Urban Religion in Late Antiquity provides the proceedings from a conference held in the Augustinerkloster at Erfurt in November 2017. The aim of the conference—along with the related project, “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal formations,” funded by the Danish National Research Foundation—was to develop an approach to urban religion that moves beyond a reduction of “religious practices and beliefs to mere instruments” for powerful individuals, recognizing instead that “religions and cities are entangled and impacted in a dialectical way on each other on every social level” (2). While many of the chapters provide significant insights, the volume unfortunately suffers from poor copy-editing and inconsistent formatting (even at the level of chapter in some instances). The contributors, no doubt, expended significant time and resources to share their observations and insights with the scholarly community. The disservice given to their work in this regard demonstrates the obligation of presses to hire skilled copy-editors and pay them appropriately.

Of particular interest to the volume's editors is the place of the individual and minority groups—those who might be largely hidden by the traces left by the urban elite—in religious and civic transformation. Ultimately, however, it is the traces of the urban elite that occupy much of the volume's attention: the near erasure of physical cities even as elites rely on urban metaphors in their discussions of religion; text culture, which tends to be associated with urban literati, as a mode of religious engagement; and discourses among urban elites as attempts to shape the practices, identifications, and perceptions of their cities. This nearly irresistible focus on elite urban engagement is understandable. On the one hand, it was the urban setting that shaped the way that elites engaged in religion (however we define religion); on the other, elites reshaped their urban environments not only through their material engagement with the urban but also through their literary productions. And, as we must constantly remind ourselves, this same intersection of urbanity and literate culture has often dictated what evidence has been preserved and deemed significant.

Importantly, the editors resist the urge to present “the city” or “urbanity” as a homogenous phenomenon, recognizing instead that urban spaces are plural and rife with competing interests, conflict, and divergent strategies. This emphasis is reflected in the diversity of the contributor's topics and approaches. Even so, three broad themes emerge. First, urbanity influences the way people frame discourses about religion. This theme is highlighted by two chapters examining Augustine's complicated treatments of urbanism (Rubens Urciuoli, Ando), in which it becomes clear that the assumptions of urban life can be built into the discourse of an “urban-based religious agent” (16), even as he erases the urban from his discourse. But the conditions of urban life also shape religious discourses in other ways—for example, the privileged discursive position granted to ritual specializations associated with intellectualism and literary culture, which was particularly facilitated by urban settings (Wendt). Increased urban visibility can also lead to semantic shifts, as seen in the shift among late antique Christians from associating pistis/fides with inter-personal relationships to physical spaces (Morgan). A second theme centers on the fact that individuals engage in religious practices within built environments. Here, we find explorations of the necropolis (Weiss), the extension of cult via landscapes (Salzman), Syriac cities (Blömer), and Roman baths (Steuernagel). Of particular note is Steuernagel's observation that “baths were locations of religious practice since they were locations where people met; they were permeated by religion since the [sic] urban life during Roman Imperial and late antique times generally was” (254). This observation is anything but trivial and should be applied more broadly for studies of late antiquity. The third theme considers the way individuals engage in normative discourses to negotiate with, resist, and even reshape their built environments, as seen in the reshaping of the imagined past in Constantinople (Chatterjee) and Edessa (Leppin). Both chapters specifically highlight the volume's observation that religion “offers a battleground” (5) for competition over the urban environment. Leppin's chapter, moreover, will be of particular interest for those introducing Syriac Christianity, although his bibliography is a bit dated.

The reader steps away from the volume with a sense that urban environments are complex and resist systemization and that individuals and groups have diverse ideas about, and experiences of, urbanity, as shaped by competing interests and the residues of the past. One could say that an urban environment is inherently unstable and resists coherence, despite the best interests of its planners and architects. This can lend to the feeling that a volume attempting to tackle such instability itself lacks coherence on multiple levels: chronologically, methodologically, and theoretically. It is, for example, odd to present the volume as addressing the city in late antiquity when the case studies span from the Egyptian New Kingdom to the Middle Byzantine period. Additionally, while the category of urban is discussed carefully, religion is left largely untheorized, a surprising neglect given the extensive history of the field. Even so, the volume has much to offer to scholars interested in exploring aspects of urban religion in the ancient world, and individual chapters offer valuable correctives to how scholars of the period think about religion in urban contexts.