Reviewed by: Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds ed. by Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood Ari Z. Bryen Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 393. ISBN: 978-1-108-47939-4 For historians, the problem of "social control" is, rightly or not, more a problem of evidence than of definition. It is easy to track the moments at which large institutions make attempts to intervene in the world; it is hard to see the micro-processes by which social structures are reproduced. How does one account for gossipy conversations in which codes of behavior are navigated, expectations articulated, and anti-social behaviors named and critiqued? For a smirk, a grimace of disapproval, or the raised eyebrow of a respected superior? For the consistency by which codes of behavior are followed without any institutional elaboration—the prevalence or absence of jaywalking, habits of queuing, or protocols for interacting with a waiter? To the extent that institutions periodically intervene in these areas such that they leave an evidentiary record, they intervene in social acts and scripts that are already thick with rules [End Page 531] and customs that already suffice to guide most behavior. Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood raise this set of questions for Late Antiquity, directing our attention neither to large-scale institutions like the state, nor to the unrecoverable world of social cues, but rather to the "petty kingdom[s]" of "little big men"—those masters of small worlds like churches and schools who, by virtue of their position, sought to correct or improve the nature of their charges. The fourth century in particular offers a treasure trove of material in the form of sermons, manuals, letters, and treatises. A remarkable range of evidence is represented, and the papers have been carefully edited to engage in dialogue with one another. The majority of papers are close readings of particular texts and particular moments in texts, from which we might note some highlights. Perhaps one of the most interesting claims that emerges from a series of papers is the way in which intimacy and authority come to be intertwined: when a speaker like Gregory of Nyssa narrates a seemingly embarrassing moment of his childhood (going off to take a nap while his recently widowed mother celebrated the festival of the forty martyrs of Sebaste), his insertion of a shred of his personal biography into his message to his congregation both humanizes him and gives him authority over them: the perceived aperçu into the personal life of a spiritual leader is not Gregory letting his guard down, but a tantalizing secret that he deigns to share; by bringing the audience into his intimate world, he makes demands upon them and emphasizes his special relationship with important Christian ancestors. Similar things might be said for the letters of Ambrose to his sister Marcellina. Precisely because these letters are imagined to be intimate, they give the impression that Ambrose speaks simply and unguardedly; what better venue for recounting, perhaps tendentiously, the violence at Callinicum that led to tensions between Ambrose and Theodosius? Intimacy and authority emerge not as sitting in tension, but as two sides of the same coin: allowing someone "in" enmeshes them in a world of expectations and demands. This has important effects on how we read texts like Augustine's Confessions as well, and how the seemingly-intimate revelation of the details of a previous relationship come to influence the ways in which Augustine imagines non-marital relations more generally. Similar things might be said for the world of institutions. The punishment of disobedient women by their families, to be effective, had to negotiate a complex balance: chaining up a disobedient wife or daughter was imagined to be especially cruel, but so was allowing the state to punish on behalf of the household. The only solution was to carefully stage the punishment, allowing others to know that the family was, in fact, avenging its honor while not being cruel. Monasteries came to serve as institutional intermediaries, allowing the disobedient to be both safe and on...
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Jan 16, 2025
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