An antique chronology

Late Antiquity (4th-5th centuries) overlaps the most impressive tectonic plate in European history, the Middle Ages, which in turn overlaps the Early Modern (16th-18th centuries). At both edges of the massive medieval plate, contemporary historiographical activity is fiercest. Here, if anywhere, we should expect cognitive earthquakes. Rightly preoccupied by discontinuity, historians scrutinise both sites. Can they tell us the processes by which, over the course of a couple of centuries or so, one age yielded to another?

This perplexing and unresolved theme runs right through The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 13 . Listening inadvertently, as it were, to the faint foetal heartbeats of the Middle Ages, already discernible within late antique civilisation, the diagnostic historians of CAH 13 recognise all the tell-tale signs. They seem happy enough at first to point them out. Then (as if ashamed), they retreat, muttering that late antiquity was a distinct historical period, well worth studying for its own sake. Anticipating what lies ahead is frowned upon. Postmodernists repeatedly warn us against falling victim to some master narrative, as if we have not known for some time that dangerously pleasurable teleological urges violate Von Ranke's dictum that each epoch is immediate to God. Precursorism is out.

Nevertheless, in the chapters of CAH 13 devoted to institutional, social and cultural history we find that the old and the new (and hints of a world yet unborn) are most sensitively juxtaposed. Emancipated from the rush of events that tends to devour historical significance in the narrative chapters, Christopher Kelly (the emperor), A. D. Lee (the army), David Hunt (the church), Arnaldo Marcone (social relations), Bryan Ward-Perkins (cities), Peter Brown (asceticism, Christianisation), Averil Cameron (education, literature), Jas Elsner (art, architecture) and others illuminate the period and shed some forbidden light on the great transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

So we note: the emperor as an icon, but with problems of command and control; the army, under its Christian standard, in decline; the rise of the church as the darling of the state; the beginnings of the Christian city; a society in transformation (most interestingly, the role of Christian women); the advent of walled cities in the West from the 5th to the 19th centuries; the common patterns of ascetic behaviour, pagan and Christian: yet the authority of the church signalling a profound difference; the Christians construct two enduring historiographical myths (or interpretations) - their triumph over paganism and how corruption entered the church (the second Fall); the Christians also steep themselves in classical culture, vigorously exploiting it, while propagating a new culture of their own; the sheer cultural vitality of the age; finally, what to make of the artistic conjecture of late antique naturalism with what seems a schematic (dare one say it?) pre-medieval style (pointing to cultural co-habitation? syncretism? multiple meanings?).

The deeper currents within this unique period are there to see. The bedrock of ancient cultural values is gradually becoming Christianised. The state, intact in the East, grows weaker in the West, where ever more the barbarians are victorious. Emperor and church are the "two massive landowners in the later empire", while "the debt-ridden rural tenant was even less secure than the domestic slave". Cities survive as economic units, still inhabited by land-owning aristocracy, but with reduced levels of economic activity (this from a nuanced exercise in economic history by Peter Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker). Christianity, despite heresy (on which see Henry Chadwick's masterly chapter), speaks to the towering patristic intellectuals far better than polytheism or neo-Platonism alone can hope to do. Farth Fowden, sensible on the "attrition of polytheism", is more respectful of that tradition than he is of Judaism, which he dismisses as having "fatally compromised the unity of God by denying the unity of his creation, mankind, and treating truth as the preserve of one nation among many". Contentious polemicising such as this, I would have thought, is inappropriate in a scholarly volume. In truth, the Jews (though mentioned by Benjamin Issac, Brown and others) deserve a chapter. So, too, do slaves, women and late antique demography.

But make no mistake: the ghost of John Bagnell Bury (1861-19), the spirit behind the old CAH , haunts Cambridge still. Bury taught that as a discipline history was "simply a science, no less and no more". To Bury (in the words of Norman Baynes), "it was better to leave the facts a mere sequence than present them as points in a logical development whichI cannot be proved". Despite the editors' best intentions, this volume reveals the dead hand of Bury's cult of facts. What ought to have been a state-of-the-art history of late antiquity is, in some respects, a venerable Cambridge monument refurbished for modern use. However bibliographically and evidentially up-to-date CAH 13 is, and however brilliantly crafted several of its chapters are, its historiographical structure is antediluvian.

To be fair to the editors, this volume's general shape was determined by the nature of the series. Yet far too much space is allotted to chronological narrative and encyclopedic description. Both of these genres are sub-historical, in which the cult of facts, rather than the search for meaning, holds sway. Labelled "chronological overview", the first four chapters, with their relentless march through late Roman politics, must have been as painful to write as they are to read. Why were their authors not allowed to integrate what comes next, "government and institutions", into their accounts, thereby enabling them to draft a genuine political history? Students be warned: blow-by-blow chronological inclusiveness is the last thing that your teachers want in a historical essay.

Building a new extension on a hallowed monument such as the CAH is risky, when today nothing we build historiographically is intended to bear the expository dead weight of "scientific" authority. Hard-won, cheerfully provisional scholarship means that magisterial gowns are no longer obligatory. Voices are softer. Should not the editors have spared their authors the indignity of genuflecting to Bury's ghost?

As long ago as 1870, Jacob Burckhardt wrote: "To me, as a teacher of history, a very curious phenomenon has become clear: the sudden devaluation of all mere 'events' in the past..." Burckhardt's artistic zeal for intelligibility and synthesis was a far cry from Bury's encyclopedism of despair. Which vision has prevailed? One acknowledged 20th-century master graces the pages of CAH 13 . To read Brown, who has the skill of a Houdini in slipping out of every editorial constraint designed to shackle him, is liberating. It is through the work of such elusive, humanely empirical scholars that the subtle art of historiography is enhanced.

Gary Dickson is senior lecturer in history, University of Edinburgh.