Maya Maskarinec's first monograph examines the cults of late antique saints who were venerated in Rome between the sixth and ninth centuries. She concentrates specifically on holy men and women who were not martyred in the city of Rome, but whose stories were imported from eastern Roman provinces during this period. Over the course of eight chapters, she marshals the meagre evidence for these cults, drawing on the testimony of a disparate array of texts (church dedications, hagiography, the Liber pontificalis) and archaeological evidence. What emerges from her study is an image of Rome as a repository of the cults of late antique Greek saints, who colonised the city in the aftermath of Justinian's wars of reconquest in the sixth century only to be ‘naturalised’ by the bishops of Rome by the ninth century.

The book opens with a discursive ‘walk through’ of the saintly landscape of eighth-century Rome (ch. i), whose purpose might have been better served by a detailed map. There follow (chs ii–iii) inquiries into the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the cults of eastern saints in the Forum Romanum (Cosmas and Damian; Maria Antiqua with her phalanx of military saints; the Forty Martyrs of Sebastian, Theodore and Sergius and Bacchus; Hadrian; and Martina) and on the Palatine Hill (Caesarius), all of which attest to the promotion of eastern saints as imperial patrons by the Byzantine administration of post-Ostrogothic Italy. Maskarinec then examines how the bishops of Rome cultivated the worship of eastern saints in diaconiae (charitable foundations) in the commercial zone along the banks of the Tiber, including Santa Maria in Cosmedin and San Giorgio al Velabro near the Palatine Hill, as expressions of papal power (ch. iv). Her book then turns to the saints fostered in the wealthy districts on the Aventine Hill, the most well known of whom was Sabina (ch. v). As these chapters show, early medieval Roman communities eagerly adopted – and sometimes invented – eastern saints who had lived and been martyred far from the Eternal City.

In the second half of the book, Maskarinec argues that the bishops of Rome played a pivotal role in promoting the cults of these ‘neighbourhood saints’ in an effort to present themselves ‘as gardeners cultivating and taming Rome's thriving sacred ecosystem’ (ch. vi, p. 118). Their efforts were not lost on Carolingian elites who appropriated the universalising vision of Roman sanctity so neatly packaged by the popes and transplanted eastern Roman saints into the north of Europe (ch. vii). By the ninth century compilers of Carolingian martyrologies like Ado of Vienne (d. 875) collapsed the cults of these saints into a narrative that promoted a universalising ‘Rome-centered vision of Christian sanctity’ that effectively erased ‘the complexities and idiosyncrasies that accompanied the development of these cults in Rome’ (ch. viii, p. 165). Even so, the diverse Mediterranean origins of these saints could not be erased. As a result, ‘the expansive geographical imagination that had once characterized imperial Rome became a feature of its Christian instantiation’ (p. 171).

This is a commendable study of the origins and influence of the cults of eastern Christian saints in early medieval Rome. The first half of the book is original and especially admirable for its attention to the Greek and Latin hagiographical traditions about these saints, which are often ignored in historical studies. There are several appendices to the volume, including a very useful tabulation of the evidence of church dedications, church frescoes and relics for the veneration of foreign saints in Rome between 500 and 800 ce (pp. 173–80). Numerous sharp black-and-white images and a quire of stunning full-colour plates enhance the attractiveness of the volume. Historians of the cult of the saints, the early medieval papacy and the Carolingians will benefit from the insights offered by this handsome book.