Appreciation …

… The Story Behind the Historian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Then there was the question of whether the last word hadn’t already been said about it 200 years earlier—the word of Edward Gibbon, the very title of whose imperishable History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) suggested that late antiquity, which saw the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome, was an altogether downward proposition. For Brown something close to the reverse of this was the case. When he came to write The World of Late Antiquity (1971), casting aside Gibbon’s scornful view of the age, he set out to show that "late antiquity marked not the end of civilization but its transformation into new and adventurous forms, which would directly influence all subsequent centuries."