A good graduate seminar primer, the essay foregrounds the difficulty that the volume sets out to address: Late Antiquity is an academic field of remarkable power and popularity, yet despite (or because of) this success, fundamental questions about the field's definition have only become more contentious. Recent disputes over Late Antiquity's temporal and spatial boundaries express deeper disagreements over the structures—social, political, economic, artistic, or more broadly cultural—that analysis should privilege and over the proper balance of continuity, creativity, and catastrophe that should inform conceptualization and narrative.

Rita Lizzi Testa, ed. Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

From Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR). Review by Dennis E. Trout, University of Missouri