About this item
The supposed collapse of Roman civilization is still lamented more than 1,500 years later -- and intertwined with this idea is the notion that a fledgling religion, Christianity, went from a persecuted fringe movement to an irresistible force that toppled the empire. The "intolerant zeal" of Christians, wrote Edward Gibbon, swept Rome's old gods away, and with them the structures that sustained Roman society. Not so, argues Douglas Boin. Such tales are simply untrue to history, and ignore the most important fact of all: life in Rome never came to a dramatic stop. Instead, as Boin shows, a small minority movement rose to transform society -- politically, religiously, and culturally -- but it was a gradual process, one that happened in fits and starts over centuries.
About the Author
Douglas Boin is an internationally-recognized authority on the archaeology, religion, and history of the Roman world. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Ostia in Late Antiquity (2013) and Coming Out Christian in the Roman World (2015) , as well as numerous scholarly articles. His research has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and the Spanish-language newspaper El País, and his public writing has appeared at TIME.com, The International New York Times, the Huffington Post, the History News Network, Biblical Archaeology, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. From 2010-2013 he taught in Georgetown University's Department of Classics. He is an Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University. You can follow his work at academia.edu or at his blog (religiousdirt.com) . His new book "Late Antiquity: A Social and Cultural History" is forthcoming in 2017 from Wiley.
