The long road to the East: Peter Brown and the languages of the “Christian Orient”

From the article:

In the moving last paragraph of his Journeys of the Mind, Peter Brown reports on his daily routine: he gets up early, says his prayers, reads ancient sources and also practises Ge’ez, ancient Ethiopian, a language that transmits works in which the Egyptian and Syrian asceticism of late antiquity echoes (p. 699). In this way, Brown’s continuing interest in the multilingualism of antiquity, which is fed by his curiosity about the diversity of ancient sources and his desire not to limit himself to the usual, but to focus on what at first glance appears inconspicuous and marginal. This is precisely what makes his depictions so appealing. […]