Religious Diversity 525
and the aristocracy.118 Indeed the leaders of the late antique Italian church
were intensely aware that domestic religious practice, especially in elite house-
holds, helped generate and preserve a model of Christian religiosity that often
complemented but potentially diverged from the model of public worship con-
trolled by bishops.119 The home could also provide a space for the propagation
of teachings or practices that were considered outside the accepted norm.120
Thus it should not be surprising that in the later 5th and 6th centuries, Roman
bishops made a concerted attempt to more strictly regulate private religious
foundations in Italia Suburbicaria.121 This was certainly part of a wider process
of professionalization and bureaucratization of the Roman Church that was
underway in the Ostrogothic period.122 But interest and intervention in private
religious foundations also served to demonstrate the authority of Rome’s bish-
ops through their expertise in household management.123 It is perhaps pos-
sible that the threat of heresies such as Pelagianism provided an additional
ideological justification for more clearly delineating the relationships between
the bishop of Rome and Italian villa churches.124
Conclusion
The use of heresiological categories to describe the religious landscape of Italy
under the Ostrogoths creates an image of a world dominated by a radical divi-
sion between heretics and orthodox Italians. But if we set this view aside, we
are left with a far messier but perhaps more interesting religious landscape
that includes Jews as well as non-Nicene Christians and other non- conforming
religious groups, all of whom from the perspective of the Nicene church occu-
pied different positions on the spectrum of acceptable belief. Moreover, the
boundaries dividing these different communities may not have been as rig-
idly enforced in practice as we might imagine, and the question of identity,
especially the Donatists, Manicheans, and Arians, but also others. For representative
examples from the Theodosian Code see Maier, “Religious Dissent”, p. 60, n. 8.
118 Brown, “Pelagius and his Supporters”; Brown, “Patrons of Pelagius”.
119 Sessa, “Christianity and the Cubiculum”.
120 Maier, “Topography of Heresy”, pp. 241–3; “Religious Dissent”, pp. 55–6.
121 Not always successfully. See Pietri, “Évergétisme chrétien et fondations privées”.
122 Pietri, Christiana respublica, pp. 1482–94; Marazzi, I “Patrimonia”, pp. 65–79.
123 Sessa, Formation of Papal Authority, pp. 161–73.
124 Cohen, Heresy, Authority, pp. 147–50.