Van Nuffelen Peter. Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity

Cambridge University Press, 2019. — 226 p.The Roman Empire traditionally presented itself as the centre of the world, a view sustained by ancient education and conveyed in imperial literature. Historiography in particular tended to be written from an empire-centred perspective. In Late Antiquity, however, that attitude was challenged by the fragmentation of the empire. This book explores how a post-imperial representation of space emerges in the historiography of that period. Minds adapted slowly, long ignoring Constantinople as the new capital and still finding counter-worlds at the edges of the world. Even in Christian literature, often thought of as introducing a new conception of space, the empire continued to influence geographies. Political changes and theological ideas, however, helped to imagine a transferral of empire away from Rome and to substitute ecclesiastical for imperial space. By the end of Late Antiquity, Rome was just one of many centres of the world.Peter Van Nuffelen is Professor of Ancient History at Universiteit Gent, Belgium, where he leads an ERC-funded team on late ancient historiography. His recent publications include Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the Post-Hellenistic Period (Cambridge, 2011), Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (2012), and Penser la tolérance durant l'Antiquité tardive (2018).