BALTIMORE, Maryland July 12, 2015 - Amidst all of the thought and discussion about the hijacking of education by the uber left, there is still a place for scholars to go and loose themselves in the very best of current intellectual thought. That respite is the many intellectual journals published by colleges and universities around the world. One such journal is the "Journal of Early Christian Studies." Below I have computer-copied a book review in a fairly recent edition of the the journal. Some might think: why merely copy a book review? Will you get in trouble for doing so?
To answer the second question, I don't think so. This particular book review is available to the general public to peruse if you go to the publications' web site. I am doing so because I don't think a whole lot of people realize that these publications even exist. They exist because people in the field; i.e., those whose life is spent doing research about the general topic and teaching others at the graduate level, need places where other experts can keep up to date and stay on the cutting edge of new developments. These publications are the place to go when your interest in a field or topic is profound, and when you want to learn more.
The publications or journals are exquisitely expensive. They almost have to be because they have very low numbers of subscribers. The universities and libraries that subscribe to the many journals pay dearly for the privilege, and the high fees make it possible for them to exist. The law of supply and demand in action. It is a beautiful thing.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 21:1, 137–145 © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
Ann Marie Yasin
Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique
Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult and Community
Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009
Pp. xxi + 337. $99.
This is a substantive, original, thought-provoking, and dense book that employs the author’s technique of socio-spatial analysis, developed under the influence of archaeological evidence and anthropological theory, to explore the role of saints in elaborating the social function of spaces in fourth-to-seventh-century churches. The strengths of the book are many. It shows how a socio-spatial perspective moves away from a consideration of church architecture per se, toward an understanding of the social and communal function of churches. It is learned, demonstrating an enviable command of trends in scholarship. It is ambitious in scope because it is both interdisciplinary in approach - using literary and material evidence - and pan-Mediterranean in coverage. It puts early Christian practice into context by emphasizing its Roman roots, effectively bridging the frequently observed Roman and early Christian scholarly divide. Finally, throughout the book, the author makes new use of oft-cited inscriptions, by demonstrating the interaction of their texts, images, locations and even materials, which too often are considered separately. The book’s organization into two parts, chapters 1-3 (14-150) and chapters 4-6 (151-285) clearly reflects its origin in the exploration of two questions (286). The first, discussed at length in part one, is how church spaces functioned as settings for the sacred, communal and commemorative action of their communities. The purpose of part one, in fact, is to demonstrate how the author’s socio-spatial readings, particularly of funerary and euergetic inscriptions, both fit into contemporary scholarship and yield results different from other scholars. After a persuasive introduction about the new perspectives offered by socio-spatial analysis, chapter one consists exclusively of a discussion of the about-face of the mid-fourth century when Christian sacred space first became materially manifested in the joining of relics and altars. As a result Yasin gives an early impression that the socio-spatial approach is least enlightening when discussing the sacred dimension of churches. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the analysis of the interior arrangement, decoration and furnishing of churches do not figure in this chapter as evidence for the hierarchical sacrality of church spaces because that discussion is somewhat artificially withheld until chapter four in part two. In fact, aside from reliquary-altars, the author does not consider those large areas of the church inaccessible to the lay community where the action of the clergy took place. Yasin’s focus throughout the book remains firmly on the lower end of the spectrum of hierarchical sacrality. The second question, discussed in part two, concerns how and where the saints, visually, textually and aurally represented in churches, bridged the divide between the Christian ly community and its clerical officiants. Thus, the saints - the primary topic of the book’s title - except for a discussion of relics in chapter 1, appear only inthe second part of the book, where their role is expressed (one might almost say downplayed) as reinforcers of the churches’ sacred, communal, and commemorative functions. This is unfortunate, because the methodological frame in part one overpowers the more original picture it encloses in part one. In fact, chapters four through six are the meatier part of the book, a more free-flowing and masterful socio-spatial analysis of inscriptions, images and prayers invoking the saints that need not have followed the sacred-communal-commemorative structure of part one. In the end, while the book’s two questions are definitely related, the work of interweaving them is left mostly to the reader since the brief conclusion (286-91) is a reiteration rather than an enlargement upon earlier material. The volume’s stubbornly bipartite structure and absence of a unifying argument gives it a kind of split personality. Part one seems designed for a more general audience while part two speaks specifically to early Christian specialists. Likewise two consistent stylistic choices seem targeted at different audiences. On the one hand, key ideas are restated and repeated often, especially at the outset and ending of every chapter. On the other end the book is heavy on footnotes in which the author makes substantive observations and exercises scholarly debates. These weaknesses, resulting from an attempt to incorporate many disparate ideas and materials into one book, are small by comparison with its contributions to early Christian studies, in introducing socio-spatial analysis and in demonstrating the physical presence of saints in churches beyond their relics, while placing a refreshing emphasis on the social and commemorative over the sacred dimensions of churches and focusing on the actions of the lay community in churches over those of the clergy.
- Susan T. Stevens, Randolph College
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