Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity

Kim Bowes is an associate professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania and has also taught at Cornell University. She has published on subjects ranging from Christian archaeology and domestic architecture to settlement dynamics and the late Roman economy, and she has excavated Roman and late Roman sites around the Mediterranean.

"Kim Bowes's book, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity, manages to be both original and relevant...This book is commendable not only for adding great complexity to our view of late antique Christianity, but especially for the type of scholarship it represents. ...Private Worship will be of interest to a wide audience. ...This is not just a book about the religious history of the later Roman Empire, but a good example of total history in the style of Marc Bloch and Georges Duby. Scholars have recently criticized late antique scholarship for neglecting the crucial, 'hard' questions of social relations and historical change that marked this period. B's work is a fine example of how these wider questions can be re-addressed, without neglecting the important contributions of cultural and religious historians. --BMCR

• 1. An empire of friends and family: public and private in Roman religions; 2. Two Christian capitals: private worship in Rome and Constantinople; 3. 'Christianizing' the countryside: rural estates and private cult; 4. Ideologies of the private: private cult and the construction of heresy and sanctity.