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Marking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome's fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church's institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of medieval society in the West.

"[An] extraordinary new book...Prodigiously original-an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential...Peter Brown's subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity."
-G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books

"Peter Brown's explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century...Brown shows brilliantly in this book how the future life of Christians beyond the grave was influenced in particular by money.
-A. N. Wilson, The Spectator

About the Author
Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

Awards
Nominated for Grawemeyer Award in Religion 2017 and PROSE Awards 2017 and Wallace K. Ferguson Prize 2016 and Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion 2016 and Herbert Baxter Adams Prize 2016 and James Henry Breasted Prize 2016 and John Gilmary Shea Prize 2016.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674983977
Author Peter Brown
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press