Death, burial and commemoration of the dead have traditionally been understood as matters of considerable interest to the Christian Church, over which it sought control from early in its history. Rebillard's aim in this book (originally published in French in 2003), starkly stated in his introduction, is to reject this widely agreed view, and to claim that ‘burial and commemoration of the dead were left by the bishops out of their sphere of control and to the care of the family’. To establish this he reverses the more usual method of starting with the earliest archaeological evidence on the Roman (and north African) catacombs, which necessarily relies on texts the interpretation of which is open to doubt, notably texts concerning coemeteria (cymeterium, koimêtêrion), terms which do not necessarily mean ‘cemetery’. Instead, Rebillard. scrutinises the problem by systematically examining collective burial practices in the late Roman world.

Such an approach offers a way out of the impasse over the interpretation of the evidence over the Roman cemeteries, though, it should be said, it offers no answer to the question about what the Roman Church owned or controlled and administered in the time of Callixtus; it is simply dismissed as a question which ‘now seems a distant one’. Important conclusions emerge from this enquiry. Exclusive Christian burial areas emerged comparatively late: ‘the church clearly wanted to leave the question of burial to the discretion of the family and did not interfere in this sphere’. This, as funerary practices in general, was not considered an important element of religious identity, either among Christians or in the Roman world in general. The evidence concerning the duty to provide burial, a duty generally recognised, is rather mixed, as, indeed, is Rebillard's account of it: sometimes (especially in chapter vi) presented as an important constituent of Christian piety and identity, but often as an obligation not specifically religious in nature, and an infrequent theme in pastoral preaching. There is little evidence about its organisation, and none of any funerary liturgy until much later.

A particularly rich chapter on tomb violation, a crime long punished by law, traces the development of a new crime, that of the profanation of a corpse. The Church had no particular interest in it, and left punishment of the crime to the civil law. Rebillard concludes that in this matter, as in so many others, Christians conformed to the general practice of their contemporaries, and had, so far as we know, no special motivations that they did not share with them. An interesting excursus suggests that Augustine's treatise on the care of the dead was not intended (as Rebillard seems, somewhat arbitrarily, to think has traditionally been assumed) to assert the uselessness of burial, but to uphold its importance out of respect for the human body. In any case, belief in the resurrection played no part in the evolution of funeral practices.

Rebillard is anxious to show that the Church made no attempt to take over what had traditionally been the responsibilities of the family and kin in matters of death, burial and commemoration. While he is certainly right in this, he is sometimes too ready to interpret the absence of evidence as evidence of the contrary. Thus he quotes four passages from Augustine's preaching concerning the difference between martyrs and other dead Christians. They are all statements of the principle that one prays for the (ordinary) dead but asks for the martyrs' prayers for them. These texts have nothing to do with praying or not praying for individual dead members in the eucharistic prayer, and do not imply that there was no mention (albeit not in diptychs) of recently dead members; nor does the general commendation of the dead in the eucharistic liturgy exclude that possibility.

An excellent chapter on voluntary associations and collective burials proves that the Church did not take over the role of the collegia. In his comparison of Christian groups with voluntary associations Rebillard comes close to denying the communal character of Christian groups: he concludes that ‘the history of the interaction of Christians and non-Christians remains to be studied in detail, but it is a good bet that the isolation of Christians is, like that of the Jews, the product of modern prejudice’. Though tentatively formulated (‘it is a good bet’), this far overshoots the limits of what funerary practices allow us to infer about the group identity of Christians and their separation from the social world around them.

Despite some overstatements of his case, the importance of Rebillard's book lies in that it establishes beyond any doubt that in the early centuries the Church was not concerned to take control of the care and commemoration of the dead, but treated these matters as being within the sphere of decisions taken by families, and subject to established custom and law. The translation reads well, despite numerous infelicities apparently originating in the translators' better knowledge of French than of English usage, and no doubt adequately renders the meaning of the original.