Exploring the Possibilities of the Family as Strategy in the Roman Empire and Early Christianity

Enquiring the Roman and early Christian family as an analytic category shifts the strategies deployed in the making of Romanness and Christianness into focus. Constituted by notions of inter alia spatiality, temporality and relationality, this analytic category enables the articulation of those generating, social mechanisms allowing for different versions of familial discourse. Not only legislative practice, but also examples from public and private building practices deriving from the Roman Empire are analysed and an attempt is made to locate examples from current and recent research from the perspective of the family as analytic category.