“A new book by Peter Brown is clearly an event. . . .  Peter Brown is a writer of highly emotive as well as extremely clever prose. . . . The Curti lectures complete the sequence of studies of the Christianisation of late antiquity on which Peter Brown has been engaged since the publication of Augustine of Hippo (1967).  One by one, these studies have illuminated the world of late antiquity (the term he has made his own) by reference to what has preceded it. ”—Averil Cameron, London Times Higher Education Supplement

“There are few areas of humane scholarship so daunting as the study of late antiquity, that period when Christianity gradually conquered the mind and heart of the foundering Roman empire.  Peter Brown is a widely recognized master of this pivotal moment of history. . . . What characterizes Brown’s work is his graceful, even ingratiating style, one that makes the most esoteric-seeming matter engaging.”—Washington Post

“Peter Brown combines a witty and ironic prose style with the gifts of a first-class historian of late antiquity possessing an exhaustive knowledge of the sources.  His latest book will certainly win him new admirers and delight old friends.  The central question of Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity is a perennial issue in human affairs, but Mr. Brown focuses particularly on the Roman Empire in the 200 years after Constantine the Great, who died in A.D. 337.  How did the empire control its citizens?  And what difference to the style of that control did church leaders make as the empire became converted to Christianity? . . .  His telling is enriched by delectable details and acute, original observations.”—Henry Chadwick, New York Times Book Review