"This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c. 150 and c. 750 AD, came to differ from 'Classical civilization'. These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deep-rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian Empire had vanished from the Near East. Mr. Brown, Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, examines these changes and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogenous Mediterranean world of c. 200 AD became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam. We still live with the results of these contrasts. " -- Provided by publisher