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Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult,
and Community. By Ann Marie Yasin. Cambridge University Press, 2009. 360
pages. $99.00.

Ann Marie Yasin’s Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique
Mediterranean is the first systematic study of the architectural context for saints
that takes into account evidence from the entire Mediterranean basin. This work
goes far beyond a traditional architectural analysis and argues for the central
role of saints at the intersection of architecture, commemoration, ritual life, and
community organization in the Late Antique church. Yasin framed her
discussion amidst theoretical perspectives ranging from the work of P. Bourdieu
and M. de Certeau on practice to M. Eliade’s well-known meditations on the
nature of sacred space. These theorists provided the backdrop for arguments
grounded in archaeological, epigraphic, and to a lesser extent, literary evidence
with a particular emphasis on the important corpus of ecclesiastical architecture
from North Africa. The book represents an important synthetic study on the
function of sacred space within an Early Christian context.

The greatest challenge in facing any work on churches across the

Mediterranean is the uneven condition of the archaeological evidence for these
buildings. The poor condition of the buildings and the problematic excavation
records often makes it difficult to assign these churches definite dates or
specialized functions. The author sidestepped this difficulty in part by
interpreting the architecture in a synchronic way in all but the first chapter of
the book where she reviewed the emergence of Christian sacred space in the pre-
Constantinean period. Chapters two through four advanced her thesis by
approaching the role of saints in church space topically. Chapter two examined
commemorative and burial practices in churches, chapter three considered the
role of the veneration of saints and eurgetism, and chapter four took up the role of
relics, ritual, and decoration in creating holy space in the church.

These three chapters argued that the Late Antique manifestations of

Christian architecture, piety, and the cult of the saints developed from earlier
Roman and pre-Christian contexts. In general, these chapters were substantial
and avoided the simplistic appeals to syncretism. For example, Yasin argued that
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burials in churches served to demonstrate membership in the Christian

community in much the same way that earlier burial practices linked individuals
to household groups. The main difference in these two forms of commemorative
practice is that Christians embedded collective burial practices in the public and
communal space of worship thereby placing this method of community building in
the context of Christian ritual. She also linked practices of Christian euergetism
to older modes of expression rooted in the ancient “gift economy”. While this
explanation could not quite accommodate the common practice of anonymous
donations or the Christian tendency to commemorate exceedingly humble ex-voto
offerings, she probably captured the main current that motivated Christian
giving. Taken together chapters two through four successfully ground the basic
character of the Early Christian architectural discourse in longstanding
Mediterranean practices. Traditional Roman practices became Christian through
the regular appearance of the bodies or images of saints in Christian architecture.
This process saw the transference of commemorative practices, euergetism, and
the functioning of the gift-economy from public space of the Roman world to the
ritual space of the church. This transformation also paralleled the expansion of
Christian ecclesiastical institutions and conceptions of sacred space at the
expense of the traditional public institutions and cult centers of the ancient
world.

In chapters five and six, Yasin explored the way in which saints created
and transformed Christian space. These two chapters provided a clear and
synthetic conclusion to her earlier arguments by focusing exclusively on the
question: “what do saints do in church”. She argued that saints reminded the
congregation that the church was commemorative space, and commemoration
produced a kind of social cohesion that reified the Christian practice of communal
prayer. The presence of saints in church buildings, however, did not simply evoke
historical memory, but also invoked Christian holiness in distinctly historical,
spatial, and physical ways. The real or imagined bodies of saints among believers
helped to articulate the relationship between the Christian community and the
heavenly realm. Saints within the church made the proximate spiritual, social,
and ritual hierarchy part of a cosmological continuum of authority and power. If
Peter Brown’s landmark, Cult of the Saints (Chicago 1981) introduced the idea
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that saints were the heavenly patrons for the Christian community, Yasin has
shown that Christian architecture played a key role in communicating these new
relationships to the community.

Although Yasin’s argument drew upon evidence from across the

Mediterranean, her strongest case studies derived from the well-preserved
corpus of churches in the west, and particularly, North Africa. Yasin reinforced
her careful study of this corpus of architecture, epigraphy, and decoration with a
similar, if less pronounced, preference for western textual sources. Perhaps the
most important sustained discussion of texts in her work centers on St.
Augustine’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda (Care to be had for the Dead). Her
western emphasis grounded Augustine’s arguments in a cohesive and well-
documented body of architectural and archaeological material. On the other
hand, this decision may leave scholars of the east questioning whether Yasin’s
work represents practices common across the entire Mediterranean. The
occasional forays to the east were largely bereft of textual sources, and this made
her sustained discussions of the church of St. Demetrius in Thessaoniki, St.
Catherine’s in Sinai, Qal’at Sem’an and some of the churches in Syria seem
incidental. Textual evidence from the East and particularly hagiographic sources
suggest that the relationship between saints, church architecture, and ritual
might have significant regional variations. More importantly, perhaps, it would
have been valuable to understand how Yasin’s arguments relate to the emerging
cult of the saints in Constantinople which began toward the end of the time period
studied in this book.

The western focus of Yasin’s book does help her work avoid one of the more
vexing problems associated with any synthetic study of Early Christian
architecture: the incomplete knowledge of the liturgy. While few scholars
consider liturgy to be the sole influence on a buildings form, liturgical influences,
as well as local traditions and ecclesiastical structure, did shape the relationship
between the clergy, the congregation, and sacred space. In fact, this is clear in the
idiosyncratic architecture present in pilgrimage churches like St. Demetrios or
Qal’at Sem’an. It seems almost certain that the life of these buildings embodied
the dynamic relationship between locally developed cults to saints and the
institutional authority vested in liturgical practices. Yasin highlighted such
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tensions in her discussion of St. Augustine’s and his predecessors’ efforts to

manage the spread of ad sanctos practices in North Africa (153) and examines
the intricate interplay between altars set up to martyrs within churches, their
memorials, and the encompassing architecture (171-189). Both institutionally
prescribed and locally developed ritual practices, would have structured to some
extent the various modes of mediation between the saint and the congregation.
Unfortunately, the evidence for ritual practices is scant and fraught with
controversy. In the final analysis, it may be to Yasin’s credit that she wisely
avoided these potentially distracting pitfalls.

The shortcomings in this book are minor, and it is important to stress that
Yasin’s book represents a major contribution not only to our understanding of the
cult of the saints in the Late Antique Mediterranean, but also the development of
Early Christian architecture. Her work joins a growing body of scholarship which
has sought to place Early Christian architecture and cult practice into a social
context. In this work, Late Antique architecture and art has finally come to stand
beside texts as sources for social and religions history of this dynamic period.