Introduction: From imperial to post-imperial space in late ancient historiography / Peter Van Nuffelen -- Constantinople's belated hegemony / Anthony Kaldellis -- Beside the rim of the ocean: the edges of the world in fifth- and sixth-century historiography / Peter Van Nuffelen -- Armenian space in late antiquity / Tim Greenwood -- Narrative and space in Christian chronography: John of Biclaro on east, west, and Orthodoxy / Mark Humphries -- The Roman Empire in John of Ephesus' church history: being Roman, writing Syriac / Hartmut Leppin -- Changing geographies: West Syrian ecclesiastical historiography, AD 700-850 / Philip Wood -- Where is Syriac pilgrimage literature in late antiquity? Exploring the absence of a genre / Scott Johnson.
Summary:
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.
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