Ancient historians have often studied daily life in antiquity, frequently with an antiquarian fascination for the anecdotal and the unique, but it is only more recently that more theoretically informed attempts have sought to understand the culture of the mass of people who occupied the social strata below the elite. N. Horsfall, C. Courrier, J. Clarke and myself, for example, have all looked to analyse what it was that made the ‘ordinary’ people distinct in some way from those above and, indeed, from each other. G. has already made an important contribution to this debate with the edited volume, Popular Culture in the Ancient World (2017); in this book she applies a popular culture approach to the late antique world, focusing on the region of southern Gaul to illustrate her broader arguments about the role of the non-elite in historical change and the process of Christianisation. The result is a detailed and insightful analysis that shows what it is possible to achieve by adopting such a micro-historical approach, one that, partly in contrast to her optimism, also serves to highlight the evidential limitations that are always going to plague endeavours to access the ‘popular’.
One of the frustrations of studying non-elite culture is that those at the bottom of the social ladder generally leave the fewest traces. In this regard, G.’s decision to focus on southern Gaul is a successful one. An area for which there is a large quantity of both archaeological and literary material makes it possible for G. to try and synthesise the two bodies of evidence in a way that is often not possible or simply overlooked when studying the non-elite. By examining the physical remains of both the urban centres and the countryside of the region, G. is able to provide a grounded sense of the backdrop for her various case studies, which focus on the role of nature in agricultural life, events such as the festival of the Kalends and the miracle stories that surrounded hailstorms. In a way, though, the result also shows the limitations of this approach. We learn that in one place bowls became more widely used than plates, suggesting a slow change in popular eating habits; but whether this amounts to much or sheds any light on the popular tensions exhibited in ecclesiastical discourse is less clear. The archaeological evidence undoubtedly adds background interest and colour, but it can never amount to an ancient version of the Geertzian ‘thick description’ that G. targets.
The book moves into a higher gear when it gets to grips with the power dynamics that are revealed in the sermons of Caesarius of Arles. These prescriptive texts reveal the attempts of the increasingly powerful Christian church to exert its authority on the popular festivals and the practices of local people. In part this ecclesiastical interest reflects a missionary zeal to adopt the language of the ordinary folk to speak to a wider audience, as the church sought to reach out to its flock in a more accessible way than traditional elite culture ever could. But, as G. demonstrates, many ecclesiastical sources used the poor as a way to talk to the rich, attempting to influence their behaviour and habits. G. neatly picks apart the triangulation between these three groups that runs through Caesarius’ sermons, and it is refreshing to find some explicitly class-based analysis in her account of the relationship between different social groups. Cultural studies can too often brush resistance and social conflict beneath a broad sweep of cultural continuum, a trap that G. rightly avoids.
The book is at its best in the substantial chapter that deals with the peculiarly late antique festival, the Kalends. The traditional public entertainments, such as gladiatorial combat, theatre and chariot-racing, had fallen into disuse as a result of changing cultural preferences and cost, to be replaced by some more homespun, do-it-yourself forms of entertainment. The Kalends allowed the non-elite to establish accessible, cheaper leisure that retained elements of traditional euergetism by means of continued habits and expectations of gift-exchange between social superiors and their ‘clients’. G.’s argument, therefore, is that non-elite creativity in the rural and the urban areas of Gaul contributed to the cultural changes that can be seen taking place more widely in the Roman world at the time. Her treatment of M. Bakhtin is subtle, although perhaps not so different from the approach of others as she claims. But where she is correct is in her argument that this popular occasion for singing, dancing and gift-giving came in for considerable ecclesiastical attack, particularly because of the sense of moral license it generated. G.’s analysis shows how the church sought to problematise this new popular event and that this related to the church’s desire to replace the traditional patronage relationship between local elites and the ordinary people with one based on alms-giving mediated through ecclesiastical structures. Moralising sermons also show how the church was taking aim at both elite and non-elite cultures. By criticising the popular festival of the Kalends, church leaders sought to encourage popular attitudes towards more elite, self-controlled forms of behaviour while, at the same time, trying to reform elite behaviour, so that it was more in accordance with the new values of a simpler, more ascetic Christian culture.
This multi-layered rhetoric of the ancient sources does something to undercut G.’s optimism at rediscovering the details of popular agency and creativity. So many details of lived popular religion are found through the normative preachings of church authorities – just as in the early empire popular culture can often be evidenced via the sneer of elite-authored texts – which makes it impossible to reach any firm conclusions about the underlying realities of ordinary life. To be sure, the archaeological record adds something to the picture, but it is not always in accordance with the image generated by elite sources, whether secular or ecclesiastical. Not that this criticism fundamentally damages G.’s project. It is merely to accept the contradiction that any attempt to find the voiceless masses of the ancient past is always going to rely on the evidence provided by the voices of others situated further up the social scale. We will always be drawn up towards those who had sufficient resources to enable them to leave a record, making any analysis of the popular less firm in its conclusions than we might be used to when dealing with the elite.
G.’s account of late antique popular culture is stimulating and sophisticated. She shows that it is possible to discern considerable popular agency in the cultural developments of this corner of the empire, which reflects the broader forces operating on the western empire as a whole. Christianisation and the development of a new Christian culture should, in this account, also be seen as bottom-up processes, not simply as the imposition of a new ecclesiastical order from above. G.’s sensitivity to the problems of evidence is impressive, and she is right not to be overly pessimistic about what can be discovered about the ancient non-elite. But the overriding sense from her account is both how much we can recover of popular culture in the round, but also how little we know of any of the non-elite individuals involved.
