Bertrand Lançon
Bertrand Lançon is a French historian and novelist, a specialist of late Antiquity.
Career
After studying with the Jesuits, he went on to pursue higher education at the University of Maine, where he discovered late Antiquity with Jacques Biarne. After he was a professor of history in 1976 at the secondary level, he entered higher education in 1989 as an attaché temporaire d'enseignement et de recherche at the University of Maine.In 1991, in Sorbonne, he defended his Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Charles Pietri, the then director of the École française de Rome: Maladies, malades et thérapeutes en Gaule du IIIe au VIe. He taught Ancient History at the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis from 1993 to 1996, then between 1996 and 2012 at the University of Western Brittany, Brest and Quimper. Since 2012, he has been a Professor of Roman History at the University of Limoges.
University publications
At the request of François Hartog and John Scheid, he wrote his first book, Le monde romain tardif in 1992. With this book and the rest, he took up the "battle" initiated by Henri-Irénée Marrou against the received ideas about the so-called "decadence" of the Roman Empire. He then combined textbooks for students and articles on illness and healing in the Roman world as well as various mental and cultural aspects of the late Roman society. His field of investigation is that of mentalities, behavior, culture and religiosity in a Roman society in the process of Christianization.In the course of his research, he conceived the neologism "nosomonde" to designate the perception of the world by Christians - in this case - of late antiquity as intrinsically ill.
In 1995, he published Rome dans l'Antiquité tardive which presented itself as a continuation of the famous book by Jérôme Carcopino.
He also devoted himself to the study of certain Emperors of the 4th century such as Constantine the Great.
With Benoît Jeanjean, Bertrand Lançon is at the origin of the French translation of the "Chronique" of Jerome, first part of Chroniques latines de l'Antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge whose translation and commentary were provided by the study group set up in Brest in 1998 with Hervé Oudart, the Gestiat, followed in 2013/2014y by volume 2 of these chronicles, those of Marcellinus d'Illyricum.
From 31 May 2007 to 2 June 2007, he gathered in Brest an international symposium on Le sens du poil : histoire et anthropologie de la chevelure et de la pilosité, which attracted the interest of researchers from several disciplines. The proceedings of this colloquium, gathered by Marie-Hélène Delavaud-Roux, were published by L'Harmattan in 2011.
In collaboration with Tiphaine Moreau, he published Les premiers chrétiens , as well as a new biography of Constantine the Great : Constantin, Auguste chrétien.
With Adeline Gargam, a specialist in French literature of the 18th century, he published a book on L'histoire de la misogynie . His most recent work is a biography of Theodosius.
Several of his books have been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Japanese.