Frankfurter, David (2018), Christianizing Egypt

Who makes history? For many years, the answer to that question was assumed to be obvious: the great rulers, generals, prelates, and thinkers who determined the course of human events. This "Great Man" view of history (and most of those identified as 'great' tended by definition to be men) began to fall out of favor in the mid-20 th century, as historians began to attach more weight to large-scale environmental, economic, and social factors. The trend accelerated with the advent of new critical approaches such as feminism and post-colonialism, which did much to broaden the range of the individuals and groups that historians might consider as active participants in, rather than simply the passive recipients of, major historical developments. The Christianization of the ancient Mediterranean world is of course a classic example of a major historical development, and David Frankfurter, in this compelling volume, takes a fresh look at it in the specific context of Egypt. Older accounts of the spread of Christianity in Egypt typically focus on Great Men as the key agents in the process: Clement, Origen, Dionysius, Antony, Athanasius, and so forth

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