Time: 6:30pmVenue: Skeel Lecture Theatre, People's Palace, Mile End Campus
Professor Peter Brown, Princeton University
This lecture will begin by exploring the idea of the expansion of Christianity in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea. It sketches out the ‘horizons of the possible’ for Christians such as Eusebius, and suggests how these horizons might explain the religious policies of Constantine, especially in relation to the non-Christian world. In the process, it exploresthe issue of the ‘history of the future’ in the Constantinian period – what did contemporaries (rather than modern scholars) actually think about the limits of the possible in bringing about change in their own age?
Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. His primary interests are in the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the rise of Christianity, and he has pursued them through investigations into such diverse topics as Roman rhetoric, the cult of the saints, the body and sexuality, and wealth and poverty. He is the author of a dozen books, including Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000), The World of Late Antiquity (1971), The Cult of the Saints (1982), The Body and Society (1988), Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (1992), Authority and the Sacred (1995), The Rise of Western Christendom (1996, 2003) and, most recently, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (2012).
A reception will follow the lecture.