2009 Annual Public Lecture

18 November 2009

Sacred and Secular: Religion and the Making of Late Antiquity

Professor Mark Humphries, Swansea University

Venue: Humanities Building, Room 2.03

Time: 5-7pm

Professor Humphries will respond to Bryan Ward-Perkins' avowed befuddlement about what he calls “the new late antiquity” having an obsession with religion. Professor Humphries' point will be that if this befuddles him, then he has missed something crucial about late antiquity, and that the "Brownian" emphasis on the period as “an age of spirituality”, while open to qualification, still holds up. The lecture will outline the development of the discipline, the recent challenge to it, and how we might move on. Along the way the audience can expect barbarian onslaughts, earthquakes, plague, famine, flood, and Theodosius I.