Empty Bottles of
Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
A historian of ideas, in Empty Bottles of Gentilism, the first of three volumes to treat The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages, Oakley gives the latest fruit of a well-spent life.
Chapter five then reverts to "Patristic Affirmation: The Greek Fathers and the Eusebian Tradition in Christian Rome, Byzantium, and Russia." This chapter begins with a consideration of early Islam but, after a section on Alexandrian thought, largely focuses on the attempt of the Eusebian tradition to fill up the Hobbesian "old empty bottles of Gentilism" (Leviathan, pt.
John Buchanan-Brown), Three Prose Works (Miscellanies, Rernaines of
Gentilism, Observations), (Centaur Press, 1972); Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, (ed.
Greek and Russian Orthodoxy receive scant consideration under "Moscovia." In his consideration of Africa, caught between the disproportionate prevalence of "Mohammadism" (i.e., Islam) and the pervasiveness of
Gentilism, especially interesting are his allusions to the Portuguese reaching out to the Grand Negus of Abyssinia, whom he associates with the followers of the mythical figure of Prester John.
Oakley, Francis, Empty Bottles of
Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050).
