Roundtable on Peter Brown, <i>Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History</i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)

It is supererogatory to attempt to introduce Peter Brown to the readership of Church History.Over three-quarters of a century, Brown has profoundly influenced the historiography of ancient and medieval Christianity, most notably through his ability to creatively reframe the first thousand years of Christianity, a feat which he has done not just once, but repeatedly.Brown's impact is so profound that it is difficult to recall how many core concepts and approaches now taken for granted were once new avenues of inquiry which he initiated.It was Brown who revealed that in the midst of the so-called "Dark Ages", one could actually find a dazzling array of diverse societies who were busy transforming the classical world into what Brown would call "late antiquity".Where previous scholarship saw cultural dead ends, Brown provoked reconsiderations.Over the decades, he drew the attention of historians to the vibrancy of the "cult of the saints", to the liberatory role of sexual renunciation in early Christianity, and to the dynamics and rhetoric of poverty and wealth in early Christian societies.Brown continually pushed the boundaries of late antiquity ever wider and later.Even his efforts to chart "the rise of Western Christendom" began, without irony, by focusing on Syriac texts from Mesopotamia.Beneficiaries of Brown's scholarship have rightly wondered about the seemingly inexhaustible sources of his creative genius.Those readers will now have some answers, courtesy of Brown's intellectual autobiography, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.At 736 pages and 99 chapters, this volume is, in fact, Brown's longest historical narrative.Readers who follow it cover to cover will not be disappointed.And yet, the sheer scale of Brown's scholarly career and the complexity of the intellectual influences upon his methods are so great that no single reader or reviewer could do justice to the book in its entirety (the very choice of 99 chapters invites a sense of infinitude).For this reason, the editors of the journal have invited six of Brown's former graduate students to reflect on the book from different perspectives.