Bryan Ward-Perkins: Two Different Ways of Viewing the End of Roman Civilization

Dear colleagues and friends,

We would like to kindly invite you to a lecture of Bryan Ward-Perkins (University of Oxford) Two Different Ways of Viewing the End of Roman Civlization. It will take place on Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 7 PM in Hans Belting Library (the ground-floor of building “K” of the Faculty of Arts at the Masaryk University, Veveří 28).

About the lecture:

This talk examines two different ways of considering the 'end of a civilisation'. The first, explored at length in the speaker's book of 2005, is in terms of the collapse of material culture and technologies. In this respect, the Latin West and Byzantine East suffered a far more dramatic collapse in the sixth to eighth centuries than did the newly Arab world of the Near East.

But there is also another way of viewing the continuity or discontinuity of a 'civilisation': in terms of religion, language and identity. From this point of view, it was in the Christian world that Roman civilisation continued to evolve uninterruptedly from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages, whereas in the Near East the coming of a new religion marked the beginning of a decisive and profound cultural break.