In his 1615 account of the Upper Guinea Coast Etiópia Menor e descripção géografica da Província da Serra Leoa, Portuguese priest Manual Alvares described at length the so-called “superstitions” of the Susu, Temne, and other inhabitants of the region which rendered the “Ethiopians” in need of the light of Christian intervention. According to Alvares, their superstitions were “those common to all heathen” and paralleled those of the “Moor and the Turk,” “heretics,” and “the Jews” who resisted Catholic missionaries’ evangelistic efforts on account of their incapacity for reason (262, 344–345). Consigning “Ethiopia and its peoples” to the realm of unbelievers, the priest proceeded to rally his fellow Christian brethren to the cause of enlightening those people who were bound to repeat the folly of their foreparents by adhering to ancestral traditions.

Isabelle Mossong's voluminous work consists of two parts: seven initial chapters, in which the information obtained from the epigraphic survey is used to answer a number of still open questions about the clergy (1–221), and an extensive epigraphic Catalogue of the clergy of late antique Italy, in which 871 inscriptions are examined (222–620). The latter is the most useful part for a researcher; for a reader, who wants to know the results of the research, it is the former. Obviously, they are closely related. I would, however, examine the Catalogue first. It is introduced by a few pages of explanatory notes (222–229) on the procedures used to collect the epigraphic material, the ways in which the inscriptions of ecclesiastical personnel were transmitted and edited, and the organization the author chose to give to the collected material. The lucidity of the choices and the clarity in communicating them to the reader are noteworthy. The Catalogue is divided into three sections: A. Inscriptions with clerical titulatures; B. Inscriptions without clerical titling; C. Dubious inscriptions and fragments. In each section, the epigraphs are collected by geographical provenance, and within each area (Rome; the eleven regiones of the Italic peninsula; Sardinia; and Sicily) according to the offices held, from bishop to ostiary. Of each inscription, the original text, translation, and commentary (usually contained, sometimes extensive) are offered; for each one, the epigraphic collections that preserve it (e.g., ICUR, ILCV), or that prosopographically study the cleric mentioned therein (PChBE Italie) are also indicated. The reference to PChBE Italie is all the more useful since, in the commentary on individual inscriptions, prosopographical data are only examined if they require further discussion. This part of the volume is the result of valuable research and cataloguing work. Conducted systematically, it is accurate and precise. The Catalogue is also accompanied by twelve tables (621–652) that I find useful to list; the first six, in particular, are interesting for the data they offer: Table 1. The earliest epigraphic evidence of the various attested ecclesiastical offices (Ostiary, Lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, presbyter, bishop are considered in reverse order to that followed in Section A of the Catalogue). From this filing, we learn that the first attested office is that of Lucius Petronius Dexter, bishop of Chiusi in 322 AD, remembered with his tria nomina and buried together with his father by his five sons, who took care to write an epitaph around which we recognize the remains of a tabula ansata. The last chronologically is an ostiarius of Dertona, Veneriosus, who died in 446: more than a century therefore passed before even a simple ostiarius was considered worthy of being celebrated for his office. Table 2. Clerics not attested in the PChBE. It enriches the well-known prosopographical collection (but which has now been published for a quarter of a century) with 187 members of the clergy, of whom only fifty-four have recognizable names. Table 3. Clerics in Greek inscriptions. Interestingly, of sixty epigraphs in Greek, about half comes from Rome and the other half from Sicily. Table 4. Clerics with multiple names. It will not be missed that only one bishop, the oldest, bears the tria nomina and of the twenty-eight recorded, the others have only two names. Table 5. Age of lectors in epitaphs. The lectors mentioned in the inscriptions are young, mostly between 13 and 25 years old. Table 6. The cleric as husband and father. Title, wife, and children are indicated next to date, origin of inscription, and reference collections. Table 7. Inscriptions found in Rome for bishops with an extra-urban seat; Table 8. Clerical families; Table 9. Metric inscriptions with direct self-representation; Table 10. Roman building inscriptions with clerics of different ranks; Table 11. Preserved or transmitted Bishop's epitaphs of the city of Rome; Table 12. Preserved or transmitted Bishop's epitaphs from Italy (outside Rome).