The Essential History of Late Antiquity

The people who lived between the third and eighth centuries CE, and the communities they populated from Mesopotamia to the British Isles, did not describe themselves as living in “Late Antiquity.” Historians didn’t coin this periodization until the twentieth century: before that, in the tradition of humanist scholarship, they had seen these centuries as split between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. “The Middle Ages” itself was a new term applied to the millennium that fell between the classical period and the Renaissance. And as if the “medieval” designation weren’t dismissive enough, some critics dubbed the end of antiquity as the Dark Ages.

Periodization brings a lot of baggage. Any epoch-defining label, whether anachronistic or not, can collapse what were significant differences between geographies, cultures, and individual experiences while minimizing changes that transpired across the centuries they bracket.

So why a history of Late Antiquity at all, and why make it as succinct as this one?

These centuries were bound together by a puzzle, by a set of questions that people asked each other repeatedly and in doing so created common ground across a profoundly heterogeneous world. No single book, not even a whole library of them, can do justice to everything that happened across this half-millennium. But by zeroing in on the puzzle that defined these centuries, The Essential History of Late Antiquity aims to capture a sense of what it meant to live in Late Antiquity — and in the process speak to our own struggle to understand our own historical moment.