The title given to these ten research essays (with epilogue and prologue by the eminent scholars Felipe Fernández-Armesto and John M. Headley) seems at first glance rather laborious and unnecessarily descriptive. Yet it serves to flag up some key issues, and not merely that conversion is a phenomenon often best approached through comparative perspectives. For the phrase ‘conversion to Christianity’ immediately invites the questions of who or what is ‘converting’ (whether an individual, group or society), of what we should understand historically by the use of that verb (whether transitive or intransitive) and of what the resultant ‘Christianity’ entails, in political, cultural and psychological terms.

The traditional preoccupation of historians of religion with conversion as a dramatic change of individual conduct or allegiance, often on a Pauline or Augustinian exemplary model, has in much recent scholarship been displaced from the centre of things. Instead, historians evince an increasing desire to engage with processes of conversion under the paradigm of ‘Christianisation’, thus embracing the collective, social and cultural aspects to the transformation of religious beliefs, and the often extended timetables under which such transformations play out. That is largely the case here. Instead of studies of individual converts and their motives, the volume discusses strategies of conversion and patterns of reception in a wide selection of societal settings: urban polities (early Christian Constantinople; the Greco-Roman city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor); autonomous kingdoms and peoples (fifth-century Armenia; Anglo-Saxon England; the lands of the Rus; sixteenth-century China); conquered territories (New Spain, and its frontiers; the Pacific Marianas Islands).

The eclectic selection of case studies reflects the volume's origins in an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Minnesota in 2001. Such beginnings can be the recipe for an indigestible confection – a random chocolate assortment, rather than a well-balanced meal. But here there have been real efforts to ease readerly consumption: poured over the whole is a thick sauce of editorial blending and seasoning, with Calvin Kendall's introduction complemented by the contributions of Fernández-Armesto and Headley in the task of setting an agenda, and drawing out commonalities and contrasts. As Kendall rightly notes (p. 3), ‘the conversion process is historically contingent’ and ‘cannot neatly be reduced to an atemporal formula’. None the less, issues and dilemmas re-present themselves in geographically and temporally disparate settings, in part because of the hold that scriptural and late antique models continued to exercise over the awareness and imagination of later generations. Foremost among these was the Constantinian paradigm, the hope and expectation that the conversion of a powerful ruler would trigger by emulation and obedience the Christianisation of an entire polity. The application seems most successful in the case of Armenia, where, as Robin Darling Young shows, a royal baptism precipitated a reconstructive literary identification of Christianity with the Armenian nation itself. But elsewhere the suitability, or desirability, of the Constantine model was often moot. Among the Rus of the tenth and eleventh centuries, contends Jonathan Shepherd, the princely conversion of Vladimir Sviatoslavich, though important, was neither the inevitable outcome of, nor the necessary condition for the spread of Christianity. Calvin Kendall, in a fascinating and sensitive reading of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, detects an implicit critique of the Constantinian approach, even in a work dealing extensively with the conversion of kings. The appropriate balance to be struck between potestas and caritas in the work of spreading the Gospel remained problematic into the early modern period, where, as Patrick Provost-Smith suggests in a subtle (and at times convoluted) argument, it hovered inescapably in the background of a range of possible strategies for the evangelisation of China. Even where the Christian affiliation of the land was a political fait accompli, the balance to be struck between force, persuasion and example in the securing and deepening of conversions divided evangelists among themselves, and within themselves, as John B. Schwaller demonstrates in a helpful overview of successive stages in the evangelisation of New Spain. In James B. Tueller's Marianas Islands, Christianisation began with a bloody war of conquest and resulted in a rich, and distinctively localised, Catholic culture.

It is a measure of a well-planned conference (and collection) that non-specialists can hear echoes of their own concerns in other periods and places. Christian Aggeler's discussion of various medieval redactions of the life of St Guthlac invites comparison with the political uses of hagiography in later centuries. Meanwhile, Oliver Nicholson's description of how processions ‘claimed the streets for Christ’ in fifth-century Constantinople, or Laura Herbert's enlightening account of the process of conversion of temples into churches in the late antique world, similarly evoke more modern parallels. But it is not quite plus ça change, as Felipe Fernández-Armesto reminds us in a superb synoptic overview. Broadly, the early modern period witnessed a shift away from an almost exclusive focus on the top ranks of society towards the targeting of ‘people in large numbers at relatively low social levels’ (p. 15). Sceptical about the usefulness of the concept of ‘syncretism’, Fernandez-Armesto asserts that the key to Christianity's global spread (and an intrinsic advantage over Islam) lies in its capacity for self-change and adaption to host cultures – though the absence of any discussion of Protestant evangelism in this volume must render such a conclusion distinctly provisional.

Despite occasional unevenness (John Koegel's discussion of missionaries and music on the northern frontier of New Spain is interesting but has little to say about conversion per se), this volume provides welcome confirmation that, with careful editing, papers from symposia can make useful and coherent collections, a recognition of which publishers are increasingly fighting shy. Following the decision of Cambridge University Press no longer to publish the conference proceedings of the University of Minnesota's Center for Early Modern History, the Center has decided to continue doing so itself, with this volume appearing as the first of a projected series of Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History. It deserves congratulations and encouragement for doing so, as, apart from anything else, this is an exceptionally handsomely-produced book, with high quality paper, binding and illustrations.