Until 1939, he spent winter and spring each year in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his father worked as a railway engineer based at Khartoum.

"[6] Such influences, with "roots deep in my childhood, already ensured, perhaps, that both religion and the 'exotic' (the non-European and, by implication, the non-classical) were both too large, too ever-present and too rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as unambiguously negative symptoms of decline.

And Greek I did, if only for one year, before taking the Junior Certificate and then lapsing from the high calling of a classical scholar in the English Public School tradition into the study of mere History.

[13] That Special Subject had a profound influence on Brown: "I was thrilled by the glimpse which both authors offered of the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the very moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire.

Institutions and powerful bodies of ideas, that I had known only in the medieval and post-Reformation periods — and many of which, in their modern form, still hung, like chill clouds, above the heart of any Irish boy, Catholic or Protestant — were shown to have originated first in a very distant, ancient world.

"[14]Following his graduation Brown began, but did not complete, a doctoral thesis under the external supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano (at that time professor of ancient history at University College London).

In 2015 he was hosted by the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in a public discussion with Paula Fredriksen.

[35] For several decades, Brown has been General Editor of the book series "The Transformation of the Classical Heritage", published by the University of California Press.

Within this broad field, he has also been central in the study of Augustine, monasticism (both the eremitical "holy man" and coenobitic alternatives), the cult of the saints and the practice of sexual renunciation.

His commitment has challenged him throughout his career to break into new territory, such as by examining the Desert Fathers, Syriac poetry, and languages like Greek and Coptic.

"[2] Following his exposure to the works of Marrou and Piganiol as an undergraduate, and shortly after joining All Souls College as a Prize Fellow, Brown travelled in Italy in 1957–8, doing research at the British School in Rome.

During that time, he was especially influenced by the work of Santo Mazzarino,[40] which provided a stimulus for Brown's earliest lectures at Oxford, on return from Italy in 1958.

[42] Brown's earliest research articles concerned the Christianization of the senatorial aristocracy of Rome (1961), and the phenomena of religious dissent and coercion in late Roman North Africa (1961, 1963).

Following the completion of Augustine, however, Brown felt "free, at last" to take a wider approach to Late Antiquity, and to turn in particular to the Near East and Central Asia.

An article on "The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire" (1969) reflected the direction of his interests, and was spectacularly corroborated when, shortly after, the Cologne Mani-Codex came to light.

[46] Brown's interest in analyzing culture and religion as social phenomena, and as part of a wider context of historical change, had already been fostered by engagement with the work of Baynes, Frend and Jones.

Reviewing it in the Journal of Theological Studies, William Frend – with whom Brown had had a courteous but critical difference of opinion on the religious history of Roman Africa – wrote: "This is a superb book, an intensely personal interpretation of its central figure, but one in which the scholar's full range of skills, those of the historian, the philosopher, and human psychologist have been brought to bear, sustained throughout by a profound knowledge of Augustine's writings and those of his contemporaries, as well as of modern critical works.

Equally, however, it was Brown's distinctive and subtle de-emphasis of theological content, combined with his use of psychoanalytic insight - which was then highly unusual in the study of an ancient figure - that helped to set Augustine convincingly, as an individual, within a historical landscape.

This was noticed by Richard Southern, who praised Brown for "bringing Augustine out of the tomb of theological doctrine, and setting his mind and emotions working before our eyes.

In his second book The World of Late Antiquity (1971), Brown offered a radically new interpretation of the entire period between the second and eighth centuries AD.

The traditional interpretation of this period was centred around the idea of decadence from a 'golden age', classical civilisation, after the famous work of Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779).

According to Brown, the charismatic, Christian ascetics (holy men) were particularly prominent in the late Roman empire and the early Byzantine world as mediators between local communities and the divine.

But more importantly, Brown argues, the rise of the holy man was the result of a deeper religious change that affected not only Christianity but also other religions of the late antique period – namely the need for a more personal access to the divine.

Published in 1988, Peter Brown's The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages.

[52] Brown's longest book to date, Through the Eye of a Needle concerns attitudes to philanthropic giving in the Latin West in Late Antiquity.

In 2008 he was the co-winner, with Indian historian Romila Thapar, of the semi-regular Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, from the US Library of Congress.

[58][59] In addition to the professional memberships acquired during his career in the UK and US, Brown has received honorific recognition from a number of other learned bodies.