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Gregory the Great and His World. By R. A. Markus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxiv + 241 pp. $59.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.
Robert Markus gives us the key to understanding his book in his introduction. "I have become convinced in the course of many years' work on the history of Christianity from the fourth century to the sixth that the cast of [Gregory's] mind can be understood only when we have taken the measure of the intellectual and spiritual shift that took place between the Christianity of, say, Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, and that of Gregory. That I have tried to do in my book, The End of Ancient Christianity, conceived, when I set out on writing it, as a Preface to what was to be the present book" (xii). In other words, one needs to read Markus's splendid book on the end of ancient Christianity in order to appreciate fully his present work on Gregory. This is quite true, for as Markus describes Gregory's intellectual and spiritual "landscape" he does so by "signposting its principal landmarks" and referring the reader for deeper discussion to his previous work (xii). Thus readers must be familiar with the map of changes Markus plotted in The End of Ancient Christianity: definitions of Christian identity (particularly Augustine's notion of "Christian mediocrity," which Gregory elaborates); the changing role of the martyr (which Gregory continues to expand and generalize to apply to the "sacrifice" of self every Christian is obliged to...