Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 5, 2015 - History - 422 pages
This book traces the long-term genesis of the sixth-century Roman legal penalty of forced monastic penance. The late antique evidence on this penal institution runs counter to a scholarly consensus that Roman legal principle did not acknowledge the use of corrective punitive confinement. Dr Hillner argues that forced monastic penance was a product of a late Roman penal landscape that was more complex than previous models of Roman punishment have allowed. She focuses on invigoration of classical normative discourses around punishment as education through Christian concepts of penance, on social uses of corrective confinement that can be found in a vast range of public and private scenarios and spaces, as well as on a literary Christian tradition that gave the experience of punitive imprisonment a new meaning. The book makes an important contribution to recent debates about the interplay between penal strategies and penal practices in the late Roman world.
 

Contents

Philosophical and domestic foundations
25
Punishment and reform in early imperial legal thought
45
Christian principles of punishment
64
Punishment reform and penance in late Roman law
89
Conclusions
113
The public prison in late antiquity
119
Private power and punitive confinement
151
Exile and confinement
194
Conclusions
275
Monastic confinement and ecclesiastical justice
281
Monastic confinement and imperial justice
314
Conclusions
342
Appendices
354
415
387
Index
415
Copyright

Exile prison and the Christian imagination
242

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About the author (2015)

Julia Hillner is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. She is co-editor, with Kate Cooper, of Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300-900 (2007).

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