Michael Ledger-Lomas, Tracing the Hard Edges of Religion: On Peter Brown’s “Journeys of the Mind” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 June 2023
[…]
No historian has evoked more vividly the strange waltz between a transcendent faith and earthly powers in the centuries from Constantine to Muhammad (a period the book’s author named “late antiquity”) than Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History is a gripping new memoir about how he came to do it.
[…]
In recovering the social and cosmic payoffs to self-abnegation, Brown posited the kind of paradoxes that had startled Michel Foucault’s readers. His sympathetic portrait of Foucault and his friend Paul Veyne cast them as allies in his quest to fissure the present’s easy identification with past persons. If he voices a criticism of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (first volume, 1976)—especially its final, long unpublished volume (2018)—it is that its philosophical commitments prevented its author from fully rendering the alien theologies that sculpted Christian flesh.
[…]
Foucault News 