The San Vincenzo Project, focused upon the Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, in central Italy, was launched in 1980. In addition to developing the archaeological potential of the well-known ninth-century painted crypt of San Lorenzo and to defining the general character of the early medieval monastery, a major aim of the project was through a combination of survey and small-scale excavation within the territory to define the relationship between the early medieval monastery and its dependent communities. This volume summarizes the archaeology of the territory, placing emphasis upon the long settlement history of which San Vincenzo al Volturno was a part, as well as the dependent communities of the Benedictine monastery identified during the fieldwork. The volume includes an overview of the 1980-1 field survey (including investigations of the castelli in the upper Volturno valley and the survey and excavations on Monte Mare); the principal results of the extensive excavations on the east bank of the river, including the Samnite cemetery and vicus, the Samnite and Roman settlement, the early medieval industrial complex and borgo, as well as the twelfth-century monastery; reports on excavations at two hilltop sites, Colle Castellano and Colle Sant'Angelo. In addition, there are essays on the San Vincenzo community in Capua; on the upper Volturno valley in Roman times; a reconsideration of late antique San Vincenzo and an assessment of the upper Volturno valley in the early Middle Ages.

Conventional histories of late antique Christianity tell the story of a public institution - the Christian Church. In this book, Kim Bowes relates another history, that of the Christian private. Using textual and archaeological evidence, she examines the Christian rituals of home and rural estate, which took place outside the supervision of bishops and their agents. These domestic rituals and the spaces in which they were performed were rooted in age-old religious habits. They formed a major, heretofore unrecognised force in late ancient Christian practice. The religion of home and family, however, was not easily reconciled with that of the bishop's Church. Domestic Christian practices presented challenges to episcopal authority and posed thorny questions about the relationship between individuals and the Christian collective. As Bowes suggests, the story of private Christianity reveals a watershed in changing conceptions of 'public' and 'private', one whose repercussions echo through contemporary political and religious debate.

Houses are often assumed to be reliable mirrors of society, fossils of family structures, social hierarchies and mental maps of worlds now vanished. This is particularly true of the elite houses of the third to sixth centuries AD, which have been read as material symptoms of Rome's decline. The great dining and reception halls of urban houses sound the death-knell of participatory government and the rise of patronage politics, while in their sheer size and splendour later Roman houses seem to encapsulate a fin-de-siecle world of have and have-nots, separated by unbridgeable social chasms. Kim Bowes debates this image of later Roman houses as reflections of decadence and despotism, suggesting that the principal interpretive model, which reads such houses as reflective of a newly hierarchical, ritualized society, finds little support either from the archaeological evidence or from new readings of historical sources. Drawing on the most recent archaeological data and new theoretical models, she offers instead a less sharply periodized view of later houses, stressing their continuity with houses of the early empire.