Reviews and Comments

This insightful work of intellectual history takes as its starting point a question that looms over the entire field of Late Antique studies: "What effect did Christianity have on inhabitants of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries?" (3) This question has been approached from a number of cultural, political, demographic, and economic perspectives, but Letteney argues that Christianization can be seen not only in shifts in people's beliefs and practices but also in a certain shift in "the structure of meaning-making" itself in the Roman Empire. By this Letteney refers to an increasing tendency of authors to use methods of aggregation, collection, and distillation to produce knowledge in varied realms in the late fourth and early fifth century, a series of methods that he sees as arising from the "lab" of the theological debates of the mid-fourth century. As Christians came increasingly to dominate the Roman elite in the "Theodosian Age," he argues, these methods became the gold standard for elite epistemology itself, as evidenced in compilations of law and the enduring tradition of florilegia.

Over seven chapters, Letteney draws on theological works, secular law, church councils, and manuscript evidence to demonstrate the late antique Christianization of Knowledge. Part I (chs. 2-4) traces the proliferation of the aggregative method proper from the post-apostolic church to Theodosius; Part 2 (chs. 5-8) examines manuscript evidence to trace the impact this method had on the physical form of the codex and on scribal practices up to the ninth century.

There are too many moving parts to the book to give it justice here, so I will mention just a few of its insights that I found especially interesting.

1. Methodological diversity in the early Church. In chapter 2, Letteney demonstrates that there was little consensus among Christian thinkers before the Council of Nicaea (325) on how best to go about proving theological precepts with scripture and/or gleaning theology from texts. There was a fundamental disagreement, in fact, over whether scripture or truth took epistemic priority. Some, such as Tertullian, were skeptical that text could communicate divine truth at all, preferring to refer to scripture as verification of divine knowledge gained through revelation.

2. The big story of the book is the development of aggregation/collection in Christian circles and the adoption of that method in non-theological realms; part 2 also demonstrates how the scribal tools (nomina sacra and nomina vulgaria) developed for these Christian purposes became tools of the trade in scribal practice broadly. Letteney characterizes this as a process of Christianization, even though these methods ceased to carry religious valence once they “escaped” their original theological context. It might seem strange to consider argumentative method an aspect of religious practice, but I think there is much to commend Letteney’s invitation to consider the more subtle habits of thought that religion can inculcate.

3. Finally, I just think it’s interesting that Letteney was able to connect these eminently Christian, Latin developments (however tentatively) to the Palestinian Talmud, which he argues developed similar “rules for deciding” among various authorities.

It's been a while since I finished this (long) book, so I'll just leave a small blurb. A Sacred Kingdom is about the relationship between bishops and Frankish kings in the early Middle Ages. This is a well-worn topic, but Moore's book offers an engaging critique of prevailing theories of this relationship, which have tended to emphasize either a supposed sacralization of kingship or a relationship of collaboration/competition between sacred and mundane spheres. Moore argues persuasively that the bishops' role as keepers of ancient law and culture enabled them, in some ways, to shape the contours of Frankish kingship itself by propagating an episcopal "social thought" (6) that successfully aligned royal priorities with those of the church. This social thought was articulated primarily in the decrees of church councils, which are Moore's main source throughout the book.

Moore brings needed nuance to scholars' conceptions of royal/religious power; I think he is particularly good at describing the "soft power" through which bishops influenced kings, even at times crafting new language to describe their relationship. Episcopal Christianity was a "cultural overlay" (122) to barbarian society, for example, and bishops and kings conceived of their respective positions "in terms of mutuality and parallelism, a conceptual 'cross-entry'." (137)

In this compact volume for the Brill Research Perspectives series, Mark Humphries discusses the nature of cities in Late Antiquity, recent developments in scholarship, and the ways these new understandings of cities have informed our understanding of Late Antiquity itself. This scholarship has played a particularly prominent role in the recent revival of the "decline and fall" view of Late Antiquity, which had fallen out of favor since Peter Brown's groundbreaking work in the 1970s. Recent developments in archaeology have suggested, some contend, a major contraction of urban space and life in the decades following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a shift they view as a rough proxy for instability, violence, and general "decline."

Humphries disputes this view and argues for a perspective emphasizing the great diversity of cities' fates in this period, and he offers several examples to demonstrate his point. This argument, however, is actually a small component of the book, which is most valuable for the ways it introduces the reader to the texture of ancient urban life.

In this clearly-argued and vividly-illustrated book, H.A. Drake takes a fresh look at a well-worn topic in late antique studies: the fourth-century transformation of the once-pluralistic Roman Empire into a self-consciously Christian, persecuting state. Was it a result of imperial expediency, episcopal meddling, or popular opinion? What explains the "demise" of official paganism over the long fourth century?

Drake contributes a new angle to these questions by examining the ways miracle stories functioned in religious polemic, particularly that concerned with emperors' (il)legitimacy and signs of divine protection for the empire. Taking into account the Mediterranean-wide assumptions that Christians and pagans shared about the meaning of miracle, he examines the ways late antique bishops shifted this discourse to assert Christian dominance over Roman state and culture. He demonstrates his point by bookending this century with two prominent miracles: Constantine's vision of the cross in 312 and Theodosius' miraculous victory over the usurper Eugenius in 394. In brief, Drake sees in contemporary portrayals of these miracles a subtle but monumental shift in the relationship between emperor, empire, and church: whereas Constantine's vision confirmed his status as a divinely-favord person (while leaving the divinity involved ambiguous), Theodosius' victory was conceived as a divine reward for the emperor's piety. In other words, the Christian God, not the emperor, came to be conceived as the sole arbiter of imperial fortunes.

Of course, it was the bishops who spoke for God on earth, and much of this book explains how bishops such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius of Alexandria, and Ambrose of Milan intervened in various contexts of miraculous discourse to tip the rhetorical scales against pagans and more moderate Christians. Julian's failure to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem due to divinely-sent fires, for example, served as an example of God's distaste for pagans and intolerance for religious pluralism. Less obvious examples, such as Christian ascetics' success in fighting demons (chapter 7) and Helena's discovery of the cross (chapter 5) demonstrate how bishops' interpretation of miracle served to draw sharper boundaries between religious communities and narrow popular notions of what it meant to be Roman and Christian.

Drake suggests that the turn to coercion in the late fourth century was a consequence of this appropriation of miracle by bishops, insofar as it increasingly allowed them to wield influence over emperors, who, as Ambrose pointed out, are "within, not above, the church."

Yet even this configuration tied the fortunes of the empire to those of the church in ways that were not necessarily advantageous to the latter. This became abundantly clear in 410, discussed in the epilogue, when the Goths sacked the city of Rome in a historic embarrassment for the now nominally Christian (and thus presumably safe) empire. Drake argues that what became the standard Christian response to this calamity also ended the "century of miracles," or "imperial miracles," in which interlocutors pitted their gods against each other by appealing to the good or bad fortunes of the empire. This response was waged by Augustine in his "City of God," which famously argued against reading divine messages in mortal events. Positing the events of 410 as proof of God's indifference, as opposed to his absence or anger, then, effectively freed Christians from imperial miracle discourse altogether and further cemented the empire's Christian identity.