"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 ... Read morea 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 "This book is both important and exciting. Bowes deploys a wealth of evidence, both textual and material, in order to examine the scope that was available to late antique individuals for religious activity beyond the reach of institutionalized authority structures, and discovers that this was very much greater than conventional accounts have allowed."
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