LATE ANTIQUE CULTURE AND PRIVATE LIFEsuperstition and irrationality. However, after the appearance of Peter Brown’s
World of Late Antiquity it would be diffi cult to fi nd a single ‘mentality’ in this
complex, dynamic and extremely varied world.
The period covered in this book was a time of change and variety. The
change was at times violent and sudden but more often uneven and gradual,
and sometimes hardly perceived by those living through it. The challenge for
the historian is to fi nd ways of doing justice to these processes without distort-
ing the enormous mass of surviving evidence. The success of the series of con-
ferences and publications under the title ‘Shifting Frontiers’ is precisely due to
its recognition of the problems presented in capturing these multiple processes
of change.^6 This is all the more the case given the resistance shown in recent
scholarship to a one-dimensional emphasis on Christianization in late antiquity,
even while recognizing that the Roman empire ‘became Christian’ between the
fourth and sixth centuries. If in particular we take a longer chronological view,
the religious changes that took place in late antiquity can better be characterized
in the words of a recent discussion by Noel Lenski as the process whereby
the kaleidoscopic plurality of religious cults once scattered across the
ancient landscape gave way to a homogenization of religious power
around the three interrelated Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christian-
ity and Islam. These squeezed out competing religious traditions by suc-
cessfully redefi ning religious truth along monotheistic and theologizing
lines, and – in the instance of Christianity and later Islam – by deploying
the coercive force of the state as a way to valorize and enforce the truths
they purveyed.^7This formulation points to several trends in recent historiography: fi rst, a
tendency to place Christianity and the process of Christianization within a
broader religious context; second, a recognition of the role played in religious
and social change by writing, debate and theological issues, including the
enormous weight placed by late antique Christian and Jewish writers (and by
Muslim writers, even if considerably later) on exegesis, the interpretation and
appropriation of classic texts; and third, an awareness of the place of coercion,
whether used by the state or by other agents. It encapsulates the linguistic
turn of the 1990s and its move towards a socio-historical paradigm of power
and dominance. Lenski’s discussion recognizes the importance of post-
colonial approaches in recent scholarship on late antiquity, with a corre-
sponding attempt to get behind the dominant narrative in order to investi-
gate power relations, the dynamics of contemporary discourse, and subjects
such as gender history and non-elite groups. The Marxist, structuralist and
anthropological approaches familiar in previous decades of historiography on
the later Roman empire have been joined by methodologies infl uenced by
Foucault and Bourdieu, and notwithstanding a traditionalist and ‘common-
sense’ reactions by some scholars, by a considerably heightened awareness of
the literary analysis of textual evidence.^8 We have already emphasised the