Ann Marie Yasin is Assistant Professor in the departments of Classics and Art History at the University of Southern California. She held a two-year Rome Prize Fellowship in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 1999 to 2001 and was named a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. for Spring 2006.

• Introduction; 1. Churches before architecture: approaches to sacred space in the early Christian world; 2. Commemorative communities: the dead in early Christian churches; 3. Topographies of honor and piety: praying for the Christian benefactor; 4. At the center of it all? Framing space with saints; 5. What saints do in church, part I: focusing communal prayer; 6. What saints do in church, part II: community connections.

'Yasin has a deft command of too-often forgotten places with their difficult archaeologies, especially those from North Africa. She sensitively draws conclusions from tricky evidence from old excavations or now inaccessible sites, and the book provides excellent plans and photographs of buildings which should now become as familiar as Ravenna and Rome … She avoids simply reinterpreting familiar sites, but carefully sets out the evidence for the sophisticated ways in which late Romans constructed the sacred in church buildings.' Caroline Goodson, Early Medieval Europe