History of Late Antiquity

George Woudhuysen

I am a Fellow by Examination in History and I work on three related topics. My doctoral thesis is a study of the House of Constantine (324-366 A.D.), that is, of the first Christian emperor and his successors, particularly Constantius II and Julian the Apostate (the last pagan emperor). I seek to understand the dramatic transformation of state and society which took place under this dynasty, and how that eventually created an empire that could do without the family responsible for it. As an off-shoot of this I work with Justin Stover, a colleague, on the (underrated) Roman historian Sextus Aurelius Victor.

One of the richest bodies of source material for the fourth century is a set of letter collections, and that has led me to be interested more generally in why people in Late Antiquity (from roughly 200 to 700) wrote letters, and especially in why and how they collected them. With Graham Barrett, a JRF at St John's, I study letters in the Latin World from c. 400-700. We focus in particular on apparently miscellaneous collections, and what they can tell us about the history and culture of the period. Partly through that work, I have become very interested in the reception and use of the history of Late Antiquity in the Enlightenment and after, and especially in the thought and work of Edward Gibbon, the period's greatest student.