeMedievalHistory volume was divided into a part on "Byzantium and Its Neighbours," which gave more space to the empire's relationswith other cultures than to its internal history, and a part on "Government, Church, and Civilization," whichwas thematicratherthan chronological. Bothworks showed a growing tendencyto go beyond political history and literary sources. But around 1970 the boom in American higher education ended. At first Byzantium and LateAntiquityseemed to be keepingthenshare of the reduced job market, perhaps because they linked ancient, medieval, Muslim , and Slavic history, anyofwhich a Byzantinist might teach. On the other hand, academic fashions were turningagainst Classical . . . neglect ofthe Greek and Latin Classics andan unwillingness to take Christian beliefs seriously have become obstacles to understanding Western civilization . . . . studies as traditionalist and elitist, and that could onlybe bad forthe studyofByzantium. Meanwhile, however, the fashionabilityof Late Antiquity, and with it the earlier part of Byzantine history, found a champion in the British historian Peter Brown, who applied the poststructuralism ofMichel Foucault to LateAntiquity. Accordingto Brown, people in Late Antiquity cared most about power, sexuality , and rhetoric, and not really (as previouslybelieved ) God, morality, and chariotracing . Brown attached farmore importance than earlier historians to livingholymen (notdead saints), whom he saw as combining the roles ofpolitician, psychiatrist, and guru. Insofar as Brown referred to religion, it was something vaguely New Age that he called "the holy." Hisworkwon acclaim chieflyfrom historians outside the field,who found its depiction ofLateAntiquityintriguing even ifthey rejected poststructuraÜsm in theirown scholarship . In 1977, Brown became a professor at Berkeley, where his popularity increased. Also in 1977, Harvard made some major changes at Dumbarton Oaks, whose endowment was then about a twentieth of the university 's billion-dollartotal. Accordingtowellinformed reports, the Harvard administration wanted to invoke an escape clause in the original donors' will, which would allow Harvard to use the endowment as it saw fit and in particularto move the Byzantine Centerto Cambridge . After partial disclosure of this plan attracted adverse publicity, the newly named director of Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard medievalist Giles Constable, declared that there had never been such a plan. Buthe soon stopped using the name of the Center for Byzantine Studies, abolished its by now depleted faculty, and ended its archeological program. Constable, whose own specialtywas French monasticism, advocated a comparative approach that would stress Byzantium's similarities to medieval Western Europe and Islam. Soon afterward the academic popularity ofByzantine history began towane, as measured bypositions retained orcreated inAmerican universities...