Publisher's Synopsis
`This wide-ranging book is an extraordinarily significant contribution to the study of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean world. The author is in complete control of current scholarship, but she brings a comparative vision to the material that is uniquely her own. For a work of such breadth and boldness, the balance that reigns throughout is quite astonishing.' Professor G. W. Bowersock, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton `Miss Herrin's scholarship is unerring, her scope is wide and her style fluent...Debate about where modern Europe came from will continue. But it will be enriched by this civilised and accomplished book.' Economist `Dr Herrin writes with remarkable lucidity and intellectual grasp about these centuries.' Sunday Telegraph `A most rewarding book....to which both specialists and those more generally nterested in Soviet literature will turn with pleasure and gratitude.' The Slavonic and East European Review In this history of what used to be termed `The Dark Ages', Judith Herrin outlines the fate of the Roman Empire from the end of late antiquity to the coronation of Charlemagne.;She describes the clash between nascent Islam and stubborn Byzantium as the central contest that allowed `Europe' to develop, thereby placing the rise of the West in its true Mediterranean context. Her inquiry contres on the notion of `Christendom'. In a path-breaking account of the arguments over Christian doctrine, she shows how the northern sphere of the Roman world divided into two distinct and self-conscious areas, as the Arabs swept through the southern regions.
