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Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church (review)

third century. Explaining how North African villages and estates established or maintained communal recognition in the face of imperial resistance constitutes the second part of the book (Chapters Four and Five). The answer was the church. In the fifth century, the provinces of North Africa had more bishops than any other place in the empire, and while the struggle between the Catholics and Donatists is partly to blame, Dossey argues that the push to ordain bishops actually came from rural populations who were seeking to become self-governing communities. Rustici who had previously thought of themselves only as members of their separate estates now looked to their cathedrae for identity. The North African peasantry was not only wealthier than it had ever been, but also politically active. In the third part of the book (Chapters Six and Seven), Dossey asserts that these rural bishops and their clergy preached and read to their congregations, creating not just political communities, but textual ones, defined in Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy (1987) as people organized into a “group centered on the shared internalization of canonical texts” (174). At the core of such North African communities was, of course, the Bible, whose stories and the sermons generated from them looked askance at many of the activities practiced by creditors or patrons, such as the forced sale of property, including human, to repay debts. Thus, for example, the disruptions at rural markets perpetrated by Circumcellions, where creditors often tried illegally to seize goods as a way of collecting debts, was indicative, not of anti-Roman or random violence, but of the presence of a scriptural and legal discourse, previously absent, which now inspired the peasantry to express discontent with traditional forms of domination. Catholic clerics acted similarly, freeing slaves and flogging well-born magistrates for violations against the texts that constituted imperial law. Rural populations were not rebelling against the Roman way of life, but involving themselves in it on a scale unattested before—materially, politically, and intellectually. Moreover, these developments in the countryside were facilitated by the fragmentation of the Roman elite. If an appeal to a decurion failed, peasants might gain the ear of an imperial official. A catholic bishop could be consulted about the need to protect an estate from a Donatist landlord. The elites could be played off each other. Dossey has written an important and learned book. One marvels at the diversity of sources the author has assembled and the depth to which she has plumbed them. Her revelatory way of examining the ancient countryside will come to be, I believe, a necessary part of the discussion on Roman North Africa. Erika T. Hermanowicz, University of Georgia