The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Horden and Purcell)

The Corrupting Sea, A Study of Mediterranean History, by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, published by Blackwell in 2000, is a major scholarly reconstruction of Mediterranean history arguing for a longue duree approach centered on the sea's fragmented microecologies rather than on any single unifying narrative, with real implications for how religious movements spread and blended across the region's connected but locally distinct communities. Its strength is genuine field shaping ambition, drawing together ecology, economy and connectivity across millennia into a framework other historians have had to engage with ever since, whether adopting or contesting it. Its limit is exactly that ambition, a book operating at the scale of the entire Mediterranean over thousands of years necessarily moves fast over any single religious tradition's own specific history, so a claim needing the fine grained detail of one particular cult, sect or pilgrimage route benefits from a source focused on that case directly, with this book cited for the wider connective pattern.