Dossey's thesis is illustrated by two mosaics presenting life on an African villa, one from the early second century and the other from the mid-fourth. The first portrays agricultural workers living and laboring in material poverty: wearing the short girded tunics of slaves, barefoot, and sheltering in brush huts roofed in thatch. In the second, the agricultural workers are clothed in multi-colored and tailored clothing, shod in boots, and delivering gifts to their landlords. Dossey attempts to explain the changes in rural culture that made these late imperial coloni more like contemporary urban dwellers than their predecessors. In the process, she clarifies the contributions of both empire and church to the transformation of rural life. The argument proceeds in three stages: material culture, community formation, and self-assertion or rebellion.
In the first part of the analysis, Dossey uses the results of archeological surveys of large areas (rather than excavations of buildings) to measure the presence of commodities and thus of consumption. The primary evidence noted is the type and quantity of pottery shards and coins found on a site. At any distance from urban markets and villas, little evidence of fineware pottery or of any coins is found for the second and early third centuries. For the later periods, African redslip pottery, small coins, and even bath houses—all signs of increased consumption—are found in rural areas. Similarly, manufacture of fineware, as well as metal working, is also evidenced in the cities of the interior and even in rural areas, rather than only in coastal cities. Dossey correlates these developments with direct taxation of estates under Diocletian and a shift to absentee landlords as changes that encouraged diversification of income-producing activities on estates and lessened the need to symbolize social difference between owners and workers by levels of consumption.
Community formation is explored in the second part. Under the Severan emperors, villages (particularly in Proconsular Africa) achieved municipal status, thereby gaining self-government and some financial autonomy. Later, the empire appointed more local officials and increased the power of landlords on their estates. In the fourth and fifth centuries, however, the expansion of the episcopate provided rural populations an alternate avenue for community formation and local control. By a careful analysis of extant lists of bishops, particularly for the collatio in Carthage in 411, Dossey shows that a large number of submunicipal communities had been granted either a Caecilianist or a Donatist bishop. By the end of the fifth century, she estimates that two-thirds of the African bishops served rural communities. In some instances, the villages exploited the competition between the communions but in others the bishops willingly split their large dioceses to better serve rural Christians. Documentary evidence, particularly in the case of Anthony of Fussala, shows that these bishops sometimes united several villages to create a new community identity. Unlike the presbyters assigned to rural congregations by an urban bishop, rural bishops had to be approved by their people, thus providing a new level of self-determination for the peasants. The bishop could himself serve as a magistrate when the parties were willing, bringing judicial services to the local level. In Africa, unlike Asia, urban and rural bishops enjoyed equal status; except for Carthage, the provincial primates were determined by length of service: village bishops exercised real power. In the late fifth and sixth century chronicles, episcopal sees were referred to as civitates even though they had not been granted municipal status. The large number of bishoprics in Africa, Dossey concludes, was a function of the aspirations of rural populations as much as of competition between Donatists and Caecilianists.
In the third section, Dossey draws out some of the consequences of the development of rural church communities. The churches created a textual culture, one in people had access to documents that set standards of law and practice. The church provides a literate clergy, training lectors in the skill of reading, and both bishops and presbyters for preaching. Dossey surveys the (381) anonymous sermons that have been transmitted through African collections and she argues that a good number of these either originated in rural settings or were adapted for such use. Clergy also served their congregants beyond the liturgy, writing and witnessing contracts. Dossey notes other ways in which the church brought rural communities into a network of literate culture. Through letters, Donatus of Carthage warned his episcopal colleagues throughout Africa to refuse the gifts that imperial officers (Macarius and Paul) were distributing—thereby provoking a military confrontation in Numidia. The Caecilianists had summaries of the proceedings and favorable judgment of the collatio in Carthage (411) read out in all parish churches. Finally, Dossey argues that both sets of church leaders supported and encouraged rural populations to resist oppressive social practices that were tolerated by imperial magistrates but condemned by the gospel. They preached on Zachaeus' conversion to demand both justice and charity from creditors and to resist illegal enslavement of indebted peasants. Catholics punished officials who violated consecrated virgins, sometimes in defiance of imperial law. Augustine even defended clerical use of force in such cases.
Dossey (and her editors) sometimes overlook aids to the interpretation of her evidence, such as maps showing the location of the sites surveyed for pottery and coins, explanations of the classes of red slip pottery.
This fine book breaks new ground in the use of evidence and in its bold interpretation of the interaction between agricultural workers and the Christian clergy in the development of civil and religious communities in the African countryside. Without ever mentioning it, Dossey breaks the long impasse over Frend's thesis that cast Donatism as a nationalist movement. Her insightful use of evidence often suggests rather than demonstrates but it reshapes scholarly assumptions and will redirect inquiry.
