Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

This book presents a fair perspective on differing views of late antiquity which I can explore on my own. This era was made famous by Gibbon's classic history, but it's always interesting to consider whether a period in history is a 'decline', a 'fall', a golden age, or just a change.Clark's book is worth reading as a starting point for a discussion of,the meaning of history.

Quite good clear easy to read. Found it very enjoyable even though i was reading it for study

Excellent introduction to fascinating era.

This book is one of my favorite of the VSI series. I find not only the information conveyed but the quality of the writing to be exceptional. Highly recommended.

I love the Short Introduction series, but this one is a disappointment. In attempting to do a summary of this large subject the author cherry picked a few subjects (mostly the rise of christianity) and covered others so sparsely that the narrative fell apart. There are paragraphs that seem to almost be randomly dropped into the rest of the text. Its best bit is updating the old Gibbon trope about the Fall of Rome with more modern interpretations stressing continuity, but it could have used a few more pages on (for example) the Gothic kingdoms and the economic evidence in favor of all that Augustine. I wanted to read this as a quick refresher, but was barely able to slog through it was so poorly written.

For those of us who cut our teeth on Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," this little updating is a revelation. Who were all those "barbarians," anyway? Was the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion actually the trigger for Rome's decline? Were there Christian "barbarians?" (You bet.) Was the Empire really the nest of vipers it is commonly thought to have been? (No. It was worse.) Who was the bishop of Rome whose sexual excesses led to an imperial ban on Christian clergy visiting unchaperoned women? (Damasus, late 4th Century). This book is unusually densely-packed with information hitherto accessible only to classicists and classical historians. It is also a hoot.As usual for this series, the quality of the photographic illustrations leaves much to be desired. But they aren't necessary anyway!

Well, this certainly wasn't them. The Dark Ages was certainly a misnomer as one becomes well aware after reading this book. Just because Rome fell doesn't mean there wasn't a "civilization" still to be experienced or written of in the future. As with the majority of the VSI books I've read, this one teaches you the details you haven't heard (or don't remember) and shows you that the contemporary perspectives of this series on old subjects and times are definitely worth the read. You can read a blog post I wrote about the series on my blog: [...]

First martyr was a woman. Freedom under Julius the emperor. Too much talk about civil servants. Affordable.

A very readable, rapid run around the main issues and themes of this fascinating and ill-defined period, which is epitomised by the rise of Christianity and the decline of the western Roman Empire. The emphasis is on culture rather than conventional history, so there is relatively little here about the sequence of events, which may not suit everyone.Gillian Clark, a noted authority on the period, writes with her customary verve and acuity, giving counter-blasts against some of the more clichéd views: religious intolerance can be over-estimated; we don’t know what life was like for the vast majority of the population; and monastic life was revolutionary. Nevertheless, by the seventh century, if not before, the western mind was closing due to censorship and persecution by mainstream, Christian orthodoxy. But at the same time many groups of ‘barbarians’ were settling and inter-marrying, bringing new customs and fracturing forever the rigid Imperial hierarchies while preserving some Roman culture.A minor cavil: several of the books in the bibliography are not available (not even from the London Library).

I found Gillian Clark's book very readable. I am not very familiar with the "Very Short Introduction" series by OUP, but it reminds me of the "Que sais-je?" series published by Presse Universitaire Française (PUF), which I generally found very helpful. Overall, then, I would strongly recommend Dr. Clark's book to other readers interested in Late Antiquity.

I found Clark's booklet disappointing. It is good, but more superficial than I expected.

Bom

I'm usually a fan of the VSI series, but for me this fails absolutely as an introduction to late antiquity because as I find it so dodgy on areas where I do have some knowledge, I can't trust the author on the areas which are new to me. It is also obsessed with Augustine. Once the author moves beyond Augustine, and perhaps neo-platonism, everything becomes rather fragile, and, occasionally, bizarre. Augustine was certainly a formidable figure, but almost everything, in a volume covering c250-750 CE, is referred back, at one point or another, and in a rather uncritical and decontextualised reading, to Augustine. For example the index reveals Augustine mentioned on 31 out of 116 pages, that is over a quarter of the book, and it is by far the largest entry in the index. By comparison the index indicates both Constantine and Constantinople are on 9 pages, and Justinian on 10. There are numerous lengthy quotes, but the reader is rarely made aware of the sources of the quotes. Tellingly the author's blurb only mentions previous editorial activity. There is no mention of authored work.