Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity: Cognition and Discipline by Paul C. Dilley (review)

Abstract

from Roman Egypt. Recent scholarship by Clarysse and Depauw (Willy Clarysse and Mark Depauw, “How Christian was Fourth Century Egypt? Onomastic Perspectives on Conversion,” VC 67 [2013], 407–35; idem., “Christian Onomastics: A Response to Frankfurter,” VC 69 [2015], 327–29) and Frankfurter (David Frankfurter, “Statistics and the Christianization of Egypt: A Response to Depauw and Clarysse,” VC 68 [2014], 284–89; idem., Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018], 38–39) has fervently debated whether we can deduce anything from onomastics about religious affiliation or the spread of Christianity. One would have also wished in the central discussion for any reference to the slippery issue of “religious identity” and for the possibility of measuring the progress of Christianization in this period. The binary opposition of pagan/Christian is an anachronistic one, as Rebillard (Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200–450 CE [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012]) has recently argued in a study on individual Christians from late Roman North Africa, stressing the multiple identities of what we call the early Christians today. Conversion to Christianity was certainly not a one-way road from one entity to another one, but the Christianization of ancient society was a rather fluctuating process of shifting religious and social allegiances. The synthesis of recently compiled epigraphic evidence and the literary and archaeological material makes this book invaluable to early church historians and ancient historians alike. The study stresses the importance of Greek inscriptions as a most valuable, yet still often neglected set of sources for the study of ordinary Christians often marginalized in accounts of the spread of early Christianity. The conclusions drawn for Lycaonia are of relevance for many other parts of the Roman Mediterranean. One can only congratulate the authors for this significant project, and for completing it so well. More regional studies based on documentary evidence like this one are needed to grasp the complexity of the expansion and success of early Christianity. Sabine R. Huebner, University of Basel