Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa by Shira L. Lander

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa by Shira L. Lander Ann Marie Yasin Shira L. Lander. Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries in Late Roman North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xvii, 279. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-107-14694-5. Shira Lander’s new book enters an increasingly rich field of scholarship on late antique North Africa. The project’s main questions concern the role that sacred buildings played in cementing notions of religious identity and in shaping [End Page 732] distinctions between rival groups, both Christian and non. The book especially examines the relationship between the place-focused rhetoric about religious buildings and real, physical conversion or destruction of other groups’ sacred sites. Along the way, it makes a solid case for the fruitfulness of close regional examination of religious conflicts and landscapes. Lander’s central contention is that church officials’ violent rhetoric proved valuable in creating and concretizing a sense of religious difference. In other words, it “othered” rival religious groups, producing a more reified sense of “us” and “them.” This is an important and broadly convincing claim. Provocative too, if less than systematically demonstrated, is the author’s secondary argument about the chronology of the development of the triumphalist rhetorical weaponry: that it was forged first in the context of battles between rival Christian groups, then honed for use against traditional polytheists, and finally aimed against Jews. The book begins with extensive methodological and historiographic summaries presented in a lengthy introduction and first chapter. While the sections on the history and scholarship of late antique North Africa are useful for bringing readers unfamiliar with this terrain up to speed, the discussions of methodology and spatial studies approaches would have benefitted from greater selectivity along with more in-depth, critical engagement with those avenues most pertinent to the author’s investigation. For example, particularly useful to the study is the notion of sacred places as what Lander, riffing on Bourdieu, calls “super-symbols,” that is, imbued with “multiple layers of meaning, their symbolic value multiplied” (67). The concept holds interesting potential for analyzing historical sacred spaces, but further development, nuancing, and problematizing of it in relation to the material gathered in the body of the book would have been welcome. Chapter 2 surveys the vocabulary used by Christian authors (and some epigraphic sources) for places of Christian gathering. While Lander is right to point out in the chapter’s conclusion the inconsistent nature of the evidence, she argues that as early as Tertullian, at the turn of the third century, the physical places in which Christians met became increasingly viewed as “in some way holy” (78) and invested with symbolic heft to signify group membership, or exclusion. This main point, however, gets occasionally lost as the chapter ranges across a broad collection of sources, not all of which appear to significantly advance the main argument (as, for example, the discussion of the mid-fourth-century mensa from Kherbet Oum el Ahdam [Tixter, 97–99] or the two-paragraph section on churches as seats of episcopal authority [107–108]). The book’s main contributions come in the following three chapters, each of which examines a different arena of religious rivalry. Chapter 3 forms the literal and conceptual heart of the book. It begins with descriptions of state seizure and destruction of Christian basilicas during pre-Constantinian periods of persecution, and then examines the currency of church buildings in contests between Christian groups, especially conflicts between Catholic Christians and dissident “Donatists.” Lander argues that these intra-Christian contests laid the groundwork for the architecturally-charged Christian rhetoric against “pagan” temples (chapter 4) and Jewish synagogues (chapter 5). While I am not fully convinced by all of Lander’s readings—for example, taking Optatus’ description of dissidents’ scrubbing of polluted, formerly Catholic churches as reportage (112–113, 131, 143) or the damage to the Robba martyr inscription from Bénian (Ala Miliaria) as intentional, damnatio [End Page 733] memoriae-style erasure (171–172)—the book offers a number of valuable insights. Among them I would especially highlight two: first, Lander’s interesting suggestion that church buildings took on more symbolic weight in the...