Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the transformation of the rôle and status of the late antique bishop. The present edited volume, which emerged from an international conference held in Granada in autumn 2011, provides a further contribution to this ever-expanding field. The essays presented do not quite do justice to the breadth promised by the volume's title, for there is a strong western bias and many of the papers return to well-trodden ground. Nevertheless, there is much here of value for students and scholars alike, particularly through the Spanish influence that permeates the collection. The entire volume testifies once more to the diverse currents that shaped episcopal power during Late Antiquity: from ecclesiastical controversies and asceticism to the rise of papal authority and the Germanic kingdoms of the post-Roman West.
The world of Late Antiquity offers many opportunities to explore the inter-related themes of conflict and compromise, making the choice of case studies inevitably selective. Gregory of Nazianzus’ dispute with his Egyptian rival Maximus in Constantinople is the subject of the opening paper (Torres and Teja), followed by a pair of studies that re-examine the Donatist Schism through the reign of Constantine (Fernández Ubiña) and the Conference of Carthage in a.d. 411 (Mac Gaw). Elsewhere, the emerging and contested authority of the papacy is approached through two of the more controversial early popes: Zosimus (a.d. 417-18) (Marcos) and Hormisdas (a.d. 514-23) (Evers). Much of the material in these various papers is not new, but taken together they reveal the often competing social and political as well as religious forces that bishops faced in the constantly changing late antique world.
Less familiar to some readers may be the papal decretals of Damasus and Siricius (Sardella) and Epistula 11* of Consentius to Augustine (Ubric Rabaneda). Both shed valuable light on the Priscillianist debates in Gaul and Spain, where questions of ascetic principles and episcopal jurisdiction became inextricably intertwined. The writings of Augustine are again cited to illustrate the dual rôles of bishops as ‘pacifiers and instigators’ in Christian-pagan tensions (Kahlos), and Augustine is argued to have influenced Honorius’ legislation in a.d. 409 concerning violence against African clergy (Escribano Paño). These papers further refine our understanding of the complex relationship between bishops, the law, and secular and religious violence, while on the balancing ledger of comprise and conciliation, preaching is identified as an essential episcopal tool for conflict resolution (Quiroga Puertas).
Perhaps the most valuable contributions within this volume, however, lie in the three papers which conclude the collection. ‘Bishops, Imperialism and the Barbaricum’ (Fear) is an impressively wide-ranging synthesis of Christianity and imperial policy beyond the Roman frontiers, from Persia and Armenia to Ireland and the Goths. The final two papers then appropriately turn back to Spain, tracing the relationship of Church and State in the years before the Catholic conversion of the Visigoth king Reccared (Castillo Maldonado) and following the Byzantine intervention of Justinian (Salvador Ventura). Visigothic Spain has rarely received the same attention in English-language scholarship as Francia or Ostrogothic Italy, and it is the great merit of this edited collection that it makes recent Spanish research on Late Antiquity available to a broader audience.
