By working on ‘private churches and private worship from the fourth through the first half of the fifth century’ (p. 2), Kim Bowes has made an innovative choice of subject, one that is difficult and important both for archaeologists and historians. The distinction between private and public is a familiar one, but it has seldom been addressed as a specific question by historians. The author rightly points out in the introduction the way studies on late antique Christianity are mainly focused on urban communities and the development of episcopal churches. Private worship is almost always studied in a marginal way, or from specific perspectives such as heretical movements or aristocratic asceticism (two questions addressed in the last chapter of the book). To my knowledge, there is no existing study of private Christian worship as a specific subject. The amount of data considered in this book proves how rich the subject is, and it is a great merit of the author to direct our attention to it. But the theme has its difficulties. The bold attempt to lay down operational definitions of private and public, which is the object of the first chapter (pp. 18–60), is not entirely successful. Bowes rightly insists on the difference between modern and ancient conceptions of private and public, but she fails to explain where the difference lies, and she does not provide the reader with the tools that he was expecting. At the end of the chapter, and all the way through the book, the opposition between private and public is used in many different ways: secret versus open, unofficial versus official, personal versus collective. As a result, the reader finds it hard to follow the many shifts in the interpretation of evidence of private worship. This feeling is accentuated by a loose use of social categories, which often are more suggestive than accurate. It makes for stimulating but sometimes puzzling reading.

The core of the book is articulated in three chapters: ‘Two Christian capitals: private worship in Rome and Constantinople’ (pp. 1–124), ‘“Christianizing” the countryside: rural estates and private cult’ (pp. 125–88) and ‘Ideologies of the private: private cult and the construction of heresy and sanctity’ (pp. 189–216). A short conclusion ends the study, which is completed by almost fifty pages of an excellent up-to-date and international bibliography and a useful general index. The case of Rome is by far the more complex, with the richest evidence. The chapters begin with an analysis of the Christian topography of the city, one of the more interesting and more innovative parts of the book. Taking into account not only the complex question of the tituli – seen here as ‘a creative compromise between episcopate and local communities’ – but also the domestic churches and the possible use of the large apsidal halls of the aristocratic domus, the book gives a rich picture of the Christian religious landscape in Rome. The study moves to the rituals of private worship: daily prayer, eucharistic reservation and private communion, lamp-lightning rituals, a set of practices which deserve to be brought into the spotlight. The author then addresses the question of the relations between the episcopal clergy and the aristocracy, seen mostly in terms of competition. A great emphasis is laid on domestic churches, of which the model is the church built by Helena in the Sessorian palace. This gives new insight into the process of Christianisation, although the evidence does not always support the conclusions: we know very little of these private churches, here understood in the loose meaning of spaces dedicated to Christian rituals in the house, and we know even less of the clergy serving them. In more than one way Constantinople is the simpler case: the building of churches is mostly the result of private initiative, and the relation between the Christian aristocracy and the bishop is more direct than in Rome. The comparison with Rome is interesting, but the analysis tends to focus too narrowly on the relations between aristocrats and bishops, leaving aside the rest of the Christian community and giving too little space to the imperial interventions, which might belong to a specific category, between private and public. The next chapter moves from city to the countryside of some provinces of the western empire. The author begins by taking into account the various architectural forms of worship buildings in the countryside: villa churches (meaning churches built within the pars urbana of the villa), mausoleums and extra-villa churches (meaning free-standing churches, built on private estates). The documentation, very well presented, with excellent graphic documentation, does not allow much in the way of interpretation of the Christian rituals performed. In a second part, various forms of Christian activities are presented: ‘estate asceticism’, mainly a study of Sulpicius in Primuliacum and Paulinus in Nola, and ‘estate based clergy’; there is a tendency to assume total control of the clergy by the landowner, which is not always supported by the texts quoted. The conclusion insists that the Christian communities established were ‘shaped by seigniorial dependency relationships’. The second part of the chapter presents four regional analyses of relations between bishop and rural elites in north Africa, northern Italy, Britain and Hispania and south-western Gaul. The author makes a case for structural differences between three types: a cooperative type in Africa, where bishops and landowners work hand in hand; areas marked by the absence of proper episcopal structures, where aristocratic initiative fills in for episcopal organisation (Britain and northern Italy), and areas marked by strong opposition between private landowners and bishops (Spain and south-western Gaul). Despite some persuasive remarks it is difficult to see much in common between the situation in Britain and in northern Italy, and the Spanish case depends too much on the Priscillianist controversy. It is hard to see how much of the actual regional diversity is still apparent to us, but one feels that the models offered are too rigid, and that the rich archaeological documentation presented in the chapter suggests a more nuanced view. The last chapter, by far the shortest, is concerned with attitudes towards private worship, and especially with the contradictory attitudes of ecclesiastical authorities. On the one hand, private worship is often seen as a threat to orthodoxy; on the other hand, the growth of ascetism in the fourth century in large part took place in private houses. In this last case, the private is seen in a very positive light, as is elegantly demonstrated in an analysis of the letter of Gregory of Nyssa on the life of his sister Macrina. Private worship is not, of course, the only theme in which one can see contradiction in the clerical discourse, which depends very much on circumstances, places and time. The major success of Kim Bowes's book is to have opened a new way of looking at the Christianisation of the Roman empire, too often approached from a limited clerical view of the history of the Church. By focusing on religion as it was practised outside the direct control of the bishop, she raises fascinating questions about the process of Christianisation. This is a major contribution to late antique studies.