Holy Households: Domestic Space, Property, and Power

Holy Households began as an idea for a conference panel. I wanted to bring together four scholars who share my interest in the history of the late ancient domestic sphere, but who employ varying methodological approaches and have different areas of technical expertise. Thus I invited an archaeologist of rural, late Roman estates (Kim Bowes), an historian of Roman law (Julia Hillner), a specialist in papyrology and Egyptian material culture (Elisabeth O'Connell), as well as an expert in the cultural and social history of the early Christian family (Kate Cooper). By all accounts, the panel, which ran at the 2005 meeting of the North American Patristics Society at Loyola University in Chicago, was enormously successful. The papers collectively engaged with an aspect of domestic life that in my mind had not received sufficient attention by scholars of the late ancient Christian household: its spatial dimension.¹ Their focus on the materiality of the household, not only its physical form but also its economic features, legal status, and social history as a private (i.e., individually owned and governed) institution, underlined the importance of domestic space as an analytic category in the study of topics like the development of monasticism, the ecclesiastical contestation over the independent practice of Christian rituals in the home, the histories of penance and the prison, and the reuse of pre-existing, non-Christian, and non-domestic structures (such as tombs) as Christian "homes." In sum, the papers examined the phenomenon of "Christianization" as a dialectical process that produced not a single model of the Christian home, but an extraordinary range of holy households.

Three of the papers in this volume (Bowes, Hillner, and O'Connell) as well as its introduction (Cooper) feature research first presented at NAPS in 2005. My own contribution (Sessa), which was originally presented elsewhere, adds yet another example of how domestic space might be approached as a topic of study for scholars interested in the history of the late ancient household. I would like to thank David Brakke for inviting me to guest-edit this special volume of JECS and for offering warm and unwavering support in the process, along with Ellen Muehlberger for her careful and thorough copyediting. I am also grateful for the enthusiastic and critical insights offered both by those who attended the panel back in 2005, and by the anonymous readers.