By Mary K. Farag.

Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity. “The making of churches into res sacrae occurred, legally and canonically, from Constantine to Justinian. But even though church property in many ways was already treated as a res sacra by Constantine and his successors, it was not until the time of Justinian that church buildings and their properties explicitly became res sacrae. Part I tells the story of how a definition of “the sacred” conceived for traditional Greco-Roman temples was applied to ecclesial property and expanded in scope in the process. I craft this story on the basis of two kinds of rules: the laws of emperors and the canons of bishops.”

UC Press. (2021) 348 pages.