Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity

This book argues that late antiquity introduced a legal form of punitive imprisonment, complicating the concept of the 'birth of the prison'.

The first book in English on the Roman prison, and the first on the Roman prison's late antique incarnation as a penal institution. It describes how late Roman penal strategies, in particular different spatial forms of imprisonment, responded to new social values of penance and purification of society.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.