Chapter 2 introduces the ancient distinction between preceptual and epistemic knowledge. It then surveys the tradition of knowledge production within Christian theological scholarship before the Constantinian age. The chapter argues that little overlap is visible in scholarly practices between Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Gospel of Truth.

This chapter provides a broader context for the achievement represented by Santa Prassede through an examination of what is known about Paschal’s numerous other building projects and patronage of material culture. Some of these survive (mosaics in the churches of Santa Maria in Domnica and Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, enamel and gilded silver reliquaries in the Sancta Sanctorum) and some are recorded in contemporary and subsequent antiquarian descriptions (funerary chapel in Saint Peter’s, restructuring of the presbytery at Santa Maria Maggiore). All can be related to papal concerns regarding relics, liturgy and the pope’s personal salvation.

The survey indicates marked continuity in rural settlement around Tuscania from Etruscan times into Roman Early Republican period (c.300-170 BC: 212 sites), implying that there was minimal disruption to pre-existing systems of ownership following the subjugation of the area by the Roman army. There was a dramatic expansion in rural settlement, a filling-up of the countryside particularly in formerly under-developed areas away from the town. This growth was encouraged by a better communications network, especially by the upgrading of the Via Clodia.There were increased levels of investment both in the town and in the surrounding countryside. Maximum site numbers developed in the Later Republican period (170-30 BC: 230 sites), and on the evidence of intensive grid collection of surface remains at selected sites, and geophysical survey at others, the core buildings of agrarian units first reached their maximum extent at this time. However, there is little evidence for large slave-run villas producing goods geared primarily for export and displacing the free peasantry, despite the written sources emphasizing this process throughout Italy at this time: the countryside around Tuscania was dominated by small farms and villages, and high-ranking sites did not bring significant changes to long-established farming regimes.

Chapter 6 turns to manuscripts themselves, showing how newly instituted scholastic practices influenced the production and use of books during the fifth century.

This chapter is devoted to the pontificate of John VIII (872–882) and the significant physical threat to the city of Rome posed principally although not exclusively by Muslim marauders from North Africa, particularly in the aftermath of the death of Emperor Louis II in 875. Papal efforts to find new military champions were largely unsuccessful, although a significant victory was scored by the Byzantine imperial fleet at the mouth of the Tiber in 880. John VIII also constructed fortifications to defend the church and monastery of San Paolo fuori le mura, hoping to present a repeat of the sack of 846. Although the papal court is known to have been a hotbed of intellectual activity, little has survived from this era in the way of material culture except for the conversion of the temple of Portunus into the church of Santa Maria de Secundicerio by a senior lay official, Stephen secundicerius. Surviving fragments of its mural decorations reveal the influence of both apocryphal texts about the life of Mary as well as contemporary Byzantine hagiographic literature. This leads to a discussion of the place of origin of certain contemporaneous Byzantine manuscripts which share the same style as the murals, most notably the Paris Sacra Parallela (BnF gr. 923).

Before our project Etruscan Tuscania was best known for its great family tombs with inscribed sarcophagi of the 4th-2nd centuries BC, but the survey evidence shows that the Etruscan landscape was most densely settled in the 6th century BC (219 sites), coincident with the process of urbanization. The frequency of ‘off-site’ material indicates that Etruscan agricultural activity extended over the greater part of the surveyed area. Little survives of the remains of the Etruscan town, but the richness of Etruscan material immediately south of the city walls indicates a suburban extension of it. The development of Tuscania implies that the control of minor centres by major centres (or rather, the control of less powerful by more powerful families as social and economic inequalities became increasingly marked) was one of the earliest features of Etruscan urbanization. The Archaic Etruscan phase was followed by a marked, though not dramatic, population decline in the Later Etruscan phase (129 sites), the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Activities at Guidocinto, a small but long-lived Etruscan farm we excavated near Tuscania, included the production and processing of oil, wine, and wool, products that enhanced elite lifestyles and provided them with valuable resources for exchange and trade.

Chapter 5 focuses on the “rise of the code” and the investiture of the codex format with new meanings when it took center stage as the preferred bookform for scholastic productions.

The project’s results indicate that a landscape once dominated by small, family-run, farms, each cultivating small plots of land, gradually transformed through the three phases of the Roman imperial period (Early, 30 BC-AD 120: 205 sites; Mid, AD 120-260: 174 sites; Late, AD 260-440: 146 sites) into one featuring large agricultural estates involved in extensive farming practices. In light of historical records it seems likely that affluent investors bought up much of the land of failing smallholders, expanding the capacity of their own agricultural enterprises and leasing out properties to poorer farmers. Local wealth, power, and influence became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of elite landowners. Yet despite this process, small low-status sites remained the most abundant class of rural habitation even in the Late Imperial period and many middle-ranking sites endured without a break in occupation even into Late Antique times (AD 440-700: 77 sites in total). The resilience of wide sections of the rural community, even in the face of external threats from Longobards and others, should not be underestimated, but significantly a considerable proportion of Tuscania’s hinterland of cultivated fields had reverted to scrub and woodland by the Late Antique period.

Chapter 7 investigates manuscripts in which scribes copied non-Christian works using peculiarly Christian scribal tools. It describes the proliferation of Christian scribal practices through products of Theodosian Age scriptoria in order to trace the influence of Christianity in a manner that does not involve speculation about of the faith of scribes or readers.

Chapter 4 traces novel scholastic practices from the realm of theology into “secular” domains during the Theodosian Age, showing how a scholarly method created to solve theological problems came to be used in legal, historical, and scientific texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries.

The primary technique employed in the project was ‘field walking’: systematically collecting archaeological artefacts lying on the ground surface, especially in ploughsoil.The method has been widely employed by archaeologists working around the Mediterranean to map past settlement especially because of the suitability of its semi-arid landscapes for this kind of ground searching.An apparently simple technique, systematic archaeological survey in fact has to deal with a wide range of biasing factors as every stage, so this chapter describes the decisions we took and the methods we employed, and assesses their implications for the quality of the information retrieved: defining the study area (totalling 353 km2);the employment of three sampling methods (Transect, Random and Judgement, totalling 97 km2) to survey the landscape; the decisions we took about the intensity of search and artefact collection methods (41.5 km2 were searched) and about defining ‘sites’- assumed foci of activity -versus ‘off-site’ or sporadic material thought to indicateland use activities such as manuring; and in our subsequent analyses of the materials collected, the methods we used to try to minimize the biasing effects of the surface archaeology of different periods of the past being differentially prolific and/or differentially visible.