Looking for books on the Fall of Rome for a university thesis

by RobyGon

Hi, i was looking for suggestions on books about the Fall of Rome. I'm writing a thesis on Hystory Teaching and i wanted to focus on the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the causes and the interpretation of recent historiography.

I already did some research on the subject and tried to nail the "major" resources, which are:

  • Peter Heater, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

  • Bryan Ward Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

  • Adrian Goldsworty, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower

  • Michel De Jaeghere, The Last Days: The End of the Western Roman Empire

I think I got all the major authors in here but I was looking for some more suggestions, maybe if there are other major sources that I'm missing or if there are some interesting books which focus on a specific aspect like maybe Teutoburg/Adrianople, Christianity and how it became the official religion after 325, maybe something about the Parthians and Sassanids (even though I am focusing on the Western Roman Empire)?

Thanks to everyone for your time.

y_sengaku

I'd also recommend:

  • Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009) for a point of view from the socio-economic history of the Early Medieval West. His Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (2005) is certainly much more detailed, but I'm afraid whether it will consume your time to spare too much to read through.
  • Though hotly debated, Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017) should also be referred to as an example of the recent evaluation of environmental impact on the later Roman Empire, preferably with some of critical book reviews like this one by the Byzantinist John Haldon et al.
  • Regardless of how we should interpret his hypothesis (positively or negatively), I suppose some of Peter Brown's works, like Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (2012), must be referred to for his historiographical significance.

As for the major academic overview series, you can also rely on the revised edition (in the end of the 20th century) of Cambridge Ancient History series and some of Cambridge Companions series on Late Antiquity, like The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila (2014).

royalsanguinius

Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire is pretty good (I think it’s been a while since I’ve read it but Heather himself is a good historian) but I would recommend his Goths and Romans: 332-489 since it deals specifically with the goths which is very important in the study of late antiquity. And his Goths as well.

That being said that are some historians who criticize Heather’s approach on the study of the “Germanic” peoples (I slightly agree with them but I think they might take it a bit far at times). One of those is Guy Halsall, whose Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West is definitely another book you should include on your list. This one deals specifically with the migration period in the west and interactions between the non-Romans and the Romans.

For books about Christianity in the 4th century I would definitely recommend Timothy Barnes, I can’t remember any of his books offhand😅but he deals with Constantine and Christianity a lot in his work.

Granted I suppose this also depends on what you consider recent as some of these are 20-30 or so years old, but nevertheless they’re certainly useful works. And in the case of heather I think reading some of his older books might give you a better understanding of his more recent work (or at least it did for me).

iconodule1981

I would include A. M. H. Jones' History of the Later Roman Empire. It's older than several of the books you mentioned above, but in terms of detail and scope, one of the best works on the period.

Unless you have money to spare, however, I'd only check out a copy (volume by volume) from your university library.

https://archive.org/details/JonesLaterRomanEmpire01

ohea

I would also recommend Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians. It does a particularly good job of building a broad socioeconomic explanation for why migratory pressures built on Rome's frontiers over time, and how Roman frontier policy supported the rise of larger, more centralized and more militarized federations in and around the empire. It also spans the late empire into the early middle ages, so there's no abrupt cutoff after 476.