Sacred violence has of late become a fashionable topic. Since 2005 no fewer than fifteen books have been published in English which either have Sacred violence as their main title or contain both these words in their full title. Among these is a reprint of Patrick Gregory's 1977 translation of René Girard's classic La Violence et le sacré (Paris 1972), which set out ‘to expose to the light of reason the role played by violence in human society’ and which argued that violence lies at the heart of the notion of the sacred. Somewhat surprisingly, Girard is absent from the bibliography of Brent Shaw's new book, even though his list of modern works runs to forty pages and includes not only many works of wide-ranging modern theory by luminaries such as Émile Durkheim, Hannah Arendt and even Malcolm Gladwell, but also items as apparently remote from his central subject as Harry G. Frankfurt's On bullshit (Princeton 2005), a book on Lutheran hymns and a learned article devoted to homicide in the English county of Kent between 1560 and 1985. Consequently anyone who reads Shaw's enormous book will receive illumination on a vast range of topics ranging from quarrels between rival chess venues in New York (pp. 6–8, from the New York Times of 23 December 2002) and the suicide of the beautiful Japanese Kiyoto Matsumoto, who threw herself off a mountain on the island of Izu-Oshima on 12 February 1933 and inspired more than three hundred copycat suicides in the next two years (p. 754), to an incisive discussion of the survival of the Punic language in late Roman Africa (pp. 427–33). For, as Shaw emphasises in his introduction (pp. 1–5), he has not set out to provide either a historical narrative or an analysis of historical events as they succeeded one another in time or even an analysis of a historical process as it unfolded and developed. He proclaims instead that his analysis is ‘drawn in a direction contrary to the natural course of the progressive unravelling of events’ and that his book is therefore ‘an experiment in time with its own bounds and closures’.

To translate what Shaw says about his aims as an author and a historian into more prosaic language, his book is not a systematic treatment of ‘African Christians and sectarian hatred in the age of Augustine’, as the subtitle of his book might appear to promise, but a series of long, wide-ranging and often brilliant essays, which are logically and artistically independent of one another, clustered around that central theme. Most chapters are divided into numerous quite brief sections, the shortest a mere page and a half, and for each section, long or short, Shaw provides a snappy and often deliberately provocative heading, such as ‘Down the sewer’ (pp. 113–25), ‘Their collected excrement’ (pp. 125–31) and ‘The fatal necklace’ (pp. 131–9) – which was in fact a necklace of dead dogs, not a burning tyre, put around the neck of Salvius, the deposed bishop of the small town or village of Membressa, not far from Carthage, and designed to humiliate, not to kill him.

Since all but one of Shaw's fifteen main chapters exceed forty pages in length, I will illustrate the nature of his book by considering its first chapter, ‘This terrible custom’, which at fifty-six pages is the next to longest (pp. 10–65). This chapter spends several pages on each of the following topics: (1) Augustine's journey to the distant city of Caesarea in Mauretania ‘in the burning midsummer sun of the year 418’; (2) a potted history of the city of Caesarea from the days of King Juba under the emperor Augustus down to 418; (3) ‘The gangs of Caesarea’ – a phrase which has surely been inspired by the film Gangs of New York released in 2002; (4) ‘a popular lynching’, which occurred in Hippo in 412; (5) the role of different types of violence in North African society; (6) the coup d'état of the year 238 in proconsular Africa and its suppression by the governor of Numidia; (7) three rebellions of the later fourth and early fifth centuries – the first in Mauretania under the Moorish chieftain Firmus, which the general Theodosius, the father of the first emperor of that name, suppressed in the early 370 s, the second in 397/398 by Gildo, who had held the post of comes Africae for a dozen years (Shaw claims that ‘there is no evidence to support the assertion that in the autumn of 397 he decided to suspend the normal grain shipments to Rome’), the third by Heraclianus, the assassin of Stilicho, who was not only appointed comes Africae, but also received the signal honour of an ordinary consulate in 413, then rebelled and invaded Italy in a vain attempt to replace Honorius as Roman emperor in the West; (8) ‘How violent was violent?’ in which Shaw raises a serious question of historical perspective when he compares the total of 35,000 homicides in Africa during the more than three decades when Augustine was bishop of Hippo (according to the most probable estimate) with the more than 800,000 murdered or killed in motor accidents in the United States between 1950 and 1975; (9) ‘Invented connections’, a section in which Shaw starts from the correct assertion that ‘it is misleading to understand the violence involving the African military man Firmus as the core of a proto-nationalist or autonomist movement’ and subjects the passages of Augustine which have sometimes been interpreted as evidence for the close cooperation of the Donatists and the Circumcellions with Firmus to a searching critical analysis; and (10) ‘The good use of treason’, in which Shaw argues that ‘the high levels of violence that are suggested and encouraged by tendentious literary sources’ are exaggerated and that in reality violence in Africa in the lifetime of Augustine was not ‘a war involving direct confrontation’ with the imperial government, but rather ‘the bloody little battle that was ritually repeated’ in the streets of cities like Caesarea that ‘better mirrored what African Christians were doing to each other [sic]’.

This long book can and should accordingly be read, digested, enjoyed and relished one chapter or a few sections at a time. It is a revisionist history of the better sort. It is thought-provoking throughout and, unlike some other recent revisionist historical writing about late antiquity, grounded in a wide and accurate knowledge of the relevant sources, above all the voluminous surviving works of Augustine, which is perhaps most prominently displayed in eight appendices that are precise and scholarly enough to satisfy any pedant. The length, breadth and complexity of the book preclude detailed criticism of its rich contents within the confines of a review. I have therefore merely tried to convey an impression of its nature and structure.

I cannot refrain, however, from noting something that has become a common practice, but which seems to me either to indicate or at least to encourage a confusion of thought. Shaw's bibliography is divided into two sections entitled, respectively, ‘primary sources’ and ‘secondary sources’, even though the vast majority of works listed as ‘secondary sources’ are not ‘sources’ at all, but modern interpretations. When I taught Roman and early Christian history to undergraduate students, I forbade the use of this phrase except to distinguish between strictly contemporary sources and later ancient accounts. As a good historian Shaw makes the necessary distinction: he consistently uses Augustine's sermons, letters and anti-Donatist polemic as evidence for the time of writing, but treats his claims and statements about events in the past, such as the origins of Donatism in the early fourth century, as Augustine's interpretation of events of which he has no direct knowledge. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Shaw's use of the designation ‘secondary sources’ for modern works may encourage sloppy thinking by others.