This is an exceptionally strong collection devoted to the creation, use, experience and transformation of space in Late Antiquity.Footnote 1 The editors have curated this sixteen-chapter volume with considerable conceptual elegance, bringing together studies that are diverse in geography, evidence and method, yet clearly unified by a shared analytical concern: how late antique spaces were inhabited, perceived, appropriated and remade. Machado and Sweetman’s introductory chapter, ‘Introduction: Lived Spaces in Late Antiquity’, is much more than a conventional preliminary essay. It establishes the theoretical and methodological architecture of the volume and offers a persuasive case for approaching late antiquity through the lens of lived space. Drawing on H. Lefebvre’s spatial triad and D. Harvey’s relational understanding of space, Machado and Sweetman translate these frameworks into a historically grounded approach that integrates archaeological evidence, textual sources, inscriptions, material culture and social practice. Given the uneven, fragmentary and heterogeneous datasets on which the study of late antiquity often depends, this is no easy task. Yet the editors address these challenges with clarity and sophistication, showing how spatial analysis can move the discussion beyond the familiar opposition between continuity and decline and instead illuminate the complex ways in which late antique societies gave meaning to their worlds.
In Part 1, ‘Visualising Late Antique Spaces’, W. Bowden’s chapter, ‘Lost in Space? Finding the People in Late Antique Archaeology’, addresses a persistent problem in classical and post-classical archaeology: the tendency to privilege physical space, architectural form and monumental topography at the expense of the human dimension. Bowden’s central argument is not simply that archaeologists should pay greater attention to people, but that the discipline’s dominant questions, datasets and visual conventions have continued to privilege monumental space, elite self-representation and the built environment, even after the language of decline has largely been replaced by that of transformation. The originality of Bowden’s contribution lies in showing what archaeology must do differently if it is genuinely to recover the lives of those who inhabited late antique spaces. Through examples such as Butrint and Venta Icenorum, he demonstrates how small finds and digital reconstruction can shift attention away from buildings as autonomous objects and towards the people, practices and inequalities that animated them.
J. König’s chapter, ‘Suburban Saints: Space, Place and Environment in Theodoret’s Religious History’, moves the discussion from material archaeology to textual spatial imagination. Rather than treating Theodoret’s Religious History merely as a repository of saintly topoi, König approaches it as a carefully structured reflection on space, environment, ascetic authority and the relationship between urban, rural and marginal landscapes. The chapter broadens the methodological range of the volume by showing that lived space could also be imagined, narrated and environmentally charged.
M.L. Berenfeld’s chapter, ‘Living with Neighbours in Late Antique Rome’, is one of the strongest examples of the volume’s concern with scale. Focusing on the Caelian Hill between 312 and 410 ce, Berenfeld examines the neighbourhood as the level at which religious, social and spatial changes became visible in everyday life. Her central argument is that the Christianisation of the Caelian Hill cannot be understood simply through the construction of churches or the disappearance of pagan institutions. Rather, it must be reconstructed through streets, routes, daily rhythms, processions, elite residences and social encounters. Her neighbourhood-based methodology offers a persuasive model for studying late antique urban change without reducing it either to monumental topography or to religious ideology.
Munnery’s chapter, ‘Shipshape and Roman Fashion: Space at Sea in Late Antiquity’, expands the volume’s spatial agenda by applying the idea of lived space to the merchant ship. Its major contribution lies in bringing the spatial turn into maritime archaeology, a field that has often prioritised hull technology, cargo reconstruction, routes and economic systems over the experience of sailors and passengers. By treating the ship as a lived environment shaped by sleeping, cooking, eating, praying and working, Munnery reconstructs the merchant vessel as a dense and socially meaningful space.
In Part 2, ‘Place-Making and Emplacement: The Impact of Religion’, G. Castiglia’s chapter, ‘Space(s) in Transition: The Impact of Early Christianity on the Late Antique Horn of Africa’, usefully moves the discussion beyond the Mediterranean core to the Aksumite kingdom and, more specifically, to the port city of Adulis. One of the chapter’s main strengths is its scalar approach: Castiglia analyses space at the level of the kingdom, of cities and suburban landscapes, and of church architecture and liturgical movement. This method allows him to show that Christianity affected different spatial levels unevenly. His discussion of Adulis is particularly effective in demonstrating how Christian architecture reshaped urban perception through the monumentalisation of churches and their imposition upon earlier spatial arrangements.
C.T. La Rocco’s chapter, ‘Making Space in the Visigothic Kingdom: Church Founders in Sixth- and Seventh-Century Iberian Epigraphy’, examines Christian place-making through a clearly defined body of evidence. Its central argument is that church foundation in Visigothic Iberia was not simply an episcopal process, as older scholarship has often assumed, but a complex social practice involving bishops, kings, monks, lay aristocrats, families and newly emergent local elites. La Rocco’s contribution is particularly valuable because it does not merely replace one dominant actor with another. Instead, she reconstructs church foundation as a collaborative and socially negotiated process, in which sacred space became a means of expressing authority, status, memory and community identity.
