‘How do we punish?’ is obviously connected to the question, ‘Why do we punish?’ In contemporary penological debates there is little consensus over the right answer to the latter question (retribution, rehabilitation and incapacitation all have their partisans), at least from a normative perspective. Yet historical precedents matter too. This valuable new book attempts to map the relationship between ‘how’ and ‘why’ over the course of Late Antiquity, focusing on three main institutional actors: the Roman state, the Church and the family. At the centre of its interest are two strands of ancient discourse: a corrective discourse, on the one hand, and an exclusionary one, on the other. The former sought rehabilitation of those people who were deemed capable of improvement (for example, dependents and children), the latter treated offenders as incurable or even diseased, and sought to inoculate society from such people through confinement, exile or death.

Over the course of Late Antiquity these two discourses came to overlap one another through the advent of the punishment of forcible confinement within a monastery, an early ancestor of the modern prison, whereby problematic members of society were both excluded and corrected. A third strand of punitive discourse, revenge, gradually withered away. The result was a late antique view of punishment that emphasized correction and rehabilitation, at least in theory. In practice, of course, correction meant confinement and seclusion, often in dark and insalubrious places. Claims about the redemptive possibilities of punishment and penance were frequently, in practice, made in bad faith. But the move from a society that aimed at the permanent exclusion of its most deviant members to one that aimed at their permanent inclusion (subject to tight controls), was nonetheless an historical watershed — even if this new penological understanding was only applied in select cases.

Hillner's approach to discourses of punishment tends to the Foucaultian, but she leavens the discourse analysis by careful attention to the institutional frameworks through which punishments were carried out. Indeed, the attention to institutions is one of the great virtues of the book. Through careful attention to a wide range of primary sources (both legal and ecclesiastical) she maps how different strands of corrective and exclusionary discourse animated particular institutions (the Church and the secular government being, unsurprisingly, her main actors). The late Roman state gradually adapted itself, in the fifth and especially the sixth centuries, to discourses that had earlier been more typical of ecclesiastics; ecclesiastical institutions, by contrast, came to understand themselves as having a key rôle to play in protecting individuals from the harsh measures of the state through interceding on behalf of those accused or convicted. In so doing, however, church officials came to be imagined, by the state, as playing an important rôle in the administration of justice. Thus an emperor such as Justinian could imagine that confinement in a monastery, a penalty previously reserved for renegade ecclesiastics, might serve as a way of improving the conduct of adulteresses or even prostitutes. H.'s third main institutional actor, the family, largely lurks under the radar, providing a ready set of metaphors for correction and domination, violence and exclusion, that could be adapted by state or ecclesiastical institutions.

There are two additional virtues of this work, though both receive little explicit discussion. Though this is a book about punishment, it is not a book that privileges the state as the most important or authoritative legal actor. The state is a protagonist, to be sure, but H.’s attention to a variety of institutions reinforces the importance, in our study of late antique law, of not taking the claims or ambitions of state institutions at face value; by contrast, much welcome attention is paid to the concerns and constraints of a variety of institutions, and to the ways in which these institutions interfaced and intersected. Secondly, and relatedly, this work privileges questions of actors' intentions, goals, beliefs and concerns over more traditional, and often more arid, questions of institutional capacity or ‘effectiveness’. The result is a final product that has much to teach about both institutional and cultural history.

The amount of research that animates this book is, by turns, both a virtue and a limitation. H. walks her readers through a jungle of sources, featuring a complex cast of characters. At times, however, the vast evidentiary edifice obscures the argument itself. Multiple examples are proffered where one or two, closely read, might have served better. Explicit discussions of causation are often reserved for conclusions (the question of whether ecclesiastical officials availed themselves of Platonic understandings of punishment, for example, is central to understanding the arc of the book as a whole; yet it is reserved until the final pages, where it receives no definitive answer). These criticisms notwithstanding, H.’s is an engaging work, and one that will, one hopes, provoke historians to think more broadly about the wide spectrum of punitive practices and institutions spread across the landscape of the late Roman world.