Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. By KIM BOWES.

Abstract

It is only comparatively recently that scholars have granted as much importance to material evidence as they have to textual records of late antiquity. Bowes’s study of the phenomenon of private worship in the late Roman empire is a welcome addition to this, as yet, slight corpus. Illustrated throughout with photographs and architectural drawings, her work sets out to demonstrate the role of private or domestic piety in the process of Christianization of the empire. Bowes is keen to argue that Christianization was not a single, homogenous process, by which the population of the later Roman empire simply adopted a new system of faith and corresponding processes of worship. This idea is perhaps no longer new, however, while the swapping of traditional power structures from aristocrat to bishop, and from secular family to family of Christ, is also an increasingly familiar trope. Where Bowes’s work does add value is in the extra layer of nuance she brings to the view of the past, as she focuses on those within the society who did not conform to the ‘norms’ laid down by those who technically wielded legislative or religious power. There were those who established their own systems and places of Christian worship, and she can point to the archaeological evidence for household shrines, oratories, and chapels in support of her thesis.