Medieval Rome is commonly portrayed as a papal city. Maya Maskarinec's City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages, in contrast, considers the history of Rome in the sixth through the ninth centuries from a novel perspective. As the title of the work suggests, saints rather than bishops are its focus—but saints of a particular type: those who were venerated at Rome but who were not martyred there. Far from a disadvantage, Maskarinec argues that it was precisely the otherness of Rome's “foreign” saints which allowed them to become patrons and protectors for local communities while remaining imaginatively imbedded in their (often obscure and distant) places of origin. This, in turn, made Rome a central node in an ever-expanding network of holiness, which was especially significant for Carolingian thinkers, for whom the unique diversity of the city's saintly topography served as a link to the farthest reaches of Christian geography and history. Although dislocated from the starring role, the papacy is not absent. Rather, bishops appear as one actor among many, including wealthy patrons, Byzantine officials, monks, migrants and pilgrims, and local communities made up of a mix of men and women with sometimes competing agendas. The history of saints from abroad and the promotion of their cults was one way these groups negotiated their positions and reimagined their own histories. By doing so, they also helped transform Rome from a fading imperial capital into a repository of universal sanctity.

Maskarinec's book is divided into two sections (although this is not demarcated in the chapter headings). The first considers Rome's, in Maskarinec's words, “ecosystem of sanctity”—the evolving relationships between communities, cultic sites, and the urban fabric of the city. Maskarinec describes early medieval Rome as paradoxically unified yet diverse, a city of neighborhoods defined by their own histories, churches, and the saints after which they were named. Chapter 1 opens with an imaginative tour of the city in the eighth century—an academic pilgrim's guide that would have been familiar to medieval peregrini (and remains so for modern turisti). As throughout the book, the quality of writing here is excellent. In a little less than eighteen pages, Maskarinec depicts a vivid world of shrines and monasteries, extra-mural basilicas and catacombs, and intra-mural churches. And at almost every corner, the reader is confronted by the powerful presence of saints.

The following four chapters focus on different areas of the city and the saints that came to be associated with them. Here the author demonstrates how the reception of particular cults was inflected through shifting economic, social, and political circumstances, especially through Rome's relationship with Constantinople. Chapter 2 investigates the Roman Forum and the reimagining of the city's imperial past. The dedication by Felix IV (r. 526–530 AD) of SS. Cosma e Damiano on the via sacra, Maskarinec argues, anchored Rome into a “wider web of Justinian's vision of a unified Christian Roman Empire” (34). Following the Gothic Wars (535–554 AD), Maskarinec claims that new churches, such as S. Maria Antiqua, S. Theodoro, the Oratory of the Forty Martyrs, and SS. Sergius and Baccus, were patronized by imperial administrators rather than Roman bishops and thus can be seen as the public face of Byzantine political power (37–40). The attribution of these buildings to imperial rather than episcopal sponsorship is certainly plausible, although a lack of evidence makes this impossible to know with certainty, as the author herself admits.

Chapter 3 shifts attention to the Palatine, where early medieval Roman bishops were “interested in establishing more authoritative and prestigious positions for themselves and the city of Rome vis-à-vis this emperor [Justinian II]” (68). The translatio of Caesarius, for example, positioned Rome as deserving of patronage and protection from the empire, while carefully subordinating imperial power and generosity to the authority of the city's bishops (68–70). Chapters 4 and 5 examine the banks of the Tiber and the Aventine, respectively. The former considers the diaconiae and the saints after which they were named. The latter considers how the wealthy, cosmopolitan communities on the Aventine patronized cults such as those of saints Sabina and Serapia and Boniface of Tarsus. These cults, invented centuries after the buildings with whom they were associated, speak to the tensions between local and universal Christianity, as well as poverty and wealth.

The second section of the book considers the later history of the city as a “storehouse of saints.” Chapters 6, 7, and 8 take as their subjects the papacy, Carolingians, and finally, Ado of Vienne's Roman martyrology. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Maskarinec argues, the popes emerged as the rightful guardians of neglected saints from elsewhere (118). The Carolingians recognized and validated this claim in the eighth and ninth centuries. Indeed, it is in the writing of Ado and his contemporaries that we can see that the city remained entrenched in its imperial past and yet, paradoxically, transformed from a fading former imperial center into a universalizing Christian Rome. The book concludes with a short epilogue and six even shorter (but useful) appendices.

A major theme of the book is that a saint's origins outside the city did not mean marginalization within the city. But one wonders if further consideration of recent scholarship on mobility, exile, and migration in the Early Middle Ages might add to the author's already insightful analyses. Religious controversy, factionalism, and how saints and their churches fit into the bureaucratic history of the Roman Church are also largely absent. Finally, I wonder how different Rome's relationship with “foreign” saints was compared to, for instance, the same relationship in Constantinople, or even in other cities in the Latin West. Of course, these topics were not Maskarinec's focus, and it is to the credit of the author that I found myself thinking about other research questions through her interpretive lens. In sum, City of Saints is ambitious, convincing, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of early medieval Rome and its saintly patrons.