Few students of late antiquity will read far in the sources without stumbling onto the election of a bishop, whether in the proceedings of church councils, the letters and treatises written by bishops themselves, or the historical writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, who provides one of the most notorious examples from fourth-century Rome. There, the rivalry of two men, “burning beyond human measure for snatching away (ad rapiendam) the bishop's throne,” caused “gory uprisings among the fractured populace” (Amm. Marc. XXVII 3.12) fierce enough to terrify an experienced imperial officer. On the other end of the spectrum, appearing especially in hagiographical literature, are bishops, such as Martin of Tours or Porphyry of Gaza, who allegedly were compelled into office by townspeople whose affection was irresistible.

Peter Norton presents these and many other examples from around the Mediterranean in a book that addresses how episcopal elections worked in theory and in practice. Its thematic organization has the virtue of forcing readers to think about the particular problem of elections within religious, legal, administrative, and social contexts. The book is the result of a dissertation begun twenty years ago. Norton has made use of some recent work, most notably Claudia Rapp's Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), but not enough to allow a reader adequate orientation toward the many important problems he approaches. The book's strength, for example, depends on its case studies, most of them presented in thumbnail sketches, while three are treated at length in the final substantive chapter. One of these case studies is the election of Basil of Caesarea. Reading Norton alone, one would not know that Robert Pouchet and Raymond Van Dam have written well on knotty issues of chronology and the social networks that worked for and against Basil. This is an unfortunate limitation to a study whose research in the primary sources is admirably broad.

The argument is also ambitious and aims to correct our understanding of episcopal elections, as well as to change our view of late antique society. Norton takes issue primarily with Roger Gryson, who has tracked the gradual definition of election and ordination procedures over time, predominantly in church councils and letters; this process was closely tied to the evolution of clerical hierarchy and jurisdiction. According to Norton, Gryson focuses on the machinations of strong bishops to put their men on other thrones but assumes there was no longer a place for laypeople in the election process. Norton, by contrast, believes there was a “popular suffrage in action” in most places (38, 13–14), with at least “the implicit power of veto” (11) in cities too large for people to express their choices effectively. Such a vehicle for “popular will,” Norton observes, would be remarkable “in a society as undemocratic as late antiquity” (6–7).

Ramsay MacMullen, in Voting about God in Early Church Councils (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), also has invoked modern democratic vocabulary but, it seems to me, with two differences: MacMullen is narrowly describing how people in assembly reached consensus; he also is trying to provoke religious historians. By contrast, Norton intends “democracy” and “the people” in the most liberal sense, which he is never able to define concretely, even in a section dedicated to “The Electorate.” Moreover, Norton's sympathy for the people doesn't allow them differentiation: they desire a patron and act from “sheer attachment” to their favorites (49, 62), but they care only about spiritual salvation, so that historians should not look for other motives stemming from economic or social tensions (56). These motives, however, when they apply to clergy, and along with doctrinal and jurisdictional disputes, occupy most of the rest of this book. Especially in chapters 5–7, actual elections only appear sporadically and then often as merely “part of a package of accusations,” as Norton notes in one case (185–186). Nonetheless, that the people maintained an important role in episcopal elections, which Norton once admits to be an “argument from silence on the part of the canons” (31), is the book's main thesis.

The thesis does not reflect Norton's greatest contribution, which is to observe that many of the elections we can inspect with any detail reveal “irregularities … complexity [and] ambiguity” (11–12) so often and consistently that, in late antique elections, irregularity appears to have been the rule. The thesis about popular participation also squares uneasily with another claim Norton makes repeatedly: religion was “by far the most common cause of large-scale public disorder in the late empire” (6), and the election of bishops in particular “was one of the most common causes of public disorder and bloodshed in the cities of the late Empire” (56, 81–82). This casual use of superlatives is unsettling, as are comments that “the exact historical truth is perhaps not relevant” (39), “that the ‘people’ remained important in theory even when we know that the historical truth is rather different” (45), and that “historical circumstances thus proved an obstacle to the working of the system” (165).

Norton is right: there is much more for historians to say about episcopal elections. Some work will continue building on recent studies of patronage systems and legal culture, while the lack of reliable editions still affects several of the cases Norton tackles here. Future studies of elections will benefit from the parade of happy and unhappy candidates that Norton has brought together, including such oddities as outsiders who never bothered showing up for work or two bishops who went on a “consecration spree” (33–34), although a spotty index makes finding these individuals difficult—Leo the Great, for example, is left out entirely, although he appears eleven different times in the texts and is credited with “the fullest expression of the papal view” (43–44) on episcopal elections. Most important, though, readers, who come to this study to learn more about the sometimes bumpy roads leading to the episcopacy, will find their horizons broadened.