N. Viermann’s chapter, ‘Holy Objects on the Move: Relics in Constantinople between City Centre and Urban Periphery’, approaches lived space through movement, ritual and sacred objects rather than through architecture alone. Its central argument is that relics in late antique Constantinople were not merely deposited in churches as static tokens of sanctity, but also actively helped to create an integrated Christian topography linking the urban centre, suburban zones and the wider hinterland. Through the cases of Samuel’s relics, the unnamed martyrs transferred to Drypia and the Virgin’s robe at Blachernae, Viermann shows how sacred objects generated routes, ceremonies, memories and political meanings.
Sweetman’s chapter, ‘Space and Place: Late Antique Churches and Place Remaking’, offers a conceptually ambitious contribution by examining church construction as a process of place-making and place-remaking. Its central argument is that late antique churches should not be understood simply as architectural markers of Christianisation, but as spaces through which communities negotiated memory, belonging, identity and displacement. The chapter is particularly valuable because it connects Christian place-making with the broader experience of crisis and mobility in the late antique eastern Mediterranean.
In Part 3, ‘Space and Meaning’, E. Ogus’s chapter, ‘Entanglement of Public Space and Honorific Statue Habit in Late Antique Asia Minor’, shows that late antique statues were not passive survivals of classical civic culture, but active elements in the production of public space, visibility, hierarchy and movement. The chapter complicates narratives of decline in the late antique statue habit by demonstrating that reuse, relocation, refurbishment and changing display contexts were not merely signs of exhaustion, but also adaptive strategies through which statuary remained socially and politically meaningful.
J. Martínez Jiménez’s chapter, ‘Civitatem condidit: City Building and Community Formation in the New Visigothic Urban Foundations’, offers a compelling reassessment of Visigothic urbanism by taking new foundations such as Reccopolis and Eio/El Tolmo seriously as political and civic projects. Rather than treating them as anomalous fortified sites or diminished survivals of Roman urbanism, the chapter shows how they gave material form to new communities within the changing structures of post-Roman kingship. Its most effective contribution lies in the distinction between urbs and civitas, which allows Martínez Jiménez to argue that the significance of these foundations rested not only in their walls or monuments, but also in their capacity to produce civic belonging.
A.R. Brown’s chapter, ‘From Theoria to Pilgrimage: Ships, Shores and Sacred Travel around the Mediterranean Sea in Late Antiquity’, offers a valuable maritime counterpart to the volume’s discussion of lived space. Brown shows that Christian sacred travel did not simply create new routes or practices, but reinterpreted long-standing Mediterranean habits of maritime devotion. The dangers of sea travel, the ritual importance of harbours and promontories, and the search for divine protection remained central; what changed were the sacred figures invoked and the objects carried by travellers. The chapter is especially effective in presenting Christianisation as a process of redirection rather than rupture, through which older practices of safe travel were adapted to a new Christian sacred geography.
In Part 4, ‘Changing Spaces’, C. Videbech’s chapter, ‘Clean Death or Messy Resilience? Forum Traiani and Forum Romanum as Activity Spaces during the Sixth Century’, offers a suggestive reassessment of late antique urban change. By comparing the two fora, it questions the assumption that monumental preservation necessarily indicates vitality, while material transformation signals decline. Its main contribution lies in reading the ‘messy’ reuse of the Forum Romanum as evidence of resilience, whereas the relative preservation of the Forum Traiani appears as a more static form of memory, less open to new urban practices. A small caveat concerns the so-called Hadrian’s Athenaeum. Videbech’s discussion would have benefited from fuller engagement with recent scholarship on the Auditoria of Hadrian, which has challenged its traditional identification as an educational or literary space and points instead to a judicial and administrative function, probably as tribunalia at least until after the sack of Rome by Ricimer.
R. Raja’s chapter, ‘Lived Spaces in Late Antique and Early Islamic Jerash – Old Questions in the Light of New Evidence’, focuses on how recent work on Jerash, especially on its Northwest Quarter, has transformed the interpretation of a city long studied primarily through its Roman and late antique monuments. Raja demonstrates that the post-classical phases were not marginal residues of an earlier urban life, but dynamic settings in which production, water management, religious reuse and domestic occupation repeatedly redefined the meaning of urban space.
E. Zanini’s chapter, ‘“Places of Continuity”: Before, Around, and After the End of the Roman Villas in Central Italy’, offers a thoughtful reassessment of the end of the villa through the long biography of Vignale in coastal Tuscany. Rather than presenting post-Roman villas through abandonment or decline, Zanini shows how certain places retained significance by adapting to new economic and territorial conditions. Its main contribution lies in interpreting Vignale not as a passive survival of the Roman world, but as a place repeatedly reactivated through infrastructural and structural resilience.
Machado’s chapter, ‘Lived Space and Social Change in Late Antique Rome: The Campus Martius’, provides a strong conclusion to the volume and will be of special relevance to scholars of Roman topography, as are the chapters by Berenfeld and Videbech. Through the Campus Martius, Machado shows how late antique urban space was not merely transformed by emperors, bishops or aristocrats, but continuously produced through housing, labour, dependency, movement, economic activity and social conflict. The chapter is especially compelling because it combines topographical precision with a sharp social reading of the city, demonstrating that monuments, streets, warehouses, churches and insulae must be understood as part of the same lived urban system.
Taken as a whole, the volume is a highly successful and intellectually coherent collection. One of the greatest strengths is that it explores lived space across a wide variety of contexts, from ships and churches to fora, villas and urban landscapes. For scholars of Late Antiquity, archaeology and Roman topography, the volume will be a stimulating and important point of reference.
