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A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (review)

Agnes represents submission to episcopal authority, but in the fi fth and sixth centuries, Agnes represents the civic virtue of a lay elite. Like Livy’s Verginia, her virginity upholds marriage, family, and tradition. Here, the senatorial aristocracy appears to have prevailed over the bishop, quite in keeping with the book’s thesis. In “Domestic Conversions: Household and Bishops in the Late Antique ‘Papal Legends,’” Kristina Sessa offers a glimpse of the household’s centrality in Christianization by contrasting the antagonistic model of the bishop’s coercive power within (and against) the household in the sixth-century Gesta de Xysti purgatione with a cooperative model appearing about the same time in the gesta martyrum, where the agency of the householder is preserved in the conversion and baptism of his household. Even though the bishop is elevated by his sacramental powers and exercises legal and liturgical authority, he does so in a layman’s house. Sessa concludes that the growth of papal power does not end the household’s importance, although titular churches are constructed over or related structurally to existing domus (83), as Conrad Leyser shows in “‘A Church in the House of the Saints’: Property and Power in the Passion of John and Paul.” Leyser explains how a house became a church and later the foundation of a basilica by unraveling connections between the Passion and other martyr legends, then correlating each layer of the narrative with stages of the church’s development. Leyser sees the fi nal text as refl ecting the monastic community of Corbie, where it was copied ca.600, and as such, it is about stability, which the house church fi ttingly represents. In the fi nal article, Marios Costambeys and Conrad Leyser use the gesta martyrum and the Liber pontifi calis to determine what it means “To Be the Neighbor of St. Stephen: Patronage, Martyr Cult, and Roman Monasteries, c.600c.900.” Because the protomartyr Stephen is virtually the patron saint of Roman monasticism (277), tracing his cult reveals how monastic identities emerge “associatively in patronage and the narrative of the martyr-cult” (263) rather than from rules and charters (which, in any event, do not appear until the tenth century). This ingenious strategy of linking monastic history to cult history yields new information, provoking a different understanding of events. The authors revise “the traditional picture of Rome as the passive recipient of reform from the north,” arguing that reform grew from two ancient communities dedicated to Stephen which had gained “the self-confi dence of Roman identity.” They reconsider the Formosan schism as an episode in the Roman renaissance at the courts of Nicholas I and John VIII (rather than the papacy’s nadir); and they recommend revisiting the (notorious) House of Theophylact (285). These are invigorating challenges. This ambitious and praiseworthy collection will inspire scholars to think more broadly and carefully about the process of Christianization and the transformation of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.