One might assume a book on ‘the formation of papal authority’ would be about the extraordinariness of Rome's ecclesiastical government, or the clever popes’ Christianization of civic or imperial administration, or their creation of the cult of Peter. Thankfully, this one is not. Sessa's excellent book removes thick crusts of hoary papal teleology; her challenge is to explain the late antique bishop of Rome without the later frames of papal primacy, papal civic administration and court diplomacy. By examining not only official papal correspondence and public sermons but also anonymous episcopal chronicles and saints’ lives, S. situates the early Roman bishops’ claims to authority squarely within late antique anxieties and interests. These bishops were worried about barbarian kidnappers and their victims who sometimes came home, lactating mothers who might marry, slave-owners who wanted their entire household baptised, the sex-lives of clergymen, their wives and children, and escaped slaves who entered the priesthood. Their strategies for resolving these issues, S. demonstrates, were to act as prudent stewards.
S. argues that the value placed upon well-ordered households and, by extension, public leadership was widely established in antiquity and that the definition of oikonomia as an esteemed practice of large household management shifted in Late Antiquity towards stewardship, rather than ownership. Rome's bishops presented themselves and were presented by others as stewards and householders. The earliest use of the steward model for Rome's bishop is Hipploytus’ writing on his rival Callistus, whom he painted as a failure in financial management and overseeing the chastity of Roman clerics and appropriate Christian marriages. This use of the model in a negative sense is compelling evidence for its diffusion and recognition.
The Formation of Papal Authority is organized thematically. A useful overview of late antique Italian estates and their management cautions us against old views of overly vertical social stratification and late antique authority being simply coercive force suggesting that it rather employed reciprocal interaction and persuasion by model. Chs 2, 3, and 4 analyse Roman bishops’ representations in terms of long-established patterns, including late antique householding. Chs 5, 6, and 7 examine bishops in the light of domestic issues of marriage, sex, and inheritance; these are followed by a concluding chapter. The discussion of the so-called Laurentian schism (pp. 212–46) is a case study of the book's argument and S. sheds new light here. By separating out the strands of ethical, juridical, doctrinal and social or locally political influence, S. shows that the conflict was not one of high politics and theology but a much richer negotiation of authority in terms of trust, stewardship, continence and self-discipline.
S. places her work on the shelf with the social history of late antique religious institutions, among recent work by Bowes, Humfress, Lizzi Testa, Mathisen, Rapp, Sotinel, and Uhalde. Her analysis is linguistically sensitive, theoretically aware and literary-minded. She occasionally draws in material culture: inscriptions, a luxurious lamp, one or two houses and chapels, but there is a sense in which her Late Antiquity exists mostly in texts. The chapters are well organized and clear, the entire text is lucid and articulate without feeling heavy-handed; this book had origins as a PhD thesis but it suffers none of the problems common to thesis-books. The book is focused on central and southern Italy, the area of the Roman bishops ecclesiastical jurisdiction; it is a deliberately regional study ending with the death of Gregory I (a.d. 604); S. has worked hard to prevent Gregory's writings from dominating the analysis by their greater volume. S.'s choice to avoid monasteries here is odd. She touches on ascetism among the late antique élite and strictures preventing slaves or tenant labourers from joining monasteries, but does not address the creation or management of monasteries. Of course no book can do everything and the sources for early monasticism in the diocese of Rome are limited indeed. It seems to me, however, that consideration of episcopal views on monasteries and their management would corroborate the claims made here.
S.'s extended discussion of saints’ lives, the so-called gesta martyrum, in this analysis of political authority is very exciting. Ch. 7 focuses on the gesta through a couple of their recurring motifs: episcopal conversion of aristocratic households, baptism by the Roman bishop, and the setting of the private bedroom, which the bishop never enters. These are the counterpoint to the mass of official letters, biographies, and synods discussed in previous chapters; without overly belabouring the point, S. shows that the ideas about episcopal authority in the domestic sphere which she has identified enjoyed very wide currency. One of this book's many contributions is its advocacy of the gesta; they were not simply pious fairytales with impossible-to-determine authorship and dating. The lack of critical editions is understandably off-putting, but S. demonstrates that they are an under-analysed category of late antique political writing and that their very nature as intersecting narratives with repeating motifs reinforced ideas of episcopal behaviour. It is well known that the so-called Symmachan forgeries included fictional narratives alongside letters and ‘official’ council records; the different genres intertwined and reinforced each other for contemporary readers. It is a mystery, then, that scholars should now still ignore the gesta; S.'s book is a model in this regard.
The Formation of Papal Authority does not deny the ‘rise of the papacy’, or the primacy obtained in later centuries or the efficacy of its later bureaucracy in administering this primacy. S. does, however, show that the means by which this was achieved was specific to Late Antiquity when the measure of Rome's bishop was set against ideas of household management.
