‘Journeys of the Mind’ is an enthralling account of a scholar at work

Historian Peter Brown’s autobiography vividly depicts a life centered on the most enviable of pursuits: Humanistic research and the reading and writing of scholarly works 

Review by Michael Dirda

June 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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Back in the 1970s, I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Cornell University enamored of medieval European literature. With excellent teachers, I studied Old and Middle English poetry, chivalric romances written in medieval French and Middle High German, Icelandic sagas — not the most obvious preparation for a future literary journalist. I even signed up for a seminar entirely devoted to Pope Gregory the Great’s 4,000-page commentary on the Book of Job. Partly because of Gregory’s sheer strangeness — in one memorable passage he compares the sinner to a testicle of the Antichrist — I found myself growing increasingly fascinated by the patristic era, the years between 200 and 700 AD when the Fathers of the Church, most notably Saint Augustine, were hammering out, explicating and defending the tenets of Christian doctrine.

Late antiquity, as it’s more generally known, had long been painted as the period of Rome’s decline and fall, Byzantium’s stagnation, and classical culture’s enfeeblement and eventual descent into monkishness and barbarism. By the 1960s that depiction of a supposedly crude and irrational age was at last questioned, then revised and finally dismissed, to a large degree because of a historian named Peter Brown.