Bret Deveraux, nel suo blog a tema storico A collection of unmitigated pedantry affronta la discussa questione della fine dell’Impero Romano d’Occidente: si tratto’ di declino e caduta oppure di continuità e cambiamento?
With that out of the way, the old view, that of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) and indeed largely the view of the sources themselves, was that the disintegration of the western half of the Roman polity was an unmitigated catastrophe, a view that held largely unchallenged into the last century; Gibbon’s great work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789) gives this school it’s name, ‘decline and fall.’ While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the ‘old man’ of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes1 and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering.
The real break with that view came with the work of Peter Brown, initially in his The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and more or less canonically in The Rise of Western Christendom (1st ed. 1996; 2nd ed. 2003, 3rd ed. 2013). The normal way to refer to the Peter Brown school of thought is ‘change and continuity’ (in contrast to the traditional ‘decline and fall’), though I rather like James O’Donnell’s description of it as the Reformation in late antique studies.
Tre blog post distinti trattano il tema considerando rispettivamente gli aspetti culturali, amministrativi ed economici:
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