Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds ed. by Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood

Abstract

Reviewed by: Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds ed. by Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood Kristina Sessa Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood, editors Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Pp. xiii + 380. $120.00. In Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds, a group of international scholars brings the insights of past studies on power relations and early Christianity, such as contributions by Michel Foucault, to bear on a set of still relatively understudied contexts: smaller-scale social configurations, such as the household, the schoolroom, and the monastery. Here the emphasis is on [End Page 643] personal relationships (parent-child, slave-master, cleric-parishioner, teacher-student, abbot-monk), and on various forms of social control used within these contexts to shape discourse, behavior, and subjectivity. As stated in the volume's introduction by its editors, Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood, "[s]chools, monasteries, and churches played a pivotal role in enforcing and reproducing the social order, and their work of cultivating obedient subjects often involved symbolic or actual violence" (10). Drawing inspiration from microhistory and the study of "small worlds," the editors explain how the fifteen essays contribute to a singular goal: to elucidate and analyze the ways in which a range of Christian powerbrokers used violence (understood capaciously in both the physical and discursive sense) to "draw members into their communities and to intensify the commitment of new members once they had joined, drawing them into alignment as sharers of an independent subjectivity" (10). Following the editors' introduction, the book's contents are arranged in four parts, each preceded by a succinct summary of the section's general arguments. (In my opinion, sectional mini-introductions should appear in all edited collections, since they both convey general points of interconnection between the essays and provide readers with a sort of "cheat sheet" for what follows.) Part One, "Women and Children First: Autonomy and Social Control in the Late Ancient Household," features four essays that examine violence and social control within the context of the household (understood primarily as a social relationship), with essays on the monastic confinement of female family members (Hillner); Gregory of Nyssa's highly personal take on the corporeal punishment of children (Limberis); the household master-slave relationship in the preaching of John Chrysostom (Tallon); and Augustine on concubinage, and the framing of his remarkably nuanced, if not utterly idiosyncratic, understanding of male-female sexual partnerships (Cooper). Part Two, "'Slaves, Be Subject to Your Masters': Discipline and Moral Autonomy in a Slave Society," features three essays that interrogate discourses and material practices of humiliation and subordination within the context of the eastern Mediterranean monastery. Slavery in these essays is explored in both the concrete legal sense and a more abstracted, symbolic sense, so as to apply to the subjectivity of both the technically free and unfree. (Indeed, several authors underscore the fluid semantic overlap of these categories, especially within a monastic setting.) Thus, there is an essay on the discursive impact of slavery in the formation of the Syrian monastic subject and body (de Wet); an essay that explores the hermeneutic complexity of using early Christian sources to reconstruct the intersection of asceticism and slavery (Larsen); and a chapter on children in Egyptian monasteries, whose upbringing and employment within this particular ascetic space sometimes blurred the boundaries between filii and famuli (Giorda). Part Three, "Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence: The Aesthetics of Control in Christian Pedagogy," tackles the important question of social control, subject formation, and the use of violence (not always symbolic) in schools and other teaching contexts, such as the church service. In what is the longest section with five essays, we read about John Chrysostom's employ of the "strategic utility of fear" to generate a particular type of ethical self and a more coherent group [End Page 644] identity (Leyerle, 173); the parallel uses of violence and humility in the training of both elite laymen in rhetorical schools and Christian ascetics in monastic contexts (Wood); Eusebius's acts of intellectual violence to pagan philosophical texts in the Praeparatio evangelica through his strategic "poaching" of pagan sources (Johnson...