The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome tackles two important questions: how and when did Rome become a singularly sacred space? Rather than take on the history of the entire city, Nicola Denzey Lewis focuses in on the spaces of the dead, the catacombs, and martyrial shrines at the edge of the city's urban core—locations that would become central to the formation of Rome's identity as a center of early Christendom. Although the geographic boundaries are confined to the catacombs and Saint Peter's Basilica by necessity and methodology, the book maintains an expansive chronological breadth, first from the third to the sixth century, and then again from the sixteenth to the nineteenth. Through these periods, Denzey Lewis interrogates both the events of late antiquity that led to the creation and elevation of these spaces; their later early modern reception, rediscovery, and re-interpretation following the Counter Reformation; and the subsequent development of attempts to center Rome in the history of the early church.
As a whole, Denzey Lewis presents cogent arguments for both the mechanisms of change and the chronology of Rome's transformation, in dialogue with current archaeological and historical writing, as well as the long historiography of Roman's sacred origins. She begins with the first rethinking of Roman's Christian cemeteries as sacred places in the fourth and fifth centuries, in which objects and rituals were employed to transform their meaning. In these periods, pagan temples still demarked the urban core of the city, and it was up to authors like Prudentius and Jerome to write a new sacrality onto Rome's past, and to project a different type of landscape onto its spaces. While the catacombs may have attracted graveside commemoration and rituals in antiquity, it was the work associated with a spiritual renewal beginning in the sixteenth century that reframed catacombs as places of special significance—and most importantly associated them with the first generation of Rome's Christians. The nineteenth century continued the process of “reinvention” of these spaces, first as worthy of visiting for expressions of piety, and second as affirmations of Christian identity at a time when the political strength of the papacy was in decline.
Beyond the perspectives on the catacombs themselves, the book looks at several interconnected topics. It examines the development of the topographies of the sacred spaces of Rome through maps, calendars, and lists, such as the epigrams of Pope Damasus, credited with creating a sacred topography for the cults of Rome, not for pilgrims and relics, but connected to place and memory. On the issue of relics, Denzey Lewis takes on the “cultural work” that holy remains performed not only in Late Antiquity, but also how they were re-employed in the early modern period—and importantly, in how the thinking from the latter influenced a contemporary overvaluing of the bones of Christian saints in the context of late antique Rome. One set of relics, those of Saint Peter, receive special treatment; they served not just as relics, but as physical reminders of the power and authority that Rome maintained. Much of this, however, comes from only recent efforts to uncover the physical remains via modern excavations, which ultimately found nothing material to corroborate the history of the first bishop of Rome. This fact, combined with the absence of contemporary positive evidence for Peter in Rome until the late second century, demonstrates how writers in different ages worked to “place” the body of Peter and connect it to imperial and later papal traditions, and sought to promote the apostle in multiple locations and iterations, often through relics. In fact, because of the ambiguity regarding Peter's relics, the entire Basilica of Saint Peter was developed to serve as a both a reliquary and as a site to fuse together the authority of Rome's first bishop with that of his successors, created through shared space and collective commemoration. Beyond the Basilica, Denzy Lewis carefully examines the authenticity of another site through its excavations and inscriptions, the so-called Crypt of Popes within catacombs of Callixtus; it is revealed not to be a “a unified burial complex for the early Church,” but rather a fiction crafted in the nineteenth century by the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi “so successful in its emulation of a fictive past that is has been translated into the category of the factual” (249).
While de Rossi worked to create a singular Christian past in the catacombs of Callixtus, other spaces were discovered that appeared to offer a parallel tale of Jewish extra-urban burials in imperial Rome—or at least catacombs that included some Jewish interments. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these spaces were reimagined as those reserved only for Jews, an isolation not rooted in fact but in loose interpretations of iconography and creative oversights of contradictory evidence in an effort to deny the existence of exposure of early Christians to other faiths. A similar reassessment of burials ad sanctos forces us to re-evaluate the underlying dynamics in shifting burial practices from outside the city to within the confines of its churches, a move that also followed the contours of its urbanity.
Denzey Lewis's excellent study critically engages with the opinions and debates about space, memory, and materiality of Rome's early Christian past as understood by the church leaders and theologians of Late Antiquity, the early modern perspective of those who sought to discover the past of a Christian Rome in the sixteenth to nineteenth century, and contemporary scholarship. Through this intervention, we are asked to question both how and why we may understand an early Christian past through the sedimentary processes of deposition, rediscovery, and interpretation. In the end, Denzey Lewis reveals unacknowledged suppositions within the field by demonstrating the power of the lens of its early modern progenitors, extending not only to burials in and around the city of Rome, but its effects on our understanding of the history of the Christian city itself.
