"Kate Cooper's The Fall of the Roman Household is an ambitious and valuable study of the cultural debates among clergy and lay cities regarding the role of marriage and the household in an evolving Christian world. The Fall of the Roman Household is an absorbing and noteworthy study of the aristocratic household at the end of the Western Empire. This thought-provoking text will certainly be of interest not only to those scholars interested in the study of household, family, and gender, but also those interested in more general interplay of classical and Christian ideas in the later Roman Empire. Cooper does a tremendous job bringing together aspects of religious belief with social history to contribute to our understanding of the transformation of the Roman household." --BMCR