-
Roma sotteranea by Antonio Bosio (review) - The Catholic Historical Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 86, Number 2, April 2000
- pp. 305-308
- 10.1353/cat.2000.0156
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
book reviews305 a large number of titles that are repeated after each essay, and this seems rather useless. The historian-reader may grow impatient with some of the analysis offered since because of the background of the authors it has an anthropological and sociological focus. However, these are sources and materials which must be taken seriously by the historian, since so much of mission history has been male-dominated in terms of content and interpretation. This book focuses on the period of high imperialism (1870-1914) and raises issues that mission historians of this period must keep in mind: e.g.,what freedom did the missionary movement give to women in terms of independence and professional development ? what forms of leadership in this movement were taken up and practised by women? what limitations were placed on women by the roles imposed on them by their culture in a male-controlled missionary society? what restrictions were placed on women by the colonial enterprise within whose framework the missionary movement developed because they were supposed to bring "Christianity and civilization" as it was experienced in the imperial countries? These are not questions that a mission historian might initially address; but they are issues that must be considered through one's own research or through the research of others. Mission historians will meet new material in this book carefully and creatively presented and therefore it will be of great value to them. Lawrence Nemer, S.VD. Missionary Institute London Ancient Roma sotteranea. By Antonio Bosio. (Rome: Edizioni Quasar. 1998. Pp. 656 + 32, including 200 black and white illustrations. Lire 350,000 until June 30, 2000, and only if ordered directly from the publisher at quasar@mail. xplor.it; thereafter 1,200,000 lire.) This copiously illustrated folio volume represents the life's work of the Maltese-born lawyer, Antonio Bosio (1575-1629), which was posthumously published only in 1635 (the dedicatory letter dated 1632 is misleading in this respect). The author combined exhaustive reading of the relevant textual sources, encompassing the work of topographers and early Church Fathers, as well as the canons of church councils and historical martyrologies, with extensive fieldwork exploring numerous catacombs whose existence, until the accidental rediscovery of burial chambers on the Via Salaria in 1578, had only been known from written texts. The work is arranged in four books. Book I deals with the death and burial practices of the early Christians. This is followed by the core of the work in Books II and III, which provide a systematic topographical survey of Rome's Christian catacombs, beginning in the area of the Vatican and proceeding counter-clockwise, taking each consular road out of the city and its burial complexes in turn, from the Via Aurelia to the Via Flaminia. The 306BOOK REVIEWS final book (TV) is given over to explanations of the themes and images with which the catacombs were decorated. The whole work is copiously illustrated with depictions of what was found as well as with maps of several of the most significant complexes. The Benedictine polymath Henri Leclercq went so far as to compare this work to Vesalius' De humani corporisfabrica and Mabillon's De re diplomatica , as books which had placed emerging disciplines on new plateaux of scholarly competence. Even if today we cannot perhaps share such a fulsome tribute to Bosio's achievement, it surely has to be acknowledged that there can be few areas of scholarship where a single work has, at a stroke, created the field, largely determined its priorities, and dominated research in the area for over two centuries. When Giovanni Battista de'Rossi came to publish the first volume of his classic study of the Roman Christian catacombs in 1864,not only did he consciously adopt Bosio's title (adding merely the suffix cristiana), he also famously baptized the latter as "our Columbus," thereby clearly identifying the founder of his discipline. De Rossi's failure to get beyond the catacombs of Calixtus , combined with the despoliation of so many tombs since Bosio's day and the continuing absence of an integrated, comprehensive survey, ensures that seekers after information about Rome's subterranean Christian burial sites (of which there are...