
The Rise of Western Christendom (10th Anniversary Revised Edition)
Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000
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Narrated by:
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Tom Parks
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By:
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Peter Brown
This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power.
- Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe
- Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as "late antiquity"
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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A well-written and researched exploration of the multivalent forms Christendom took in its rise to prominence in Europe.
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Scope of Book: This book really covers the first 1000 years of European history (or if you prefer, of Church history in Europe) with lengthy and surprisingly detailed excursions into the Christian cultures of the Byzantine empire and of the lands that would be conquered by the Arabs. The range of the book within European history is astonishing. It doesn't just focus, as one might expect, on Italy, France, Ireland, and England, but gives attention also to central Europe and Scandinavia.
What's Unique About this Book: While you'll find several histories of the Dark Ages on Audible, this one is unique for its novel (even shocking) interpretation of those events and scholarly (as opposed to popular) approach.
Contrary to the usual narrative coming from Edward Gibbon, Peter Brown argues that there was no fall of Rome due to barbarian invasions. The "barbarians" were hardly different culturally from the frontier Romans and much of what is taken to be "barbarian" culture is really Roman military culture applied to the general population through the mediation of Germanic peoples who had taken on Roman military culture; the "invasions" were not invasions, but minor disturbances mostly coordinated by one Roman faction against another; and the net result of the "barbarian invasions" was next to nil. In place of Gibbons "fall of Rome," Brown offers a great decentralization of Romaness due to the breakdown of the Roman tax collection system during the long civil wars; the centralized Romaness was followed by a period of local Romaness, which gradually and mostly voluntarily transformed into idiosyncratic local cultures.
Contrary to the Catholic historiography of Christopher Dawson, he argues that papal Rome did not function as a centralizing governing force in preserving the political-religious unity of Europe after the fall of Rome. Rather, Italy functioned as a sort of cultural epicenter from which, in a decentralized way, common cultural and religious customs were preserved through traveling holy men and cultural exchange across Europe—much as the Aztecs provided a cultural epicenter for distant American tribes not politically under their control.
Performance: The narrator, Tom Parks, does a great job reading this book. The quality of this audiobook performance is vastly better than that of Peter Brown's study of patristic perspectives of wealth, Through the Eye of a Needle, which is unfortunately and dramatically marred by an astoundingly bad narrator.
Must read for Western & Church history
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Magnificent book
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Mind-expanding book
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Philip Belangie
Amazing—my second read through
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