December - 2025

In God, Slavery, and Early Christianity: Divine Possession and Ethics in the Shepherd of Hermas (Cambridge University Press, 2025, 318 pages, US$ 120.00), Chance E. Bonar presents an interpretation of early Christianity from the discursive context of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean. The author discusses a text written between the 1st and 2nd centuries AD by an enslaved Roman who almost composed the New Testament, The Shepherd of Hermas, which records the visions, commandments, and parables he received in encounters with divine interlocutors. In this text, Hermas presents the faithful as enslaved, useful and loyal property of an enslaving God who watches over and disciplines his slaves during and after life, constructing the image of the ideal Christian according to this ideology. From this innovative interpretation, Bonar seeks to clarify how deeply early Christians were rooted in Roman slave society.

Painting Pompeii: painters, practices, and organization (Brepols, 2024, 120 pages, €85.00), by Francesca Bologna, is a study of Roman mural painting, focusing on the painters themselves. It combines qualitative stylistic analysis (inspired by the Morellian method of attributing "hands" to paintings) with quantitative analysis of production time, costs, and the economic conditions of the artisans in Pompeii. Bologna uses in situ analyses, photographs, historical construction manuals, experimental archaeology, Diocletian's Edictum de pretiis, and studies on subsistence costs to identify groups of painters in Styles III and IV, demonstrating that, instead of stable workshops, pictorial practice was likely carried out by flexible and itinerant teams, often in precarious conditions. The volume also integrates comparative evidence on apprenticeship and artisan mobility, considering how themes and models were used and adapted for varied audiences and how mural art inscribed in domestic spaces reflected broader social practices.