Journeys of the Mind

"""A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year"" ""A History Today Book of the Year"" ""[Brown] delivers an insightful and detailed chronicle of his life and academic career. . . . A rewarding combination of the personal and the scholarly, this is a valuable resource for students of the ancient world and the early Middle Ages."" * Publishers Weekly * ""This meticulous and lively account of [Brown’s] intellectual development lovingly acknowledges all the scholars—from his school days onward—whose work helped shape his own. . . . This book offers no less than a template for how to live, in an uncertain world, while surrounded by death and the unraveling of all we know: that is, in generous recognition of our teachers, with boundless curiosity, and buoyed by the delight of lifelong scholarship.""---Claire Messud, Harper’s ""No historian has evoked more vividly the strange waltz between a transcendent faith and earthly powers in the centuries from Constantine to Muhammad (a period the book’s author named ’late antiquity’) than Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History is a gripping new memoir about how he came to do it. . . . A sustained and moving meditation on how historians of any faith cope with the strangeness of its past.""---Michael Ledger-Lomas, Los Angeles Review of Books ""An enthralling account of an eminent scholar at work. . . . Journeys of the Mind may well be the most romantic book of the year.""---Michael Dirda, Washington Post ""‘Journeys of the Mind’ is a scintillating intellectual autobiography and an evocative traversal of lost worlds.""---Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal ""An extraordinary book, recounting the intellectual development of an extraordinary scholar.""---Peter Sarris, Engelsberg Ideas ""Enthralling."" * Salopian Magazine * ""A fascinating map of intellectual debts, of unexpected twists and turns . . . and of academic friendships across most of the globe. . . .[A] brilliant book.""---Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement ""The veritable crash course in twentieth-century intellectual history that [Journeys of the Mind] provides will capture the attention of persons with no particular knowledge of or interest in late antique studies as such. . . . And this, I think, is the book’s greatest contribution—that it is also an invitation. To follow the journeys of Peter Brown’s mind over the course of these seven hundred pages is necessarily to begin making journeys of our own.""---John Ladouceur, The Lamp ""Peter Brown’s Journeys of the Mind is really two books in one: the autobiography of a distinguished historian, and a guided tour of the development of his intellectual interests and their application during his long career. . . . A fascinating safari through territory that is often unfamiliar but always interesting.""---Lawrence N. Crumb, The Living Church ""An outstanding account, drawing on an exhaustive personal archive and aided by a formidable memory. . . .Written in pellucid prose, always gracious, unpretentious and unaffected, it is a rich feast to relish slowly."" * Dublin Review of Books * ""Journeys of the Mind has elucidated a lifetime of thought. It reflects how much Brown has enriched scholarship for the past six decades in ways which will undoubtedly stimulate new directions for research on this ‘world of late antiquity’ for many more decades to come.""---Rosamond McKitterick, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum ​​​​​​​ ""Peter Brown, like no other, has taught historians to view religion as a powerful force in history (past and present) and has taught theologians to understand every religious idea and doctrine as embedded – not to say: incarnated – within its specific historical and social context. This book’s gift to its readers is to offer this double insight and challenge once again, this time not in relation to distant times and people, but to the scholar’s own life and thought in history. Journeys of the Mind reveals how religion can work as a catalyst for historical imagination. But reading this book can also stimulate reflection on how history can become a catalyst for theological work. For history without religious imagination is empty, and theology without historical imagination is blind, as Kant might have said.""---Katharina Heyden, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum ""Brown’s autobiographical reflections now offer us a clearer and indeed much wider-ranging view on [religion]""---Claudia Rapp, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum ​​​​​​​ ""The most exciting book that I have read this century is Journeys of the Mind (Princeton), an intellectual memoir by the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. Immaculately written, radiant with wisdom, generous, grateful and gladdening, it matches The Education of Henry Adams without the haughty wounded misanthropy.""---Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement ""This wry scholarly autobiography excels in its pen portraits of scholars who have influenced Brown, from Mary Douglas to Michel Foucault.""---Michael Ledger-Lomas, History Today"