Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (review)

The disciplinary boundary between archaeology and historical approaches that depend primarily on textual analysis remains a problem in a number of areas in the historiography of the ancient world. In this learned and significant study, Bowes, an archaeologist by training, offers an important contribution to one of the fundamental problems in the study of Late Antiquity: the Christianization of the later Roman Empire. According to her, the rise of the bishop as communal leader and the creation of the imperial church after the conversion of Constantine are developments modern scholars have mistakenly set at the center of Christianization, in part owing to an uncritical reading of the literary sources. Alongside the very public Christianization of the Roman Empire, the conversion of the aristocracy led to the private patronage of spaces of worship for the friends and families of elites, spaces that allowed for ritual outside the jurisdiction of the church and not performed for the benefit of the whole Christian community. The earlier historical model, whereby Christianity moved from private to public after Constantine, Bowes argues, draws too great a distinction between the pre- and post-Nicene periods and obscures a significant aspect of late antique religious practice.

In the first chapter Bowes suggests that even in pre-Nicene Christianity an ongoing tension existed in the distinction between the public and private because Christians placed an innovative emphasis on the former. In contrast, despite attempts to maintain boundaries between public and private, for example in Roman law, relations between these two spheres in traditional Roman culture were fluid in practice. This early Christian tendency to emphasize the public continued, sometimes with explicit instances of social dissonance, once elites converted to Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The following two chapters are case studies of private worship in, respectively, Rome and Constantinople, and in rural estates in the West. Chapter 2 demonstrates how much of the supposed Christianization of the two capital cities, such as the development of the cult of the saints and the formation of ascetic communities, was instigated by lay aristocrats engaging in traditional habits of patronage and the maintenance of familial and social networks. In chapter 3 Bowes points out that in the rural regions of the West the institutional church often was even preceded by the Christianity of aristocratic estates, institutions which were guided by a "seigniorial social logic." Chapter 4 provides explicit examples of the friction running along the ideological fault lines that existed between these public and private forms of Christianity. Controversies over female domestic asceticism and heresy "in the home" occurred as the public/private distinction was drawn into moral debates.

Bowes acknowledges the difficulty in distinguishing the "private" in the ancient world and suggests that we treat this slippery category as dialectically related to the "public," as a sphere "both immense and wholly permeable, even integrated, with the public" (13). The historicizing destabilization of categories often trips up historical inquiry and therefore we should applaud her attempt to address this difficult problem head on, but she occasionally seems to take for granted what "public" means in her analysis. In fact, at times it seems to be synonymous with the "institutional church." Such a problem is apparent, for example, when she asks "how did the episcopal public respond to the rural private?" (161) in a context in chapter 3 where the dominant form of Christianity was that of the landed estate. At this point it is not clear whether the public/private dichotomy represents an outsider heuristic tool, the usefulness of which I would question, or if "public" in such cases is in fact only the episcopal, ecclesial view of itself vis-à-vis aristocratic estates. Public/private varies in her examples and sometimes seems to represent simply the notion of common or universal, as opposed to particular, benefit, as understood by certain churchmen.

Aside from the public/private dichotomy, Bowes addresses a number of important related...