Peter Heather

Peter J. Heather (* 1960 in Northern Ireland) is a British historian.

Heather studied history ( with doctorate ) at New College, Oxford University and taught at University College London and the University of Yale. By 2008 he was in Oxford Fellow of Medieval History at Worcester College. Since 2008 he is Professor of Medieval History at King's College, London.

The research focus is Heather's late antiquity and thus to the end of antiquity. In recent years he has also become increasingly involved in the political development of the early Middle Ages. He has published numerous articles and monographs on topics such as the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the Goths (where he argued against either Herwig Wolfram ), published the role of the Huns in the dissolution of Western Rome or the rhetorician Themistius. In 2005 he published his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, in which he indicated as the main reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire in the West the invasion of the Huns and the resulting triggered migration of peoples; simultaneously rejected Heather in the book, the thesis that the Empire was subjected to a " process of decay ": Internal factors were not decisive for the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. The book aroused in the professional world and therefore interest, as his colleague, the Oxford archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward - Perkins, almost simultaneously, a similar book published ( The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization ). Heather and especially Ward - Perkins argued partly explicitly against the highly influential position of teaching at Princeton historian Peter Brown, who understands the Late Antiquity, especially as the transformation time and is accused of parts of the research, with the migration period ( at least partially ) associated destruction and negative developments not sufficiently taken into account.

Publications

(selected)

• Goths and Romans 332-489, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, ISBN 0-19-820234-2
• The Huns and the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, in: English Historical Review 110 (1995), pp. 4-41.
• The Goths ( The Peoples of Europe), Oxford 1996.
• The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1999, ISBN 0-85115-762-9 (as editor ).
• Politics, philosophy, and empire in the fourth century. Select orations of Themistius, transl. with an introduction by Peter Heather ( with David Moncur ), Liverpool, 2001.
• The Fall of the Roman Empire, London et al 2005, ISBN 0-333-98914-7 German: The Fall of the Roman Empire, translated by Klaus Koch man, 3rd edition, Stuttgart: Klett - Cotta, 2008 (2007), ISBN 978-3-608-94082-4. Book Prize 2007 by H -Soz -u-Kult

• German: Invasion of the Barbarians: the formation of Europe in the first millennium AD, translated by Bernhard Jendricke, Rita Seuss and Thomas Wollermann, Klett- Cotta, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-608-94652-9 ( detailed discussion (PDF; 140 kB) at PLEKOS )