James Howard-Johnston

James Douglas Howard - Johnston ( * 1942 ) is an English historian.

Howard - Johnston is married to the novelist Angela Huth, they have a daughter. Howard - Johnston is one of the English upper class ( Peerage ): he is the grandson of British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, the Commander in Chief of the British Army in World War I; his father was the counter - Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard - Johnston ( 1903-1996 ). 1954 married his mother, Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Haig ( 1907-1997 ), second husband, the famous historian Hugh Trevor - Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton married, so that the stepfather was.

Howard - Johnston is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, and from 1971 until his retirement in 2009 professor of Byzantine Studies. His research focuses on late antiquity and the Byzantine period, for which he is an acknowledged expert. Howard - Johnston has worked intensively with the relations between Byzantium / Byzantium and the Sassanid Empire, the upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 7th century and the contemporary historiography. In addition to several important essays on these topics he published in 2010 a comprehensive study on " world crisis " of the 7th century, in which he extensively examined the relevant sources and based thereon historical overview provides, where he re- dated multiple events ( so the death of ʿ Alī ibn Abi Talib to the year 658 instead of 661 ) or interpreted differently.

Publications (selection )

• Studies in the organization of the Byzantine army in the tenth and eleventh centuries (1971 )
• The cult of saints in late antiquity and the Middle Ages: essays on the contribution of Peter Brown (1999, as editor with Paul Antony Hayward )
• The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos in the series Translated Texts for Historians (1999, edited with Robert W. Thomson, . Historical commentary was written by Howard - Johnston )
• East Rome, Sasanian Persia and the End of Antiquity (2006) [ collection of essays ]
• Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (2010; review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, review in marriage points)