Leslie Dossey seeks to come to a better understanding of the social, religious and political conflicts in the north African countryside in the fourth and fifth centuries ce. These conflicts, which have long drawn the interest of scholars, involved rural Christians, including the circumcelliones, and the urban Catholic hierarchy, and they were connected with, but are not entirely identical to, those between the Donatists and Catholics in late antiquity.

Dossey approaches this complex historical problem by considering in great detail the economic and social concerns of the rural communities themselves. Her book is divided into three main sections. After an historical overview, Dossey presents what is likely to prove to be her most controversial argument, that rural communities in late antique north Africa were able to demand social and political privileges because they were enjoying a degree of economic prosperity unavailable to them in the early empire. In the second part of the book, Dossey focuses on the rise of rural communities, particularly rural villages that developed municipal institutions, a phenomenon connected with a decline in authority and political power on the part of cities in the late empire. On the basis of their newly-found strength, rural communities demanded their own bishops, thereby contributing to the proliferation of rural bishoprics, one of the characteristic features of Christianity in late antique north Africa. In the third part of the book, Dossey draws on the work of the medievalist Brian Stock to examine how the preaching of rural bishops helped to shape ‘textual communities’ in the late antique north African countryside. A rural congregation's common understanding of Scripture often led its members to impose their own interpretation of imperial law, taking what seemed to urban (Catholic) authorities revolutionary steps. These steps included preventing landowners and creditors from enforcing debts through the unlawful enslavement of creditors, ostentatiously refusing tainted charity offered by bishops and members of the urban elite, or punishing landowners and Catholic clerics who engaged in acts of rape against rural holy women. These actions prompted sometimes violent reactions on the part of Catholic and civil authorities.

To address Dossey's analysis of the economic condition of rural communities, it seems clear that the north African rural economy prospered in late antiquity, when other parts of the empire were facing severe economic challenges. Dossey attributes this prosperity to a variety of factors, including north Africa's continued role as an exporter, both of foodstuffs, especially wheat and olive oil, and also of other goods, such as African Red Slipware. At the same time, in late antiquity, cities in the later Roman Empire lost much of the political and economic power that they had previously enjoyed; Kyle Harper examines some of the potential ramifications of this for tax collection in his recent analysis of the fourth-century census inscriptions from Asia Minor (‘The Greek census inscriptions of late antiquity,’ JRS xcviii [2008], 83–119). One sign of the relative decline of cities, as Dossey points out, is the very small number of communities that achieved higher civic status in the fourth century; the civic competition that had characterised provincial political life under the principate was a thing of the past. But the main reason for the ascendancy of rural communities, in Dossey's view, was that peasants in the fourth century had much more wealth than in previous centuries. An indication of this is a ‘consumer revolution’. Late antique peasants could afford consumer goods previously associated with towns, such as glazed pottery for cooking (African Red Slipware) or roof tiles; estates were more likely than previously to have amenities normally associated with towns.

But it is not clear that north African rural communities were substantially wealthier than they had been in previous centuries. Much of Dossey's argument about the new prosperity of fourth-century communities is based on rural surveys that have detected a greater presence of African Red Slipware in late antique rural sites than on rural sites from the first through third centuries. She places great weight on a small number of rural surveys, which have used different methodologies in gathering ceramic evidence, so that it is difficult to draw reliable conclusions of changes in rural workshop production or the consumption of more expensive consumer goods. Moreover, it is not clear that landowners in late antiquity took a very different approach to exploiting their estates from that of their counterparts under the principate, as Dossey argues. Her premise is that, under the principate, landowners and the imperial government (as the owner of extensive estates of its own) sought to restrict the economic activities of their tenants or coloni to the production of foodstuffs over all other pursuits. In late antiquity these restrictions were removed, as tax policies gave landowners every incentive to locate workshops and markets on their estates to make them as profitable as possible. The well-documented efforts of some landowners under the principate to establish rural markets on their estates suggests that estates in the earlier period were centres of economic exchange, possibly with more products than foodstuffs. Perhaps we should see greater continuity between the principate and late antiquity, recognising that the late imperial policies to centralise taxation at the expense of cities contributed to a decline of the cities’ economic and political power.

Even if her analysis of economic change in late antiquity is not totally convincing, Dossey none the less offers a very careful and convincing account of the intricate relationships between Catholic and Donatist religious communities, and between the rural communities and the cities in north Africa. Her book represents a major contribution to the debate on the nature of rural life in the Roman Empire, and she shows how the writings of Augustine and other Christian figures from late antique north Africa provide a rich a source for the social history of the empire.