History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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(out of 7 reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 33.75
Price: CDN$ 30.61
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Rating: (out of 7 reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 33.75
Price: CDN$ 30.61
[wprebay kw=”pagan+history” num=”8″ ebcat=”all”] [wprebay kw=”pagan+history” num=”9″ ebcat=”all”]
Review by Brian Griffith for History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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This is a fine collection of essays on the changing quality of family life as classical Rome shifted to medieval Rome. I found its accounts of early Christianity’s impact on personal life particularly interesting. For example, Michele Rouche shows how evolving church doctrines on marriage affected families in Western Europe. In the long process of conversion, many missionaries seemed to assume that cultural standards from the old Near East were those of God, while those native to Europe came from the Devil. Most clergymen taught that the church’s rites and approval were necessary for valid marriage, but for centuries this was hard to enforce. The priests could not simply declare all existing marriages invalid. Still, they increasingly denounced families that formed their own bonds independently, saying that these couples were living in sin. The clerics taught that lovers who separated and found other lovers were “bigamists”, and their children were “bastards”. The church informed local people that lovers of the same sex were “sodomites”. Many European women found it shocking that the church condemned lesbian lovers, demanded they abandon each other, and required them to perform heavy “penances for sin”. (p. 533)
The book traces slow but big changes in human relations, rights, duties, expectations and dreams over several centuries. It gives perspective on the options we face as families today.
Review by Glenn McDorman for History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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This is the first volume of a multi-author endeavor to trace the changes in private attitudes, beliefs, benaviors, and lifestyles from the early Roman Empire to the late twentieth century. The first volume begins with the early Roman Empire and ends with the apogee of the Byzantine Empire. Containing five lenghty essays by different authors (mainly French — the whole project is a French one) dealing with the early Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire, housing and architecture in Roman Africa, Merovingian Gaul, and tenth and eleventh-century Byzantium. The project is a fresh and invigorating look at the ways that societies change. There are several excellent illuminations in this book. We are shown that the notion of Roman “sexual liberation” is not well-founded; that Christianity did not change Western views on sex and the body, but that Christianity adopted the views of the poorer (and more numerous) Roman classes; how architecture can reveal much about a society; and that the major change between the late Empire and the early medieval had to do with notions of “private” and “public.”Although the book is interesting and useful, there are some reasons to criticize it. Most of the attention is given to the early Roman Empire, which consumes almost one third of the book. Entirely too much space is given to the chapter on architecture in Roman Africa — it is significantly longer than the chapter on the late Empire. The chapter entitled “The Early Middle Ages in the West” is really only about Merovingian Gaul, and does not always have the change between the late Empire and early medieval as a focus. The chapter on Byzantium did not seem to fit with the rest of the book. The reason for including Byzantium in this volume rather than the next volume (Middle Ages) was to show Byzantine culture as a continuation of Roman culture. Unfortunately, the piece was not about the early Byzantine, but rather the middle Byzantine era, thus having no connection with the rest of the book. It is also dubious that the book begins with the Roman Empire, not the Roman Republic or classical Greece. Paul Veyne says that this decision was made because Rome was essentially Greek in character, and that a section on Greece and a section on Rome would be repetitive. This is weak reasoning at best, but, given the lenght of the book as it stands now, it may still have been a good decision. Finally, the book is not footnoted or endnoted. There is a lengthy bibliography and a small notes section in the back, but assertions, ideas, and evidence are not clearly referenced. I do not know if this is how French scholarship is done, or if this major chunk of scholarship was left out in the interest of marketing the book to a lay audience. Either way, it is frustrating, and only hurts the academic value of this major project.Despite these critical comments, I view the book as an excellent effort and an enlightening read. Too often history is about events, not people, and these historians have made a noble attempt to humanize our past.
Review by Robert J. Crawford for History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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This book covers about 1,000 years of private life, from the polytheistic era of classical Rome through the acceptance there and then institutionalization of Christianity in the dark ages. It is a dazzling side glance into the cultural evolution of these tumultuous times with some reference to the larger political context.The distinctions between these cultures are at once subtle and brutal. First, we view the civitas of Rome, that is, the obligation that Roman citizens felt towards their cities, which involved complex community-oriented mores and expensive public displays that were paid for by private means; aristocratic children, brought up with relatively less sense of their individuality than we enjoy, saw their lives and careers as reflections of the glory of their cities. The reader is also treated to the way that slaves and families were treated in great detail.Then, in the early Christian era, more privatized cultures arose, first with the increased introspection that the christianization of the empire entailed. Next, the barbarian invasions – in which nomadic tribes smashed the urban cultures in whose wealth they had wanted to partake – merely accelerated this trend; they greatly valued their possessions, often war booty that they had to carry with them, and hence had little regard for fixed property and its supporting laws that enabled cities to flourish. Infrastructure and larger communities and political units in this period deteriorated, which severely impacted trade and hence economic welfare. The standard of measure of a life at that time became purely personal wealth and power.A sub-theme of the book is the influence of monasticism, which created its own closed communities and became the model for family life at the beginning of the gothic era. Monks and the clergy were the holders of standards of conduct and literacy through this little-known period, and exerted immense influence on the mores of the people who lived nearby. In all its detail, this was new to me. Indeed, if it were not for their labors, much of classical learning would have been lost forever. They are also virtually the only source for information about life in Byzantium.While there is something lost in having so many authors involved in a single volume, the chapters in this book are so long and detailed that they are like self-contained books. Ample illustrations transport the reader to each era, revealing the mystery of what made us who we are in the west over so many centuries. Nonetheless, the chapters are uneven. The chapter on Roman architecture in N. Africa is very boring indeed, and the one on Byzantium is dull as well. But those on pagan and then Christian Rome are superb, as are those on the dark ages. Finally, this book relies more on written sources than on archaeology, which is a pity in my opinion, as the sources written after pagan Rome are rather formulaic and outright boring in their rhetorical flourishes as you read about them over hundreds of pages. At times, it reads like a compendium of obscure sources, including exhaustive analysis of funery inscriptions, though that is often what academia comes down to. Another odd thing is that there are only two pages of footnotes, which are followed by a rather poor bibliography. While the book is trying to strike a balance between popular and specialized audiences, I would have preferred better info on sources.In spite of these criticisms, there is no question that this book is an ample and fascinating meal. Recommended.
Review by Black Bart for History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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So far, I have only read the half of the book on Pagan Rome, as that is my hobby these days. It was interesting in parts; illustrative of things I had not known or even suspected, things I had read allusions to previously, and things I never would even have thought studied. Some of the cross cultural comparisions were beautifully illustrative (one that sticks was a comparison between the economy of a present day middle eastern country to that of the Empire). I am pretty sure this suffered from some sort of idiological bias, as it was weirdly contradictory in places, though it is an original enough bias that it it probably unique to the authors. One of the authors at least, seemed to be an intimate of Michel Foucault. They were all french, and the prose suffers for it to the point of being occasionally downright nonsensical. The book certainly rid me of any “golden age” delusions I might have, regarding Roman times. I’ll stick with my electric can opener, thanks very much.
Review by for History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
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This book was fascinating, but I wish more thought had been given to the whys of private life, not just the whats.