In this book, Kim Bowes examines the late antique Christian rituals of the home and rural estate.

Kim Bowes is an associate professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania and has also taught at Cornell University. She has published on subjects ranging from Christian archaeology and domestic architecture to settlement dynamics and the late Roman economy, and she has excavated Roman and late Roman sites around the Mediterranean.

1. An empire of friends and family: public and private in Roman religions; 2. Two Christian capitals: private worship in Rome and Constantinople; 3. 'Christianizing' the countryside: rural estates and private cult; 4. Ideologies of the private: private cult and the construction of heresy and sanctity.