ABSTRACT
When the holy man experienced his ‘fall into particularity’ in 1971, he crashed into an innocent and unsuspecting world.2 Unsuspecting, in that no scholarly prescience could have foreseen how, three and one half decades and several retractationes later, that fall would continue to reverberate; innocent, in that the holy man arrived in a world that knew not gender. In successive refashionings of the holy man, Peter Brown has removed him from his original lonely pinnacle and relocated him in evolving landscapes of erudition, whose sands shift but whose bedrock remains that which he had first mapped in The World of Late Antiquity, also in 1971.3 Two winds, in particular, have sculpted those dunes in the intervening years: reaching gale force at times, the blast of new forms of textual criticism originated from a variety of theoretical and empirical quarters, whilst other breezes played upon the flesh, drawing attention to its sexuality and gendering the human body in all
1 Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 11.17 (to Radegund and Agnes), Venance Fortunat, Poèmes, ed. and trans. Marc Reydellet, 3 vols (Paris, 1994-2004), iii: 125.
