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The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in
modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane
Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and
overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as
utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known
from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman
domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the
relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She
proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own
right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian
communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have
included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite
the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts
that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by
Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic
cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from
using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or
their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about
identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual,
Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through
ritual enactment in early Christian communities.
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