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J.B. Bury, Later Roman Empire - outdated?
#1
I just picked up a copy of J.B. Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire - From the death of Theodosius to the death of Justinian. I know Bury has a pretty good reputation as a historian, but I can't help but notice the book was published in the 1920s and surely some subsequent scholarship has to contradict this book, no? Archaeologists have discovered a lot in the past 80 years.
I tried to use the Search feature to see if this topic has been covered before but I couldn't find anything.
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#2
No, the sequence of the events is still the same, the names of the emperors haven't changed, the foreign tribes are still identical. Our understanding of the conditions (economical, social, religious) has changed. But if you want to know what more or less happened, it's still OK. The text is available at Lacus.
Jona Lendering
Relevance is the enemy of history
My website
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#3
Thanks a lot Jona, just thought I'd ask in order to avoid committing any erroneous information to memory.
I'm only a few pages in and I can already tell I'm going to enjoy this one a lot.

(I, for the record, am the author of the original post. I thought I was logged in when I made it.)
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#4
I really like Bury, and he is still cited by modern historians. I adore Gibbon, and he is still cited by modern historians. Are some things outdated? Sure, but you can still learn a great deal from them. And as for Gibbon, he was such a good writer that one could read him just for the literary aspect alone if one so chose.
David J. Cord
www.davidcord.com
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#5
After reading it, I can see why Bury has such a good reputation as an historian. He's very meticulous in pulling together a lot of obscure and sometimes unreliable sources into a coherent narrative, and he leaves his personal views out of the book.
It's virtually impossible to tell what J.B. Bury's personal opinion is by reading his work; in the theological disputes, he will articulate one side's argument very fairly and persuasively to the point that you start to think he is e.g. a Monophysite or Pelagian, then he turns around and treats the opposing arguments just as convincingly.
Some historians try to make sense of events that were sometimes nonsensical through their own preconceived notions about history... before they even begin their research, they think "in writing this book I will prove x." Bury never does that. It's clear throughout his work that his first and only priority is to tell exactly what happened, nothing more.
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