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TIME

BEYOND LATE ANTIQUITY

The time has come for scholars, students, and the educated public in general to

treat the period between around 250 and 800 as a distinctive and quite decisive

period of history that stands on its own.

—G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar (eds.),

Interpreting late Antiquity (2001) ix

Will the periodization of history itself be cast aside, and will we see the rise of

an entirely new paradigm that reframes these centuries in a radically different

way? Whatever occurs, it is a sobering reflection that, as the twenty- first cen-

tury draws to a close, the Late Antiquity with which the new generation en-

gages (if, that is, “Late Antiquity” as a concept still exists) may well look signifi-

cantly different from the Late Antiquity with which we engage now in the first

decade of the same century.

—W. Mayer, “Approaching late Antiquity,” in P. Rousseau (ed.),

A companion to late Antiquity (2009) 13

The roots of late antique studies

Just as what Europeans thought of as their discovery of “America” turned out
to have had forerunners, so too the realization that Islam is to be read in the
light of Antiquity long antedates the heightened American and European
awareness of the Muslim world that has prevailed since 2001, and the con-
current reassessment of the historical narrative. This chapter shows questions
about Islam were present at the very birth of modern late antique studies.
Discussion of periodization can seem arid because periods are so obvi-
ously our creation imposed retrospectively. yet they are indispensable: histo-
rians must divide time into periods if they are to make any sense to each other
let alone their pupils. Furthermore, historians’ handling of the periods they
construct, and their preferences among them, tell us much about their own