Ebook: Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity

This book traces the long-term genesis of the sixth-century Roman
legal penalty of forced monastic penance. The late antique evidence
for 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.