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Religion and Violence in Late Roman North Africa

The articles in this special section had their origin in a seminar held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Seattle in January 2013. The aim of the seminar was to pay homage to Brent Shaw’s Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, which had been published not long before.1 Shaw’s volume is more than a monumental study of the confl ict of Catholic and Donatist that came to a head during the episcopate of Augustine. It is a reminder that the literary and material evidence for North Africa between the Great Persecution and death of Augustine is more voluminous than that for any other region of the empire–save perhaps northern Syria–and a call, a summons, even, to use the massive corpus of North African Latin not just for biographies of Augustine, but for social historical inquiry.2 In that spirit, the contributors, all of whom publish their seminar papers here, were asked not to review or critique Shaw’s work but to evaluate and explore the social history of violence in late Roman North Africa in light of his achievement. Catherine Conybeare, Hal Drake, Cam Grey and Noel Lenski responded to this challenge by broaching topics and off ering theorizations that build upon Shaw’s work but also qualify it and in important ways assess and address some of its lacunae. Conybeare demands that we identify violence to bodies in particular as an ethical problem and observes the startling unwillingness of Augustine to describe such violence. She then takes up two features of his texts, his interest in the spaces where violence occurs and the power he seeks to assign to communal norms and public speech to constrain it, and fi nds echoes of this conjunction in Arendt’s concern for the geography and publicness of political action, articulated in Arendt’s work on the space of appearance. But while Conybeare’s close readings reveal how much profi t might still be gleaned by close attention to Augustine’s language, she ends, like Shaw, in ethical lament and epistemic aporia. For though Conybeare provides