Kim Bowes presents a remarkable synthesis of archaeological and textual materials from around the Roman Empire, with a focus on the West, in a book that without doubt makes a significant contribution to the study of early Christianity, the shifting dynamics of the later Roman Empire, and the world of late antiquity more generally. Using archaeological data that has not yet informed most scholarship on late antiquity, Bowes argues that private Christian practices and places played a widespread, influential, and hitherto largely unrecognized role in shaping “the early Christian topographies of both city and countryside in East and West” (218). She thus hopes to reshape narratives of Christian development in late antiquity by supplementing studies of the church as a public institution with a compelling history of the ways in which private worship, largely of the empire's wealthy elite, produced particular Christian traditions, complicated clerical authority, helped to define the relation of the individual to the church, and spread Christianity around the empire.

The book's introduction provides a coherent overview of Bowes's arguments and describes well the gaps in scholarship that the project addresses. Bowes hopes “to reexcavate the private” (2), private churches and private worship, in an effort to expose evidence that has been missing from academic reconstructions of Christianization. Such evidence, in turn, sheds light on the often complex and sometimes tense relationships between those elite who traditionally held authority and the Christian clergy who were newly gaining public authority in the fourth century. These new conversations also further nuance perceptions of fourth- and early fifth-century accusations of heresy that often rendered private worship as dangerously heretical as it fell outside the oversight of the church's public officials. By combining archaeological and textual data, this volume contributes to any number of varied aspects of late Roman and early Christian studies.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for her claims through an in-depth discussion of traditional Roman religions and a deft contrast with second- and third-century Christianity. She concludes that similar structures—families, patrons, houses, household shrines—that are shared between Christian and traditional Roman cultures actually “mask a radically different ideology of the private and its concomitant public” (59). Because Roman law narrowly defined public religious practice, everything else fell under the category of the private, and in light of such breadth, “the pagan religious private was, in some sense, a neutral category” (59). Pre-Constantinian Christians, however, worked under different constraints that resulted in “a hierarchization in which the communal was often preferred to the private” (60). While Bowes carefully defines many of her terms, a discussion of the parameters of “religion/religious” would have strengthened this chapter's claims. When she writes, for example, that “the private … was the default legal category for Roman religious action” (21) and recognizes that even Christians “seem to have held imperial priesthoods, abstaining from sacrifice but presiding over games and other rites” (22), she raises thorny questions of how to apply modern concepts of “religion” to the ancient world. If legal definitions distinguished certain public priestly acts from all others, in which ways are public and private acts equally “religion”? Does a Christian who abstains from sacrifice but not from presiding over games see both acts as equally “religious”? The difference that she traces remains persuasive, but future work may helpfully nuance her discussion.

Chapter 2 is a powerful chapter that traces an impressive swathe of material in order to draw conclusions about private Christian worship in Rome and Constantinople. For Rome, Bowes traces the history of the city's powerful elite families and the crowded urban landscape, demonstrating that titular churches represent a complex relation between elite patrons and Christian clergy that is unique to the city of Rome, and that Christianity was practiced much more widely within the city—through prayer, lamp-lighting, relic cult, private liturgies with domestic clergy, and asceticism—than scholars have presumed. She likewise demonstrates private Christian worship within Constantinople, and she reveals a striking difference in the dynamics between clergy and elite patrons in the two cities. This chapter represents a rigorous and adept handling of a striking amount of archaeological and textual material and will transform the way scholars imagine Christianity in this period.

Chapter 3 examines the role of rural estates in the Christianization of the countryside in the West, persuasively challenging earlier scholarship that presumed that the bishops and local clergy were the primary force for spreading Christian practice. Instead Bowes reveals the significant role played by the estates—the places they provided for worship, and the patterns of behavior their owners modeled for those who were under their influence—and the tensions that such estate-based Christianity created with the urban episcopacies. As Bowes concludes, “Estate-based communities were simply different from those envisioned by the episcopate, and their hierarchy and very raison d'être were seigniorial, not episcopal” (188).

In Chapter 4, Bowes demonstrates that these multiple competitions over public and private also shaped heresiological accusations, such as those against Manichees. As bishops struggled to establish their authority over the empire's elite though imperial edicts and conciliar canons, they insisted that private worship in the home deviated from orthodox public Christian worship. Female ascetics, traditionally valorized for their private isolation, found themselves particularly at the crossroads of this rhetorical struggle.

In this book, Bowes reconfigures traditional narratives of “the Christianization of the aristocracy” and “the Christianization of space” (220) and redefines some aspects of “Christianity's relationship with its Roman past” (222). As with any work, this volume is understandably shaped by the author's disciplinary training. In this case, her frequent use of “the Peace of the Church” as a chronological marker and a few uncharacteristically flat-footed assumptions about religion betray her training outside of Religious Studies and provide opportunity for future nuance. This is more than balanced, however, by the rich array of information that she is able to bring to bear on the study of early Christianity from her training in Art and Archaeology and by her insightful and intelligent analysis of the material. While a relative paucity of evidence for private worship cautions against broad generalizations, Bowes carefully navigates the available evidence in order to draw persuasive and significant new conclusions about the history of Christianity in late antiquity that will fundamentally reshape the way scholars narrate some aspects of early Christian history.