Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

Herrin, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846144663 ISBN 13: 9781846144660

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2020

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome slowly faded and Constantinople was established as the capital of the Roman Empire in the east, a new city was rising in the west. In 402 the western Emperor Honorius settled in what was then a small but well defended provincial city on the Adriatic coast. This town was Ravenna, and it was to be home to the rulers of what remained of the western empire until it fell to the Lombards in 751.

Successive emperors filled Ravenna with exceedingly impressive secular and ecclesiastical buildings (many of them still standing) and the imperial court attracted scholars, teachers, lawyers, inventors, craftsmen and spiritual leaders. For over three centuries it (rather than Rome) became the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures, and played a critical role in the development of a medieval European identity.

Yet the city at this remarkable period has never benefited from an authoritative and accessible history. Judith Herrin's book explains what made Ravenna such a brilliant and vital centre during the fifth to eighth centuries. Readers unfamiliar with the audacious world of Late Antiquity will find the book a compelling introduction to the period, while those who know it will find it brought to life in the history of a single city.

Review:

Reviews for Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (-)

Others in recent years have made worthy efforts to interest us in the Byzantine achievement, but none has made it live in quite the way that Herrin does ... Free from portentousness and pretentiousness, she doesn't insist on her subject's importance or relevance: the freshness and enthusiasm of her book is its real point. Not just an important work of scholarship but a delight to read, this study works a minor miracle in raising Byzantium, Lazarus-like, from its dusty grave. (Michael Kerrigan Scotsman)

She presents Byzantium as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan reality which somehow escaped the constraints of its official ideology (Economist)

About the Author:

Judith Herrin won the Heineken Prize for History (the Dutch 'Nobel Prize') in 2016, for her pioneering work on the early Medieval Mediterranean world, especially the role of Byzantium, the influence of Islam and the significance of women. She is the author of Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, The Formation of Christendom, devoted to the Mediterranean world from the mid-sixth to the mid-ninth century A.D., A Medieval Miscellany and Women in Purple. She worked in Birmingham, Paris, Munich, Istanbul and Princeton before becoming Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London, from which she retired in 2008. Judith has published many scholarly articles, excavated in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, and was on the editorial board Past and Present, for many years serving as Vice-Chair, from 2000-2013.