Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (review)

Some scholars have suggested freeing late-antique church history from its orbit around Constantine and his reign. That is easier said than done, when Constantine still enjoys credit for ending the persecutions, summoning the first ecumenical council, and giving bishops legal authority over their own courts. Caroline Humfress, however, shows brilliantly how such a liberated history might appear, by focusing on the practical, mundane ways that religion, law, and politics interacted. Her book is one of the best among recent studies in late Roman law, which will not surprise those who have read her previous essays. It also is of critical and timely importance to the study of bishops—especially the nature of their authority and their place in late Roman society.

In a lucid and solidly constructed argument, Humfress demonstrates how legal practitioners, including Christian churchmen, affected the scope and content of imperial law and how imperial law then gave Christianity its hard boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. The most consequential turn for the fourth-century church, she argues, was from philosophical to forensic debate, a turn Constantine demonstrated when he branded Arius with infamy in 325 after previously inviting him to a polite exchange of views. But Constantine was in some ways a latecomer to this forensic turn and certainly not the final word. Humfress spends the first two parts of the book explaining what and whom forensics involved; she shows that its teachers and practitioners were active into the fifth century and beyond; she presents illuminating examples of the influence of forensic experts on lawmakers; and she makes clear how much church officials and procedures owed to forensic training.

The exposition is clear, but the material is complex. Students of church history unfamiliar with Roman law may want more help understanding formulary procedure, for example, than Humfress can provide here. Students of legal history unfamiliar with theology have it easier, even in the third and final section on how forensics affected theology. Humfress is interested in the way churchmen and lawmakers categorized doctrine and subsequent application of those categories, but not in the details of doctrine. Indeed, Humfress has left plenty of work to be done, whether in further tracing the imprint of forensic training in doctrinal texts themselves, or in documenting more cases of influence among forensic experts, churchmen, and lawmakers. Her own success here should encourage such future studies.

If the argumentative focus of the book is acute, the breadth of its learning is vast. Humfress is equally masterful in handling scholarly debates from a century ago as she is bold in pushing recent advances further, especially with respect to rhetoric and legal studies. As for the primary sources, Augustine is the single-most important author, especially for the later chapters. But the book balances the evidence well across time and space, with particularly good and careful use of the law codes and papyri. One exception is how Humfress handles Roman bishops: in a text that places British-style quotation marks around such seemingly innocent words as law, legal, Christian, Roman, knowing, and facts, it is surprising to find papacy and the Pope unremarked; whereas Humfress is careful to differentiate between emperors and the actual authors of their edicts, the "Roman papacy [has] intent" and acts "self-consciously" (pp. 179, 211); and the evidence for Roman bishops keeping a "'central archive'" (p. 170) is actually thin. But the evidence from Rome would lend itself well to the same, methodical treatment Humfress applies to the North African evidence. Minor typographical errors crop up mainly in notes and the bibliography, where scholarship is sometimes misattributed (e.g., Gager for Gagos, Michel for Millar).