THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYmembers, as individuals wrestled with the conflicting claims of the church
and their own social background. Great new buildings, churches and mon-
asteries epitomized the rising centres of power and influence; the Egyptian
and Syrian deserts became the home of several thousand monks of all sorts of
backgrounds, and the eastern provinces a heady cultural mix, ripe for social
change.
This very different perspective has attracted criticism for being based
largely on the evidence of religious and cultural development and failing to
do justice to economic and administrative factors.^12 But it has had immense
value as a stimulus to further work and to the establishment of ‘late antiquity’
as a field of study in its own right. One of the most notable and important
developments in this field in recent years has also been the amount of inter-
est shown in the period by archaeologists, especially after pioneering work
done since the 1970s on the dating sequences of late Roman pottery, which
together with a more rigorous approach to excavation made possible an accu-
rate chronology for late Roman sites. One should also mention the level of
interest shown at present in urban history, which is especially relevant to this
period, the latter part of which saw a basic transformation in urban life, and
indeed the effective end of many, though certainly not all, classical cities in the
eastern Mediterranean (Chapter 7). The synthesis of the new archaeological
material often remains incomplete – some is badly published or still awaiting
publication – and in many cases the interpretation is controversial, but no
historian of the period can ignore it.^13
One of the striking features of Brown’s World of Late Antiquity was the use
it made of illustrations and visual evidence, yet visual evidence has proved
more difficult for historians to use than archaeological, perhaps because art
history as a specialist field has been perceived to rest on different methodo-
logical principles. It has also been difficult to escape the deep-rooted assump-
tion of a clear-cut distinction between Christian and non-Christian art, and
the corresponding notion that late antique art represented a step towards a
more spiritual, because more religious, style. The work of Jas Elsner and oth-
ers offers an important corrective,^14 as have several exhibitions emphasizing
objects from the secular sphere and ‘daily life’ over religious art. The concept
of material culture, more neutral than ‘Christian’, or classical, seems to offer a
promising way round this problem, but materialist approaches to this period
find it difficult to accommodate the huge amount of evidence for religiosity
and religious change. There needs to be a synthesis between these approaches
and that of cultural history, which has its own problems in finding a satisfac-
tory explanation of religious change.^15
‘Late antiquity’The terminology used by scholars for historical periods, in this case terms
such as ‘late antiquity’, ‘medieval’ or ‘Byzantine’, is on one level largely a mat-
ter of convenience. However, the question of where to draw a line between