The Early Byzantine Christian Church: An Archaeological Re-assessment of Forty-Seven Early Byzantine Basilical Church Excavations Primarily in Israel and Jordan, and Their Historical and Liturgical Context by Bernard Mulholland (review)

There are more early Byzantine basilicas that are archaeologically well-documented than we generally acknowledge, and we have only begun to mine this rich corpus for what it might reveal. These are two important takeaway points from Bernard Mulholland’s new monograph. The author draws particular attention to the potential of artifactual analysis—studying the types and patterns of deposition of the “stuff” found within church walls, from pots to items of personal adornment—to enrich our understanding of the complexities of ecclesiastical space. Mulholland has identified, for example, twenty-five churches from which domestic artifacts have been recovered, preserved under sealed destruction layers caused either by fire or earthquake (p. 30). This is an exciting body of material, the potential of which the present volume begins to explore.

The specific questions posed by the book of the assembled evidence are threefold: What typological patterns of sanctuary configurations do the buildings fall into? What might these tell us about the location of the diakonikon in the early Byzantine period? And does archaeological evidence support or refute the view that the sexes were segregated in early Byzantine basilicas? Mulholland addresses each of these issues in turn, although the terms of the discussion, especially in the case of the first two questions, remain narrowly technical rather than expanding into a sustained discussion of the larger significance of the findings (such as that pertaining to our understanding of relationships among liturgy, experience, and architectural form, of geographical patterns, or of historical change). In the case of the third issue, Mulholland concludes that “archaeological evidence does not support the accepted view that the sexes are segregated in church” (p. 163). It is important to note, however, that the archaeological evidence presented by the author does not convincingly refute it either.

The author admirably aims for methodological transparency; however, a number of questions and concerns remain. Although chapters usefully compile and tabulate data, they rarely enter into scrutiny of details from any given church, none of which is reproduced in plans or images, and the full catalog of sites and artifacts is available only on the disc that accompanied the original thesis (from Queen’s University Belfast, 2011). The composition of the corpus is also enigmatic. For example, the justification is not convincing for the inclusion of a handful of basilicas outside the Levant—there are three in Italy, one in Croatia, three in Bulgaria, one each in Egypt and the Sudan, although none from Turkey, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, or Byzantine North Africa—in a study that is primarily about early churches in Israel and Jordan (which account for thirty-eight of the forty-seven sites surveyed). As a result, the corpus seems both too large and too small. By including a selection, yet only a small selection, of basilicas that are both geographically, and in some cases also chronologically, distinct from the Israeli-Jordanian majority, it becomes difficult to discern what the conclusions represent since they are neither closely regionally specific nor broadly comparative. For example, readers will understandably question the value of the evidence of the ninth- to twelfth-century burials from Mola di Monte Gelato in Italy (p. 153) for understanding gendered spaces in early Byzantine churches. In addition, more sustained discussion of the limits of and methodological approaches to the archaeological evidence would have been desirable. For this, one need not start from scratch. For example, the discussion of which chamber should be understood as the diakonikon and the analysis of archaeological artifacts for evidence of gendered spaces could have benefited from recent scholarship tackling similar questions in Roman domestic spaces.