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BOOK REVIEWS627 of the Minster came at the end of the thirteenth century when "almost 150 [sic] years of litigation began, not now between the bishops and the chapter, but between the deans and their chapters." Not surprisingly perhaps, contempt for the authority of the dean and chapter on the part of the lesser clergy and servants of the cathedral (like Thomas Mudd, its drunkenly insubordinate organist in 1663) runs like a leit-motiv through the pages of this volume; and it is hardly less surprising that the chapter should have fallen victim to one of the most notorious and ruthless ecclesiastical patronage networks in the country after William Pitt nominated George Pretyman as bishop of Lincoln in 1787. No doubt Lincoln Cathedral has suffered more than its due share of internal faction; and no doubt too it has suffered from its comparative isolation and from the irony that the mother church of medieval England's largest diocese should be so unsuitably located. Not that any of these disadvantages inhibited the erection of what William Cobbett called "the finest building in the whole world." Might it even be that Christian cathedrals derive much of their creative energy from human strife and frailty? Perhaps we should positively hope so; for otherwise Peter Kidson's belief that the future history of Lincoln and other cathedrals can only be one of"temporary reprieve or decent mummification" is too disquieting to contemplate. R. B. Dobson Christ's College, Cambridge Ancient Building God'sHouse in theRoman World:ArchitecturalAdaptation among Pagans,Jews, and Christians. By L. Michael White. (Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, for the American Schools of Oriental Research. 1990. Pp. xviü, 211. »27.50.) This volume may be considered, in my opinion, a very important contribution to the history of the primitive and early Church, especially in regard to the Church as building. The bibliography on this subject, particularly with relation to the Christian community in Rome, comprises a long series of tides; and with respect to other cities of very early Christianity, apart from DuraEuropos , which is dealt with in many works both large and small, towns such as Antioch have been thoroughly investigated; in the case of Antioch special attention is due to André Marie Jean Festugière's Antioche païenne et chrétienne . But the very special feature of L. Michael White's book is to stress, with a large apparatus of critical information, the connection between early pagan, Jewish, and Christian places of worship. Architectural adaptation is the principle, but architecture goes hand in hand with other forms of religious syncretism or, more so probably in the case of Christianity, of highly valuable 628BOOK REVIEWS eclecticism. Rightly for the Roman world is to be understood that ecumene of political, administrative, and military government unified under the leadership of Rome as capital of the Empire. Yet, as is well known, the Oriental part of it transcended, by and large, even the realm of the Hellenistic conglomerate of states to allow Jewish and then Christian penetration of the Caucasian regions—Georgia, Armenia, and then Persia, Ethiopia, and farther remote enclaves in Asia, Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. Whether through the witness of monuments still existing or mrough the testimony of written texts, inscriptions, and other archaeological finds, the reconstruction of this world done by Dr. White in his solid chapters is impressive first of all for its accuracy; secondly, it is very instructive in comparative methodology. This is perhaps the moment to recall that the author had already published a prior volume; in his words, "The present study is based on the collection of archaeological and documentary materials first assembled in the author's Yale dissertation and now published separately under the tide Christian Dotnus Ecclesiae and Its Environment' (p. xi) (with the subtitle A Collection of Texts andMonuments in "Harvard Theological Studies," Vol. 36, in association with the American Schools of Oriental Research [Minneapolis: AugsburgFortress , 1990]). So the environment of the Christian Domus Ecclesiae is given here in the exposition of God's house in the early adaptations among pagans, Jews, and Christians from Dura-Europos to Roman Brittany. A sample of the whole matter is given in these words...

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