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Households and Bishops in Early Christianity
Kristina Sessa, Assistant Professor of History
I study the history and religion of the late antique Mediterranean world, ca. 300-700 CE, with a geographic focus on the western half of Empire, especially the Italian peninsula and North Africa. My training has been in the interrelated fields of Early Christianity, Classics and the social history of the Roman Empire, though I am also very interested in Roman religions, classical and early medieval material culture (especially domestic architecture and space), and the history of religious belief and community.
Methodologically, I look to sociological models of religion as well as to the work of theorists of power and institutions for insight into the emergence of early Christian ideologies, practices, and institutions and their dialectical relationship with the Roman world. I am also, however, very much a product of the "new cultural history," and thus tend to approach my material from a literary and rhetorical angle. My first article, for example, examined the epistemological meaning of the sensory-disabled body in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, the writings of Augustine and several late Roman Christian martyr narratives and showed how this particular trope lends insight into the valuation of truth in three different historical contexts and genres.
My current book project is entitled The Household and the Bishop: Estate Management and Papal Authority in Late Antique Rome. It presents a new cultural history of the late Roman pope and papacy by examining how the Roman bishop and his church emerged in late antiquity through a complex and sometimes problematic relationship with the urban elite Christian household. It charts a slow, and often fractious process of cultural accommodation, through which a relatively new and untested figure of authority – the bishop – came to be seen as having a place within Rome's oldest and most conservative institution – the household.
While I draw a great deal for my study from material sources like inscriptions and the archaeological remains of late Roman houses and churches, I work primarily with a group of relatively unstudied fifth and sixth-century narrative sources. I maintain that these rich and textually complex sources played a primary role in the shaping of papal authority in late antique Rome and in the establishment of the Roman bishop within the domestic sphere.
In addition to my manuscript-in-progress, I have a forthcoming article, "Domestic Conversions: households and bishops in the late antique ‘papal legends'," which analyzes some of the texts that will appear in the larger study. I have also recently guest-edited a special volume of The Journal of Early Christian Studies on the topics of property, religious power and domestic space – topics which figure prominently in my own work. My contribution to the volume, "Christianity and the cubiculum: spiritual politics and domestic space in late antique Rome," looks at how the cultural construction of a single room in the Roman house refracts late antique perceptions of the Bishop of Rome and the limitations of his authority within the private, lay household.
