Sacred spaces tend to endure. Even when walls and images are destroyed, even when one religion's building is replaced with another's, the locality of holiness is preserved more often than not. A grotto to the Greek god Pan becomes a temple to the Roman god Augustus. Hagia Sophia becomes a mosque, then a museum, and now, perhaps again a mosque. Evangelical church planters take over a shuttered Catholic parish. One can understand the transitions with ease in such cases, when either natural or architectural wonder evokes the numinous. But what about the sacredness of domestic space? For cultures in which one's own house evokes the sacred through art, architecture, and ritual, how does that sacred space undergo change? How does a house become temporarily sacred space, while not losing its basic domestic functions? Can a regular house pass on its holiness over time, and even from one religious worldview to another?

Cianca addresses questions such as these by means of analyzing Roman houses and early Christian house-churches during the transition to late antiquity. She takes seriously the endurance of Roman domestic rituals and argues that “the conception of sacred space in house-church Christianity did not demand the negation or rejection of traditional domestic cult practice. . . . The temporary sanctity [of a Christian house-church] would have found its place inside the context of Roman domestic life, which included the domestic cult” (6). Her argument is at first limited to Roman houses in Italy, but she later presents two case studies of Christian house-churches at Dura-Europos (Syria) and Lullingstone (England). She relies heavily on contemporaneous literary evidence and somewhat on ritual theory to aid interpretation, acknowledging the necessities and drawbacks of each.

Because Cianca does not focus on “purpose-built structures,” she must define how she understands a space to be sacred when it is only temporarily or partially so. According to her conceptualization, it is “set apart from ‘ordinary’ space,” “constructed as sacred by the practitioners and inhabitants who occupy it,” “bounded either through material articulation or through performance,” and “used for ritual” (9). Romans and Christians could have done this in any style domestic space, from elite villas to apartments to mixed-use shops to tenements. The best evidence for Roman domestic cult comes from household shrines (discussed in chapter 3, “Roman Domestic Worship”) dedicated to the tutelary Lares and Penates but also to familial gods, especially the genius and any others to whom a family was devoted. Various niches, lararia, aediculae, and even dedicated rooms (sacella) are found in diverse socioeconomic levels of Roman homes. Since these were expressions of both piety and Romanitas, Cianca explores “whether it would have been possible—let alone probable—for converts to Christianity to have rejected the rites and practices that not only commemorated their existence, but formulated and maintained it” (79).

She finds evidence of the coexistence of both polytheistic and Christian ritual practices in the examples from Dura-Europos and Lullingstone. For Dura-Europos, her argument centers not on the well-known painted baptistery but on the less-adorned assembly hall. She argues that “the vestiges of some polytheistic elements,” especially a Bacchic frieze that was not removed when the room was substantially renovated into a church, show that “sacred space in early Christianity did not demand a ‘purification’ or cleansing of inconsistent elements from worship space” (104). Her argument about the villa at Lullingstone is “more powerful” and focuses on the “Deep Room,” which was used as a nymphaeum and then as a repository for familial busts of a second-century owner, with votive pots placed there and filled by new third-century owners of the house. The key point is that “the practice of offering libations to ancestors” here continued unabated, even “while the Christian chapel was fully functioning directly above” (107).

Cianca makes a plausible case about the hybridity of sacred domestic space, a fact demonstrated still today. In New York City, for example, thousands of apartments have been handed on from Jewish residents to non-Jewish residents with intact mezuzot on their door frames. While some do reject the prior tenants’ religious symbol and apotropaic ritual, most leave them in place and some even incorporate them into other, non-Jewish religious prayers (Ann Farmer, “On Doorways, A Jewish Custom Inherited by Gentiles,” New York Times, 18 September 2010, A14). On the other hand, Cianca perhaps underestimates how zealous religious converts can be, both then and now. While undoubtedly some “converts out of polytheism would simply have continued to practise the family rituals with which they were familiar, and upon which they and their families were dependent” (90), the idolatry critique that Christians inherited from biblical antiquity also remained strong. They may have continued to be inspired by the imagines of their Roman ancestors, but also by the stories of the Maccabean era or Christian martyrs who chose death over obeisance to statues. And some modern tenants, when finding a mezuzah on their door frame, are disturbed and remove it.

Cianca's thoughtful and provocative book could have been strengthened with the inclusion of many more images, especially of her two Christian case studies, for which she provides only floor plans. A reader would need to obtain the archaeological report about Dura-Europos to see the Bacchic frieze examples upon which that argument is built. The archaeological reports from Lullingstone are even less readily available, and so it is difficult to evaluate some of the details of the argument about this fascinating building. Finally, Cianca might have cast the net a bit wider for comparative examples from early Christian literature. John Chrysostom, for instance, spoke frequently about making one's domestic space into a church space. He was not strictly “Roman,” but then again, neither was the Dura-Europos house-church or some other evidence Cianca used in her argument. “Make your house into a church,” Chrysostom exhorted his congregation—without it ceasing to be a domestic space (Sermons on Genesis 6). Cianca's insightful book explores how some early Christians did just that, even with the vestiges of ancestral spirits still present.