Reviews

Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World

G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999) 780 pp., $49.95.

This lavishly and lovingly compiled volume signals the coming of age of an exciting scholarly field: Late Antiquity, the period spanning the mid-third to late eighth century C.E.

When we knew it as the “Dark Ages,” this epoch remained veiled in obscurity, a featureless intermission between the shining classical and pious medieval worlds. It was often considered “merely a violent and hurried prelude to better things,” write the editors, “a corpse to be dragged quickly offstage so that the next great act of the drama of the Middle Ages should begin.”