The words ‘Lullingstone Roman Villa’ in big, red letters on the front of this book over a reconstruction of the villa in its fourth-century heyday might suggest a new guidebook or a popular work on the villa. But as important are the words ‘Culture and Society’, signalling a much more specific perspective. Originating in a 2018 Masters dissertation at King's College, London, the work focuses on the architecture of the villa, its place in the landscape, along with aspects of its decoration, and above all the mosaics, as expressions of the proprietors’ taste and paideia. A very positive feature of the publication is the extensive use of good-quality colour (and some archival black-and-white) illustrations which support the text well and greatly aid comprehension.

An introductory chapter outlines the history of work on the site and the programme for the rest of the book: chapters 2 and 3 form the core of the treatment of the villa. Chapter 2 takes a landscape approach, examining the ways in which the setting of the villa within the Darent valley and its relationship to the river were used to create an impression of the importance of the group of structures, with the temple-mausoleum set at its highest point. The sequence of Roman period construction on the site is then outlined, the development of the principal residential building being complemented by considerations of the temple-mausoleum and the ‘granary’, thus assembling the fourth-century complex. The chapter ends by contextualising Lullingstone through a comparison with a handful of other fourth-century high-status villas, including Chedworth.

Chapter 3 is the most detailed, consisting of an in extenso treatment of the mosaics in their physical setting and their cultural messages, setting Lullingstone in the developing discussion of the cultural context of late Roman villas in Britain. The focus is the mosaics of what the author terms the ‘Audience Hall’ (the Bellerophon and the chimaera mosaic) and the stibadium (the Europa and the bull mosaic). The analysis of the layout of the residential building draws on A. Wallace-Hadrill's discussions of the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’, and of socially conditioned penetration into Roman houses. It would have benefited from use of the ‘Interiors’ chapter in E. Swift's Style and Function in Roman Decoration (Aldershot 2009), including its treatment of the geometric elements of mosaic design. The importance of status as a conditioning factor is brought out, but gender and age are rather surprisingly left out. The mosaics are then considered in a wider context, as expressions of their commissioner's desire to represent himself (less likely, herself) as a person formed by paideia and deploying a range of cultural references to impress guests and underlings. The most striking evidence for this, the elegiac couplet in the Europa mosaic, is discussed in useful depth. Perhaps more could have been made of the rarity of other fourth-century mosaics in Kent and the distinctive yet unparalleled palette and drawing of this pair of mosaics. The book then ends rather abruptly with a brief conclusion.

This leaves the sensation that this is half a book, which is a justified impression. Mosaics are considered in detail, but what about wall-paintings, comprising amongst others the feature for which the villa is internationally famous: the Christian wall-paintings of the apparent house church in an ‘upper room’? These and the water nymphs of the ‘deep room’ are briefly mentioned and illustrated in chapters 1 and 2, respectively, but not in chapter 3. Yet one might have thought them as important as, if not more than, the mosaics for what they tell us about ‘culture and society’ at the fourth-century villa. They demonstrate Christian practice to set alongside the mosaics with their subject matter derived from the mythology of the traditional religions. Other important but clearly relevant elements, such as the baths, similarly get short shrift. The splendid pair of marble busts in the ‘deep room’, exceptional in Romano-British culture, are not even mentioned. More could have been made of the contents of the temple-mausoleum. G.W. Meates’ excavations yielded a notable range of artefactual material that could have been interrogated from this perspective.

The problem presumably lies in the origins of this work as a Masters dissertation, with its constraints on word-count. This makes sense in the academic context, but has worked to this publication's considerable disadvantage, preventing it from considering and discussing crucial elements relating to ‘culture and society’. It does raise some acute questions over genre and potential readership/s. It is neither a guidebook nor an overall synthesis, yet nor does it work as a specialist consideration of ‘culture and society’ overall at Lullingstone because of its major lacunae. It is a frustration that the work could not be carried through to a full treatment of the subject by an author with an evident appreciation of the site and the subject.