The Fall of the Roman Household

Kate Cooper's The Fall of the Roman Household is an ambitious and valuable study of the cultural debates among clergy and lay elites.
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Cooper, Kate. The Fall of the Roman Household. | Natasha Amendola - leondumoulin.nl

Cooper does a tremendous job bringing together aspects of religious belief with social history to contribute to our understanding of the transformation of the Roman household. Household and empire 4. The invisible enemy Appendix. Ad Gregoriam in palatio: Kate Cooper , University of Manchester This title is available for institutional purchase via Cambridge Core Cambridge Core offers access to academic eBooks from our world-renowned publishing programme.

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Home Academic Classical studies Ancient history. Look Inside I want this title to be available as an eBook. Add to cart Add to wishlist Other available formats: Paperback Looking for an examination copy? Emphasises the contribution of women and family networks to developments in 'male' institutions such as the Church Offers an interdisciplinary approach to religious and family history Makes use of overlooked sources especially the little-known conduct manuals for married Christian women.

Log in to review. How do you rate this item? Reviews must contain at least 12 words about the product. Table of Contents 1. This title is available for institutional purchase via Cambridge Core Cambridge Core offers access to academic eBooks from our world-renowned publishing programme. The History of Rome. Histoire, Sciences Sociales English edition. Perhaps the best illustration of senatorial Christianity discussed in this chapter is the Cento Probae , a verse summary of biblical history crafted entirely from lines and phrases borrowed from Virgil.

Cooper then analyzes the Ad Gregoriam and a variety of other texts written for a senatorial audience, including the works of Prudentius, Boethius, and Cassiodorus, to illustrate not only how authors expressed a vision of Christianity in the language of the literate elite, but also how they associated the toils of daily life endured by these elites with the spiritual struggles faced by ascetics and martyrs.

The Fall of the Roman Household

Chapter 3, "Household and Empire," considers views on the ethical responsibilities of the Christian aristocracy, particularly in their role as landowners. Cooper argues that household manuals attempted to reassert traditional senatorial values concerning the "moral burden of authority" of wealthy elites in a Christian guise 96 , displaying an urgency and depth that reflected the economic downturn of the late Roman Empire stemming in part from increasing absenteeism and the employment of wage labor.

Thus, she reads the emphasis placed on a domina's obligation to her servile dependants as a possible critique of the wage labor system. Late Roman authors strengthened this association by depicting a domina 's management of her household as being critical to her spiritual salvation.

Cooper offers the intriguing suggestion that this Christianized reassertion of traditional household values may have been an attempt to solidify and enforce a framework for proper leadership and estate management that could endure the political instability of the fifth and sixth centuries. The final two chapters shift focus to investigate Christian writers' attempts to create a spiritual world view inclusive of traditional household roles and responsibilities.

In Chapter 4, "'Such Trustful Partnership': The Marriage Bond in Latin Conduct Literature," Cooper explores the increasing emphasis placed on a wife's subordination to the authority of her husband in Christian texts.

Building upon existing scholarship, especially the work of Judith Evans Grubbs, Cooper analyzes how the changing political climate made the traditional system of marriage based on face-to-face negotiation between families of equal status less useful. The growing number of aristocratic men marrying women from humbler social positions, in conjunction with the general instability wrought by the military conflict in the fifth and sixth centuries, increased the need to document marriage, which had traditionally relied simply on the witness of kin and neighbors.

Furthermore, in these circumstances, a husband would have been less reliant on the money and influence of his wife's family, thus making her more vulnerable. At the same time, Cooper contends, Christian writers attempted to strengthen these unions by establishing "the husband-wife relationship as a newly central axis of loyalty and reciprocity" Moreover, authors depicted the vulnerability and potential indignities created by a wife's subordination to her husband as an opportunity for a woman to demonstrate her spiritual endurance, and thus adhere to the ascetic ideals of the Christian martyrs.

Chapter 5, "'The Invisible Enemy,'" continues to explore the connection between matron and martyr by analyzing how clerical authors attempted to recast marriage and motherhood as a form of asceticism. Drawing heavily from the language and imagery of warfare, both secular and spiritual, these writers articulated precisely how the domina must herself struggle with the same invisible enemies that plagued ascetics and martyrs. For Cooper, what is particularly interesting is how these authors used the idea of the reinvented Christian household as means to help craft and express late Roman spirituality.

An appendix contains Cooper's translation of the complete text of the Ad Gregoriam in palatio , which should help bring more attention to this fascinating document. The translation also includes footnotes that effectively serve as a minor commentary of sorts, mentioning key points of translation and identifying important textual references. In analyzing the debate regarding the relationship between Christianity and household, Cooper attempts to untangle an intermeshed and constantly evolving set of cultural and religious values, which are expressed in a diverse variety of sources.

Accordingly, perhaps the most perplexing issue for the reader will be the organization of the book a potential difficulty that Cooper herself seems to anticipate. While Cooper attempts to use the Ad Gregoriam in palatio as a "narrative thread" that will help guide the reader through "the maze of our evidence" 11 , this thread is not always apparent. Occasionally it is initially unclear why Cooper introduces a particular example or element of analysis at a given point in the text, and what role this information is serving in her larger arguments.

Due to the book's organizational structure, Cooper sometimes has to introduce ideas that she will not address until later in the text. Compounding this organizational complexity is the book's lack of formal introduction and conclusion. While the work of an introduction is done by the preface and the first part of Chapter 1, I found the lack of a discrete conclusion to be unsatisfying.

Given the nuance of Cooper's analysis, I think that revisiting the individual strands of her intricate arguments at the end of the text would have been helpful. All primary source material quoted in the book appears in English. In cases where Cooper believes the Latin or Greek to be useful, individual words and shorter phrases are included parenthetically in the translation whereas longer phrases and sentences are placed in footnotes.

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The Fall of the Roman Household is an absorbing and noteworthy study of the aristocratic household at the end of the Western Empire. This thought-provoking text will certainly be of interest not only to those scholars interested in the study of household, family, and gender, but also those interested in the more general interplay of classical and Christian ideas in the later Roman Empire. Cooper does a tremendous job bringing together aspects of religious belief with social history to contribute to our understanding of the transformation of the Roman household. Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity.

Harvard University Press, University of Chicago Press, [].