Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. By Kim Bowes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi + 363 pp. $95.00 cloth.

摘要

Kim Bowes presents a remarkable synthesis of archaeological and textualnmaterials from around the Roman Empire, with a focus on the West, in a booknthat without doubt makes a significant contribution to the study of earlynChristianity, the shifting dynamics of the later Roman Empire, and the world ofnlate antiquity more generally. Using archaeological data that has not yetninformed most scholarship on late antiquity, Bowes argues that privatenChristian practices and places played a widespread, influential, and hithertonlargely unrecognized role in shaping “the early Christian topographies of bothncity and countryside in East and West” (218). She thus hopes to reshape narratives of Christian development in late antiquity by supplementing studies ofnthe church as a public institution with a compelling history of the ways in whichnprivate worship, largely of the empire’s wealthy elite, produced particularnChristian traditions, complicated clerical authority, helped to define the relationnof the individual to the church, and spread Christianity around the empire.