In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past by Victoria Leonard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past by Victoria Leonard Jamie Wood Victoria Leonard In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past New York: Routledge, 2022 Pp. xxii + 199. $136.00; £120.00. Having worked on another of the less celebrated historians of late antiquity, Isidore of Seville, I have much sympathy with Victoria Leonard's approach to the Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, written by the priest Orosius. Challenging what has until recently been the fairly widespread scholarly condemnation of the universal historian's abilities, Leonard deftly demonstrates that he was in fact an original author who deployed historical production to intervene actively in the religious changes of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Of course, such shifts did not occur in a vacuum, and Orosius's intervention was at least in part intended to help members of his Christian audience make sense of their religion's place within the late Roman politico-military complex. Rather than judging Orosius in terms of his failure to live up to the standard of classical historiography (or its late antique standard-bearers) or on the basis of Augustine's apparent unease with elements of the Seven Books of Histories, Leonard seeks to understand the author on his own terms. In this sense, the book builds on recent work by Peter van Nuffelen (Orosius and the Rhetoric of History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), which demonstrated how Orosius's "Christian" vision of history was grounded in a thoroughly ancient [End Page 257] education. Without denying his classical formation, Leonard's historiographical analysis seeks to contextualize Orosius in relation to the efforts of Christian intellectuals in the decades around 400 in order to comprehend what Christian imperial rule meant for their faith and, more specifically, in order to respond to the charge that Christianity had brought about the fall of Rome (9). This campaign reached its zenith, in the Latin West at least, with Augustine's City of God, the intellectual heft of which did much to overshadow Orosius's work, if not the enthusiasm of medieval copyists (over 275 manuscripts of the Seven Books of Histories survive) (2). After an introduction that surveys previous historiography and articulates the monograph's rehabilitative intent, Leonard proceeds to unpack Orosius's approach to writing history (Chapter One), beginning with the important question: "What is the Historiae?" This is particularly pertinent because the text does not fit neatly into any pre-existing historiographical genre, whether ancient (e.g., classical history) or more recent (e.g., late antique epitome). Nor does Orosius provide a programmatic statement of intent at the beginning of the work or reveal much about himself that can enable us to figure out what he was trying do to. This is not to say that the Spanish priest was an unreflective practitioner of the historian's craft, for the vast scope of his work meant that he had to make a series of decisions about dating and what to include and exclude and, on occasion, make explicit reference to the method that he was applying. Indeed, Leonard argues that Orosius's style throughout is "self-conscious" (36) and that he deliberately wove together various literary genres in a work of historiographical innovation that offers a politicized vision of his "Christanized historical model" (38). The following three chapters demonstrate quite convincingly how Orosius put this project into practice, from his vision of a Christian ordering of universal time (Chapter Two), his presentation of imperial power (Chapter Three), and his filtering of military affairs through a Christianizing lens (Chapter Four). Chapter Two shows brilliantly how chronology is not neutral. Orosius arranged his text according to a range of different temporal criteria and deployed a variety of dating mechanisms to thoroughly Christianize past time, his organization of the work around the Incarnation quite reasonably being posited as a precursor to the b.c/a.d. scheme (69). Chapter Three shows how, contrary to previous analyses that have focused on Orosius's emphasis on the synchronism between Augustus and Christ, his vision of the relationship between empire and Christianity was more complicated, ambiguous even. Rather than a universalizing vision of cooperation...