Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa by Leslie Dossey (review)

Leslie Dossey's book documents the integration of the rural population of North Africa into the society of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Apart from an introduction, historical overview, and conclusion, this study is structured in three main parts: consumption of material culture (chapters 2 and 3); community organization (chapters 4 and 5); and the Christian countryside (chapters 6 and 7).

Dossey's study of consumption is the first serious attempt to address this issue in Roman Africa. Using the results of archaeological surface surveys, she argues that rural inhabitants were "non-consumers" in the early imperial period (defined here as first century BCE to third century C.E.). Due to an ideology of self-sufficiency and restrictions imposed by landlords, tenant farmers (coloni) did not obtain goods such as archaeologically-identifiable slipped pottery. In the late imperial period (fourth and fifth centuries C.E.), their behavior changed, and coloni began to accumulate slipped pottery, roof tiles, metal artifacts, glass, and other items. They constructed more durable homes and even built bathhouses. Many archaeologists have interpreted these changes as an expansion of rural settlement, but Dossey instead considers them to reflect shifts in consumer behavior.

Second, Dossey studies rural communities. Around the beginning of the third century, the imperial government had allowed North African villages and estates to form self-governing communities. This led to the florescence of res publicae and castella (village republics) which may have possessed only the most basic civic arrangements, but which gave their residents "citizenship"—an important status under Roman law. Although the imperial government did not permit coloni to form urban communities in the fourth and fifth centuries, they found a way to fulfill their communal ambitions. As Christianity spread throughout North Africa, rural inhabitants chose religious leaders and became ecclesiae (bishoprics). Dossey argues, in opposition to earlier scholars, that the horizontal ties within bishoprics provided a measure of self-government by counteracting the hierarchical ties that bound coloni to their landlords.

The importance of ecclesiae becomes clear in the third section of the book, in which Dossey looks at the communication between rural bishops and their audiences. Texts of sermons indicate that preachers transmitted novel ideas to peasants in the fourth and fifth centuries, introducing them to ideas about charity, freedom from debt and slavery, legal rights and moral values that undermined the long-standing system of patronage which repressed rural populations. She reinterprets Donatist and Catholic sermons, showing that both groups preached messages which provoked social unrest in the countryside. The surviving accounts of Catholic bishops (Augustine, Optatus) have biased interpretations of the Donatists as rabble-rousers, when in fact both groups were responsible for introducing ideas that caused peasants to revolt against their masters.

Dossey has conducted a truly interdisciplinary and multi-scalar study, making use of the full range of texts and archaeological data, and considering peasants, landlords, slaves, bishops and all other occupants of the rural landscape. At a time when many scholars are balkanized in narrow specialties, it is refreshing to read the work of one who commands archaeology, Latin epigraphy, and early Christianity. The book should be commended as a model, for we must interweave the fragmentary threads we possess to maximize our knowledge of the ancient countryside. Her thesis—the desire of rural populations to participate in the same material culture, community structures, and intellectual currents as urban societies disrupted power structures in the countryside—is a powerful one, and explains well the revolutionary changes of the North African countryside in this period. One might object that some of the patterns had already begun in the second and third centuries: the distribution of African Red Slip Wares and African cookwares, the presence of the poor in third-century Martyr Acts, the spread of 'community' inscriptions attesting the lex Manciana or identifying civitates, all offer signs of an earlier chronology. But this criticism only shifts the trends earlier; it does not negate the implications. Perhaps...