A review by a top scholar on the alleged destruction of the ancient world by Christians. Still too much Gibbon!! We have evolved from there
21 September 2017 | by Averil Cameron
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Catherine Nixey(Macmillan, 2017, 352p., £20)
Hearts will sink among historians of early Christianity and late antiquity, as well as medievalists and, needless to say, Byzantinists, when they see the title of this pugnacious and energetically written book.
The words “darkening age” evoke everything they have been trying for years to overturn, implying as they do the notion of the “dark ages”, when the glories of classical civilisation were supposedly obliterated for centuries, until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment made possible the triumph of Western European liberalism and secularism.
We imagined that we had made some progress in finally overturning the Gibbonian model after a mere two and a quarter centuries. But, no. Catherine Nixey is a lively writer and likely to go far, but unfortunately in her first book she has rather…
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